Eugenio Marongiu/Image Source via ZUMA
It’s getting harder and harder to follow politics on the web. The big newspapers went behind paywalls long ago, of course. Then the Substack revolution started pulling individual authors behind a paywall. And political magazines have been steadily moving behind paywalls for a while. The Nation has been behind a paywall for years. Ditto for New York. And now even the blog at National Review is paywalled—parts of it, anyway.
It’s sort of ironic, I guess: the political internet is becoming more and more like the old political print ecosystem. Back then you had to pay to buy a newspaper, pay to buy a magazine, and pay to subscribe to a newsletter. And if you wanted to comment on political affairs, you needed to work for an organization that subscribed to all these things so that you could keep up.
Oh well. The internet was nice while it lasted. But we all have to eat.
