Someone replied to a Tabs recently to say:

Ya know, one of my other paid newsletters sends links without a paywall, sending the url as archive.ph. It saves me 3 extra clicks for each link. ;-)

I don’t do that, as I told this reader, because I completely rely on the work of actual journalists reporting and writing stories to make this newsletter worth your time to read, let alone your precious subscription dollar. Coming up with my own ideas for what to write every day would be a nightmare. Imagine being an opinion columnist, when there are tens of thousands of truck-driver jobs going unfilled? All those journalists need to be paid for their work somehow, and subscriptions are not the worst idea for how to pay them. I owe it to them to at least give their publications a shot at turning you into a paying reader.

But we do live in an age of proliferating paywalls, subscriptions for every streaming channel and music service, and pretty soon we’ll have to pay the Elon Musk tax just to invent a new type of guy to get mad at every day. I subscribe to a lot of publications, for obvious professional reasons, but I can’t afford to pay for every local newspaper that crosses the feed every day, and neither, I imagine, can anyone else.

So today’s Friday subject is: how to read paywalled content. It’s practically a required skill for Tabs to make any sense, and I bet all of us have something new to learn about the various ways to do it.

Here’s the Tabs subscriber discord #pets channel news, presented by front page editor @michelle and the pets of Tabs:

I truly don’t know what to tell you about the Discord. They just do this kind of stuff? Like, all the time. If you imagine that Twitter is the hidden painting of Dorian Gray, getting more hideous by the minute, the Tabs Discord is Dorian himself, growing younger and more beautiful with every crime we commit.

And speaking of crimes, let’s get to the criming, right after what is absolutely going to be history’s most ironic paywall. Listen, if you’re not a paid subscriber and you do find a way to circumvent this one, I won’t be mad.