ever since sites like the new york times caught on to the private browsing trick to get around their bullshit paywall, i’ve been using the google translate trick instead. google translate isn’t restricted to text you paste; you can also paste in a url and it will generate a link to a translated version of the webpage you wanted. it’s this service you’ll be using
go to google translate and paste the url of the paywalled article you’re trying to read on the lefthand side (where you’d normally paste foreign text). set the “from” language (the one on the left side) to russian, arabic, japanese, etc. – any language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet. set the “to” language (the one on the right side) to english. it will generate a url on the right, and you can click it and enjoy
(the reason you want to pick a language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet is that false cognates are inevitable. if you don’t want to read an article that’s mostly intelligible but every instance of the word “after” is changed to “anus”, for example, you don’t want to go with german)
this DOES NOT work with every paywall! i just tested it on a number of sites, and it doesn’t work on wall street journal. but it does work on the new york times, the la times, the washington post, and the san diego union-tribune. i make no guarantees!
hope people find this helpful!
many/most paywalls can be foiled by putting the url into Archive.is as well. this has the secondary benefit of creating an archived snapshot of that particular article on that day, which is invaluable to historians and researchers
