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You can read 'The New Yorker' for free right now

You can read 'The New Yorker' for free right now

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Stories from 2007 forward will be online for free through the summer

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Many of The New Yorker's smartest reports and profiles get hidden behind a paywall when they head online, but for the rest of the summer those articles will all be open to everyone. To promote a design overhaul of its website that's meant to make articles easier to read on phones, tablets, and the desktop, The New Yorker is making all new articles and all existing articles published after 2007 free to read until sometime this fall.

Though the magazine has been online since 2001, only stories from 2007 forward will be reworked into the new article format — which is presumably why earlier articles will remain hidden from free access. Still, it's a trove of stories that you'll want to check out, and you may want to get moving while you can.

A more logical paywall will go up this fall

Once this free reading period is over, the magazine will implement a new style of paywall for its website. Rather than allowing unlimited reading of some free stories and fully barring access to paywalled stories, as it did until today, the new paywall will simply allow visitors to read a limited number of any of its stories, after which they'll have to subscribe if they want to keep reading. The New Yorker hasn't detailed exactly how it'll work, but it should end up looking a lot like what The New York Times does.

With the magazine planning to start publishing more stories on the web, this new model appears to be a more sensible way to let readers keep up with its coverage of current events. It may ultimately mean access to fewer articles — depending on how big of a reader you are — but at the very least the new paywall should be easier to understand. If you want to get reading before the paywall comes back, Longform has put together a great list of 25 unlocked New Yorker articles.