piauí Paywall: How to Read piauí Articles for Free

piauí is Brazil's monthly magazine of long-form journalism. Founded in 2006 and published by Editora Alvinegra, it is hosted at piaui.uol.com.br, within the UOL portal associated with Folha de S.Paulo, and it has become the Brazilian equivalent of The New Yorker or The Atlantic: a home for 6,000-word reconstructions, political essays, profiles and the occasional cartoon. Its pieces are long and widely shared, which means the one you want is frequently the one that hits a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full piece.

How the piauí paywall works

piauí runs a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can open a small number of pieces a month, after which a prompt invites them to subscribe. Some editions and special projects are more tightly guarded than others, but the basic model is a meter, and the count is stored in a browser cookie.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The full text of the essay is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a subscriber or over your limit and covers the body with the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete piece. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and piauí sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 20 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 4,541-word piauí reconstruction from issue 241, "Voo noturno", on the plane carrying the Chapecoense football team that crashed in Colombia in November 2016, loaded in full, all 132 paragraphs.
• A 6,473-word piauí essay from issue 123, "A armadilha em que a esquerda se meteu", on the trap the Brazilian left walked into, loaded in full, all 63 paragraphs.
• A 6,858-word piauí reply in issue 125, "Ainda a esquerda", answering that essay, loaded in full, all 59 paragraphs.

Read a piauí article in full

• Copy the article link. piauí links look like piaui.uol.com.br/revista/241/ followed by a slug and a trailing slash, so the pattern is piaui.uol.com.br/revista/<issue>/<slug>/, and web-only pieces sit directly under piaui.uol.com.br/<slug>/.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The piece appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the piece in Portuguese, exactly as piauí published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. piauí sends free email bulletins that announce each new edition and link to selected pieces.
• Library access. Many Brazilian university libraries hold the print magazine, and back issues are often available through library digital-magazine services.
• Private windows. The monthly meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, though this is slow going for a magazine whose pieces run to thousands of words.
• Related free sources. piauí's political essays draw heavily on public data from IBGE, the central bank and the courts, all of which publish free.

How it compares with other Brazilian titles

piauí sits alongside the big Brazilian dailies in our tests. Folha de S.Paulo, the paper linked to the same UOL portal, loads in full through the reader, as do O Globo and Estadão. The exception is the business daily Valor Econômico, which does not work: it served only teasers in our 17 October 2026 tests, so there is no Valor guide. Across the Atlantic, Lisbon's Observador, tested the same day as piauí, also passes. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

piauí publishes journalism that takes months to report and runs to lengths that almost no other Brazilian outlet will fund. If you read it every month, a subscription, which includes the print edition and the full archive, is the right way to keep that work going.