The Point Paywall: How to Read The Point Magazine for Free

The Point is a Chicago-based magazine of philosophical essays and criticism, founded in 2009. It publishes three print issues a year and, between them, a steady run of web-only essays, dialogues and interviews at thepointmag.com, most of them long enough to need an afternoon rather than a coffee break. Its best pieces travel widely on social media and in newsletters, which is how most readers first meet its paywall: a few essays open freely, then the subscription prompt appears mid-paragraph. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full essay.

How The Point paywall works

The Point runs a metered paywall built on the Leaky Paywall WordPress plugin. Non-subscribers can read a limited number of articles before a subscription prompt replaces the text; subscribers log in and the prompt goes away. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls describes how meters like this one behave, and The Point's is a textbook example.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The full essay is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and the plugin's script then counts your visit and, once you are over the limit, hides the body and shows the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article, however long.

Our tests on 3 November 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 4,368-word The Point criticism essay "The Perfect Game" loaded in full, all 26 paragraphs.
• A 4,615-word The Point dialogue "Searching for the Unexpected" loaded in full, all 62 paragraphs.
• A 2,997-word The Point politics essay "JD Agonistes" loaded in full, all 18 paragraphs.

Read an essay from The Point in full

• Copy the article link. The Point links look like thepointmag.com/criticism/the-perfect-game/, with the section first and then the essay's slug.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The essay appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

Essays of four or five thousand words are no problem; the reader returns the whole piece, not an excerpt.

Other approaches

• The meter itself. Because the count is stored in your browser, a private window or a different browser starts the meter again. That is fine for an occasional essay, less so if you read The Point every week.
• Newsletters. If you sign up for the magazine's email updates on thepointmag.com, the links they carry count on the meter like any other visit, so they are a way to hear about essays rather than a way round the prompt.
• Print issues. The three print issues a year collect the longer essays, and a library copy is the old-fashioned way to read them.
• Related free sources. The Point's essays often respond to books, films and public arguments that are themselves freely discussed elsewhere, so the context for a piece is rarely hard to find.

How it compares with other essay and ideas magazines

The Point sits alongside several other long-form magazines that pass our tests. Harper's Magazine, the London Review of Books and the New Left Review all load in full, and together with The Point they cover most of the ground an essay reader wants. The notable exception is The Atlantic, which blocks the reader and so has no guide. Our page on sites that cannot be bypassed explains what to do about titles like that, and the full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Point is a small magazine that pays its writers for essays of a length almost nobody else publishes. On 3 November 2026 a Digital Only subscription cost $38 a year and includes access to every article the magazine has ever published; Print and Digital, with the three print issues, was $44 a year against a list price of $52.80; and a Supporting subscription was $125. If you find yourself reading The Point regularly, one of those is the right way to keep it going.