In a change of pace—Dalhia Lithwick hasn't written anything recently, has she?—here is a piece of practical advice for those of us who don't want to go through our work computers (or other sites which have a permanent subscription) to read the Wall Street Journal's pay-walled articles:
Most Wall Street Journal articles are hidden by a pay wall. Unless you are accessing the site from a computer that is recognized as paid-for by the Journal’s web servers, all you will receive for most of these articles is a “stub” of a paragraph or two. This is annoying if you are trying to access the Journal from your home computer and you do not have a personal subscription.
Fortunately, this block is easily circumvented. Google, in order to completely index a website—something the Journal and other newspapers places great value on—must have the entire content of the site available to it. Google in turn requires operators to return the same version of the website to browsers who click on a Google search link as they do when Google itself follows the link. So to get all of the Journal, one just needs to pretend that one found the article with a Google search.
This only takes a second. When you run across a “stub article” just copy the beginning of the stub (typically about thirty words, but usually picking the first paragraph does the trick). Then paste the stub into a Google search box and hit search. Usually the first article that comes up in the search is the full copy of the Journal article. If it is not, it usually will be a copy of the Journal article on another website. If necessary, one can ensure that one gets the official version by adding the string “site:online.wsj.com” to the Google search box before hitting search.
Update: The WSJ has apparently become wise to this workaround and will at some point only display stubs, even after Google searches described above. Their method is cookie-based, so it is easily circumvented. Just continue reading WSJ articles on another computer, on another browser on the same computer, or delete your wsj.com (and subdomain) cookies from your current browser for a fresh start.
Update 2: With at least the current version 12 of Google Chrome it is possible to block wsj.com (and subdomain) cookies using Options/Under the Hood/Content Settings/Cookies/Manage Exceptions..., thereby permanently solving the problem. This may make commenting on WSJ articles impossible, but you can always use a separate browser (or separate Google Chrome Profile) for that.
