you can now get a big discount on this newsletter!

Hi everyone,

The good news is: I get to stay in my apartment for another year after a series of ups and downs, including renovation and head injury drama, and negotiations that I perhaps failed at considering, you know, the nature of this email. Which brings us to the bad news: my rent is going up 30%, the kind of raise that makes me have to, very unfortunately, “think about work.” To be completely honest, I am doing my level best to avoid feeling like the sky is falling even though terrible things seem to keep happening to me over and over again. Fortunately, the absurdist part of me finds all of this extremely funny in the abstract. Life’s little black cloud!!!!

Anyway, because I’m writing more on Substack — it’s the most convenient and supportive place for me to write personal and non-architectural essays that are more difficult to pitch to conventional outlets — I’d like to make this a more sustainable enterprise for me in terms of my labor. Most of what I’ve written here so far has been, for all intents and purposes, unpaid. In recent months, however, that has begun to change, for which I thank you!!

To be honest, I didn’t anticipate this newsletter to be as successful as it has been. That’s part of why, like my blog McMansion Hell, everything on the late review has been free to read. However, McMansion Hell is financially sustained by a delightful, 8-year old community on Patreon, which allows me to keep that website free and open to the public. While I enjoy making fun bonus content (such as livestreams) for my Patrons, the main blog is and always will be free. This is because it is my political belief that the suburbanization of the internet through enshittification, content decentralization and private Discord servers (which for me personally are just places to just hang out and socialize) is detrimental to the spirit of public discourse.

While I realize that subscription fatigue is real, I want my work to reach — and affect — as many people as possible. That’s only possible through the generosity of paid subscriptions. Without those subscriptions, the work I’m doing here will simply cease to be feasible from a time and labor standpoint. This is especially true now, as I’m also writing a very fun book called Structural Issues, which makes any spare writing time exceedingly precious!

To be clear, all major, public-facing work on this Substack will continue to be free. However, I will start intermittently giving paid subscribers early access to some of that writing by putting it behind a temporary paywall. (I will let everyone know how long the paywall will last at the beginning of the post and will also use Substack’s subscriber chat function — accessible within the app — to alert readers to when a paywall has been lifted.) This is my admittedly ambiguous way of keeping my principles intact while also making subscribers feel like their subscriptions are paying for something concrete.

Hence, if you like some of the recent posts in this newsletter and want to see more writing in this vein, I’m offering a discount of 40% off on new subscriptions through April 1st. You can subscribe via this email, or by sharing this link! For those bad at math, it makes a monthly subscription to the late review $4.20 (the cost of a latte) and a yearly subscription $48.00 (as opposed to $80!).

Yours truly,
Kate