A birthday ask

Turning 40 next week. Here's 40% off an annual subscription, and the honest case for upgrading.

I turn 40 next Friday! I’m doing the thing where you offer a discount tied to the number, because it’s a good excuse and I’ve never needed much of one.

From now through April 24, annual subscriptions to The Present Age are 40% off. That’s $36 for a full year. The same deal is running over at my Patreon if you prefer to support the work that way.

Here’s the actual pitch.

The last few months have been some of the busiest I can remember. The Iran escalation and the war powers dodge. The CBS/Bari Weiss situation and what it signals about where legacy media is heading. Pete Hegseth going on the record about the CNN acquisition in terms that should make every journalist in this country uncomfortable. The Grammarly “Expert Review” feature and what AI companies actually think of the humans they’re training on. Media consolidation, manufactured outrage cycles, the “seriously, not literally” industry that exists to launder Trump’s worst impulses into something digestible.

I’ve been covering all of it. Usually two to three times a week. And the only reason I get to keep doing that, without a billionaire owner or a corporate parent or a board of directors who might one day decide I’m a liability, is because readers pay for it directly.

That’s the whole model. It’s also, increasingly, the whole point.

A real example. Back in December, I wrote a piece about Kalshi, the $11 billion prediction-market company whose CEO said his long-term goal is to "financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion." The piece was not flattering. A little while later, Kalshi reached out and offered me a paid sponsorship. I said no. That's the version of this newsletter you get when readers fund it directly. I can't be bought, and I can't be leaned on, because there's nobody upstairs to lean on me.

The outlets that used to do this work are being bought, gutted, realigned, or “refreshed.” The people who used to do it are being laid off in rounds. Independent, reader-funded media criticism isn’t a nice-to-have right now. It’s one of the last places this kind of writing still happens without somebody upstairs getting nervous.

If you’ve been reading for free and the work has been useful to you, this is the part where I ask you to chip in. $36 for the year works out to three bucks a month. You get every post, full archives, the comments section, and the knowledge that you’re directly funding someone who is not going to shut up.

The offer runs through April 24. After that, the prices go back to normal and I go back to being 40 without the cute tie-in.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

—Parker