As we celebrate our 60th birthday, which we hope you will mark by supporting our Webathon, many people have shared fascinating I-first-experienced-NR stories. I thought I’d share mine.

I came across National Review quite by accident. I had just arrived at university in England and I’d become interested in exploring a broader range of political ideas than I’d heard growing up. In this endeavor, the Internet was my friend. All of a sudden I had an array of foreign newspapers and magazines at my disposal. I found Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Human Events, and . . . surfing around one day, I found National Review. This was 2004, a few months before the presidential election, and it seemed that the site was being updated every few minutes. I couldn’t stop reading. And, before too long, I couldn’t stop agreeing.

Not with everybody of course. But then, that’s the great thing about National Review. It offers a wide range of center-right voices from which to learn — and, yes, with which to argue. Budding moderate that I was, I’d never heard people so unashamedly make the case for limited government, individual liberty, and the goodness of the West. I’d never heard of Thomas Sowell or Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. I’d never seen arguments grounded so deeply in the great books or in the Anglo-American tradition. It was an education.

Traveling around America and talking to NR subscribers, I’ve noticed that so many of you have your own discovery stories. Some have described finding NR in college and sneaking it around inside ostensibly neutral textbooks, as if it were Playboy. Some were converted by the coverage of a particular issue or era. Some — my wife for example — were “born” National Review conservatives, and seem to have come into the world with decades of editorials pre-memorized. On more than one occasion I’ve been shown near-complete collections of back-issues, lovingly curated in a basement or a study. Few magazines inspire such fondness and loyalty. Few magazines deserve to.

But, for all of NR’s virtues, the opinion journalism game has always been a tricky one. In an ideal world, our typewriters would be made of gold. In the real world, we survive only because our readers keep us afloat. Over the magazine’s 60 years in business, we have lost upwards of $50 million. We have been, as one wag put it, a “for-profit that never makes a profit.” Because they know that an America without National Review would be as unthinkable as an Arizona without the Grand Canyon, the generosity of our friends has held us back from the precipice time and time again. This week, we are asking them to do so again.

You can be part of this historic effort by making a contribution here.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.