It’s hard to have any sympathy for news organizations when they insist on this nonsense. How can any of these orgs report objectively about Facebook or privacy issues when they themselves are the biggest offenders by forcing this crap on people?

I am a paid subscriber to a select few news orgs, but even those try my patience. Very hard to care about the news business when they engage in this.

I finally paid for a subscription to New Yorker. Man, the entire experience was frustrating as hell.

Old school media outlets are just so clueless about digital models

Disable scripting (I use uMatrix). I wouldn't have known about that dialog if you hadn't alluded to it.

No. You do not have to Javascript to read it either.

The text of the article can be retrieved without any use of Javascript.

Just click on the light gray Close at the top left.

The back button makes bad UX good UX!

Entering a fake e-mail works.

so does clicking the close button, didnt have sign in or up for anything to read whole article

They deliberately made the 'close' button fainter. Oh we are going to have an article on "History of 'bold' close buttons".