I ask because wired.com pages consistently take 20-30 seconds for me. Ping is on the order of 60 ms just now. Just curious about what makes it so slow for me.

Taking a brief look at the article's source, it looks like wired uses a huge number of javascript includes. These vary from word press plugins, to tracking analytics, to even a konami code robot.

This, along with the image heavy layout and the fully expanded comments section can probably account for your load times.

That's odd. I haven't noticed any slowness (and I've loaded the OP several times today).