> Just search for the headline on google, and click through that way. No registration.

No, that's not guaranteed to work. It's a cookie issue.

I have have never registered at nytimes and have seldom been able to read its articles, no matter how I approach the site. Until a few experiments today, that is.

I reject all cookies by default. NYTimes confronts me with the registration page when I have cookies disabled. I discovered today that if I go ahead and allow cookies from www.nytimes.com, I can read the article without registering. Allowing for session does the trick; don't store the cookie indefinitely. And accepting cookies from wt.o.nytimes.com and up.nytimes.com is not necessary to read the article.

metafilter.com gets around this by just telling all of its members to use the "metafilter46/metafilter" account.