If I could teach nerds only one thing about the world, it's that dismissing non-technical forms of communication as useless does not impress anyone with your intellectual skill -- it just makes you annoying and hard to tolerate.
But there's a few simple things article writers can do to improve readability. -Summaries (explain what the reader can expect to get out of the article) -Sideboxes (highlight key passages or points from each paragraph) -Descriptive paragraph headings
This article had none of those, and I felt like it was just trying to keep me hooked so I'd keep clicking to get to the next page and find the good part.
Dude, the magazine has a cover story about Spongebob. (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/spongebob) Perhaps you're being a tiny bit silly in expecting them to "highlight key passages or points from each paragraph" for you?
Also, the information bandwidth of social communication is incredibly high. Much of our mental resources are dedicated to social decisions (friend or foe? are they lying?), which computers tend to handle very poorly.
Articles like this are a good way to hear about studies you want to read about further. I don't have time to keep current on neurology, linguistics, psychology, history, archaeology, epidemiology, etc., etc., etc. journals, and I highly doubt I'm the only one. I'm grateful for authors like Oliver Sacks who write about the material in an approachable manner.
(This same point came up yesterday. Some people here seem eager to jump on psychology as being not science, and all writing about it being fluff.)