body { max-width: 11in; }
Note that my own personal website conforms very well to his expectations (except loading images from flickr (without javascript) which, as you pointed out, leaks private data). I would add however that the most important thing is readability, responsiveness and speed.
A webpage without stylesheets is technically responsive, but in practice not very readable, due to pretty bad defaults in most browsers (i.e.: tiny fonts and cramped text)
Finally, the most important part of any article-based website (for me) is a full text RSS, which enables me to have actually good reading experience - outside of a web browser.
body { max-width: 35em; }
I'll play with it a little bit more, the ems might be a better solution after all.
It's a fact proven out by years of practice in print.
My preference is ems for text width as that translates naturally to line length. Toss in an auto left an right margin for centered text and a padding directive for keeping text out of the gutters and you're a long way to readability.