Flawless with Firefox + uBlock Origin. I find that I am usually immune to whatever complaint that people have about unloadable articles on Hacker News.

Worked fine with Chrome+uBlock origin, but I did wonder why smithsonianmagazine.com requested permission to send me notifications.

Why would I ever want that from a webpage, except maybe my webmail or calendar?

I switched from using NoScript to a plugin called uMatrix. It's an improvement in many respects, and I believe it's available for both Firefox and Chrome.

The page took about 10 seconds to load fully on an 8-core laptop with 32 GB of RAM, and continued firing off pixel-tracking requests and pings to scorecardresearch.com for about 80 seconds.

All that for a short article which barely introduced the reader to an interesting topic. It was like a factoid crammed into five paragraphs in order to increase ad real estate.

I've started reading everything I can through a proxy that removes everything except for the text and hyperlinks.

Try whitelisting the site or disabling it for this session, there aren't any overt or annoying ads from what I can tell.

Yeah. I was interested but ended up closing it in under 5 seconds thanks to the ads.