If the New Yorker would use the proper format of SVG here (or even PNG — the diagrams are all JPEGs), they would likely compress even better; most of them also include a ton of whitespace either side of the actual image. Testing one of them, the size falls by ~28% if you correct for all this.

On mobile, where my connection is less reliable, I also have a strong distaste for lazy loading: it squanders all the time available from when I started reading until now. Then, when the image is finally in view, then we start the long haul of fetching it, and risk that I've again lost good connectivity.