Sometimes nytimes.com forces me to login to read articles. Only if it's interesting enough (the title at least) I'll bite. For these cases I recommend BugMeNot: http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com
It should also go away if you delete your NY Times cookies.
After much bugmenot and cookie hassle I'd recommend the Firefox RefControl add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/953. It lets you set your referrer to http://www.google.com for nytimes.com so NYT thinks you're coming from a Google search and always skips the login page.
Google the article title and follow that link. You won't get the paywall.
It is interesting I noticed that the NY Times seems to be doing some A/B testing around this. I Followed a link and was surprised to be able to read when I clicked on the second page link it told me to login. When my co worker went to this page he had to click past one of those big skip this advertisement pages but the article was all on one page and he didn't have to login.