That's how they got customers in the first place. Isn't the article supposed to be about how they retained them?

Is there a paywall bypass that works for New Yorker articles now?

This may sound very low-tech, but if you stop loading the page as soon as you open it, you should be fine. For me, that's refreshing the page and spamming the ESC button.

Holy shit it works!

You can disable Scripts loaded from www.newyorker.com in uMatrix.

You can also do that in basically any vanilla user agent (for chrome, click the lock in the URL bar -> site settings -> disable javascript -> refresh page).

I'm not a zealot, but I like to browse with javascript default to blocked, and only if I notice a site not behaving correctly will I enable javascript. Side benefit is killing most begging-for-subscription overlays.

Just hit Reader in Firefox before the payroll kicks in.