Originally Posted By: artie505
Nope! I just did some additional experimentation and found that my original guess was incorrect as is your URL guess.
It hinges on your nytimes.com cookie or lack thereof.
If I visit the website without a cookie in place I can navigate from article to article; once I get a cookie, either by visiting nytimes.com directly or clicking on a link, however, I'm at a dead end in all respects.
...more or less, anyhow... tongue

It's probably a bit of both. If you haven't viewed articles over the course of a month, then your free allotment should not be compromised. But you advise that it is. Therefore it is likely that the cookie(s) that got dumped into your browser could have been contaminated by getting to the NYT via Jon's link (which would have such info embedded).
So you definitely have clear out your cookie cache (at least for NYT-related cookies [Look very closely!]) and start from scratch, directly on the www.nytimes.com site.

I make it a habit to examine all URL links that come to me through third parties in my own "sandbox" prior to accessing them, just to make sure that they're legitimate. Often there's a lot of inscrutable info embedded which can easily be discarded. Who knows where such things lead?