Try changing ‘www’ to ‘text’ in the URL to get the plainer version of the site. That might help. Here is the modified link:

https://text.npr.org/2020/12/18/944594193/new-york-times-ret...

Thanks! I love NPR but always had trouble with the unbreakable cookie barrier.

They have a text-only version of their site. For single articles, just replace the 'www' subdomain with 'text':

https://text.npr.org/944594193