I concur. It's both beautiful and understated—I appreciate the visual acuity, but I am more impressed with the fact that NYT, of all, is finally growing past the era of crying "we're interactive!!!" out loud and starting to make good, subtle and tasteful use of unique properties of the Web. This is elegant.

This was incredibly evident during the election. They're really leading the pack in terms of using newer technologies as more than a tool to draw attention to their articles, but to actually add depth to them.

Its very nice, but I think the rapid motion is a little much for reading- they could do the same thing with a slower frame rate and more blurred outside, it might be more comfortable

I agree, I've been reading NYT online for years and never seen an animated gif illustration before. I quite like it.

agreed, my first thought was that it was one of the best uses of animated gifs i'd ever seen.

I might be oversimplifying it, but the GIF might have something to do with this: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/11/us-word-of-the-ye...

The animation is present on mobile devices as well, though perhaps not on their mobile-formatted site. Do they even serve that site to WebKit browsers anymore? If so, they shouldn't.