The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the page they want to see. I used to love NBC.com because they would let me type things like nbc.com/parks to get to http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation, but that is no longer true. Now everyone just assumes that they need to google something to find it, and they can't even imagine that apple.com/ipad would be the page they are looking for.
user readable and user typeable aren't the same thing. your WaPo url is perfectly readable - it includes the author, the source, the name of the article, and the date. if you click on it, it takes you where you want to go. if you see it in a context where you don't want to click on it but want to read the article later, you can still find the article because it gave you all the information you need to google for it. if for some reason the link breaks, you can use the information in the link to find an alternate source for the article.
apple.com/ipad is a good URL because it describes the destination. so is nbc.com/parks. but there is a practical limitation to that sort of url scheme - you only get a couple hundred pages max before you exhaust your namespace. you couldn't use a URL like that for every single article a newspaper writes without an absurd number of collisions. so you have to start using unique IDs. and if you only use the ID, you lose the memorable/describable aspect.
How is your first URL not easily user readable? It clearly tells me that it is from the Washington Post, in the Opinions section, written by EJ Dion Jr, titled "the roots and lessons of memorial day," published May 25 2014, and then has a (presumably) uuid for the article.
Since when has verbal transmission been an important consideration for URLs?
If I want to send you a link to a washingtonpost.com article the link looks like:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-root...
The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the page they want to see. I used to love NBC.com because they would let me type things like nbc.com/parks to get to http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation, but that is no longer true. Now everyone just assumes that they need to google something to find it, and they can't even imagine that apple.com/ipad would be the page they are looking for.