When I was writing that last post I was confused because I couldn’t copy text from the article I was linking to.
Clicking and moving my mouse across the text did nothing: there was no indication that I had selected anything. Similarly, double-clicking on a single word didn’t select it.
Eventually I saved the article to Instapaper, and copied from there
After initially posting it, I noticed that the URL contained the string “amphtml”. I removed the amphtml/, and the page worked normally.
AMP is Google’s “accelerated mobile pages,” a way for them to control URLs instead of the owners controlling them. At least, that’s how it appeared at first. Clearly that can’t be the case for a page like this that’s purely at the Washington Post’s own site.
But it’s a bloody annoying state of affairs, and makes for a very bad web citizen.