What Does This Button Do?

So the New York Times launched their new Web site design recently, and it looks great: I like the way they pack a lot of content into a small space: you can get to a huge number of articles from the front page. I also like the way they are breaking one of the rules of Web design, creating pages with a width of over 800 pixels (they actually go up to 975) over 5 columns.  But it's not perfect, and many of the problems seem to come from advertising. Take, for instance, what I got when reading an article (at right); the advert was misplaced, obscuring the article itself with no way to get rid of it. Granted, the article itself was perhaps not the most earth-shattering thing to miss, but it is pretty irritating and has happened more than once.