A little HTML background which can help explain it.
If you were to view the source of any given HTML you would see the source says:
<HTML><HEAD>Page heading on the web browser window</HEAD><BODY>Body of the webpage some <A HREF="sitename">visible text in link</A> </BODY>
If any component is missing from the body, it doesn't know where to close the page. If any encapsulated link is incomplete i.e. </A with no following > or something ends up inside in place of the markup, it stops encoding the page, and leaves you with a blank. The email program may try to overcompensate seeing what component naturally follows, but its guess may not always be correct. It gets more complicated with more codes. Some webpages have code Safari doesn't understand, and so it won't show that code. Well neither will Mac OS X Mail. Suffice it to say, the sender of your corrupt email is not showing the whole page in the email. When it comes to the "New York Times," they probably want you to go to the page, and pay their subscription to see the rest of it.
I mean you could write a letter to the editor of the New York Times, and ask, are these articles supposed to be legible in email? If not, then there is your answer.
