No doing the same to me.
On a brighter note the left pane doesn't scroll with the articles, and goes away entirely when you view in portrait mode. My guess is that they are redirecting mobile Safari to a tablet friendly (by their definition) page.
Which means it's time to experiment: . . .
Sure enough, when I use Atomic browser, set to identify itself as IE8, the page behaves normally.
Google has been optimizing a lot of it's pages for tablet browsers lately. I doubt it's entirely for our benefit. Android tablets will probably be redirected to the same pages by default. And like us, if they don't like the new pages they will start using browsers that can bypass them.