This is completely unnecessary. Mr. G says there's an extra 8 megs of memory for you if you crash when she tries to install Netscape. All perfectly innocent. Nevertheless, a few cookie paranoiacs have set their browsers to alert them when a cookie is heading their way. And some of them have complained that this notice pops up a lot when they're reading Slate.
Slate actually uses very few cookies.
For example, we tell your browser to remember the date of your visit. When you come back the next time, your computer sends that date back to ours. If it's still the same day, we don't feed you the cover again but take you straight to the Table of Contents. All perfectly innocent. But we did investigate these complaints, and it turned out that our server computers were sending jars and jars of cookies we didn't need.