It's not 680px per se that's effective; it's the legibility of 60-80 characters per line. Sadly, it seems like the new Wired article pages have the body type a

It's not 680px per se that's effective; it's the legibility of 60-80 characters per line. Sadly, it seems like the new Wired article pages have the body type at a character width of around 50 on average, so it falls just a hair short of that ideal window. Removing the social share icons would likely bring it into that window, ironically. As someone who's working on a major replatforming for another news media site, I feel Wired's pain on this.