I have received word that the New Yorker will make article available online today or tomorrow. The article gives a bit of background on the story, and attempts to get a deeper look into the reason's for Perelman's actions.

Java Objects tend to be pretty heavy, partly because every Object carries a virtual table (to implement polymorphism, reflection, etc.)

This is nonsense. The virtual method table of an object is identical across all instances of a particular class. Each object carries nothing more than a pointer to the single virtual method table that it shares with all other objects of the same type.