Ah, snap. Shields down, pages like Washington Post and NY Times load. With shields up, page-load times out. Got rid of cookies and cleared cache. Uninstalled Brave and re-installed. Pages without tons of ads still load fine.
Actually brave has an inbuilt ad blocker in the form of brave shield.Also there are a lot of ad category blacklisted by brave.So it might be the case that the website you are trying to load has got ads belonging to those category.Best solution would be turning off the brave shield in the websites you trust.