Site doesn’t work if Adsense is disabled

I run the Ghostery Chrome plugin to block tracking, and noticed that the new TR doesn’t like it very much. In fact, Techrepublic won’t work unless I enable Google Adsense in Ghostery. Not sure why that is, but I figured it out with trial and error. If Adsense is disabled, I can’t click on links, the image slider on the front page won’t work, and the page won’t load more posts when I scroll to the bottom.

I’ve never seen this on any other website. Any thoughts on why that happens?