When designers volley designs back and forth in a battle of one-upmanship, the result is an esoteric, but fun, digital-age sport.

Khoi Vinh connects the early childhood disruption he experienced as an immigrant from Vietnam with his fastidious style as a designer.

The NYTimes.com designer talks favorite fonts and websites.

Khoi Vinh hates websites on which everything is “rendered to within an inch of its life.” Do we really need to see the little rivets on the mailbox icon?

Technology has both democratized design and made user response central to designers’ choices. At the same time, says Khoi Vinh, “true expertise is as rare as ever.”

As online media outlets compete furiously for eyeballs, the NYTimes.com design director discusses features that have, and haven’t, worked for the website.

Print editions of newspapers remain “canonical.” But anticipating, and accommodating, user behavior is the unique challenge of the Web.

The NYTimes.com designer strives for “a maximum of elegance with a minimum of ornamentation.” He also tries to think outside the grids that first made his style famous.

A conversation with the blogger and design director of the New York Times website.

“This being so afraid about competitiveness, I have never understood. Even as a Prime Minister, unless you have products or services to sell to others outside your own country, then […]

Skeptics of global warming present the same issue as tobacco companies who misbehaved, lied to Congress and undermined public health efforts.

Wealthy countries have to pay for part of their debt to the planet by helping developing countries have a chance for sustainability.

Becoming a New York sightseeing guide is harder than passing the bar. Having met the challenge, Jacob Appel describes his favorite sight in the city.

Don’t write stories about “ordinary people who think in ordinary ways,” and don’t spoon-feed your readers answers to moral dilemmas.

Discouraged writers, take heart! Jacob Appel has been turned down by nearly every publication in existence—and has the records to prove it. So what keeps him plugging away?

“A pharmacist in Alaska can look at the records of his daughter’s fiancée in Florida…and there’s no way the system right now can track that down.” What’s the solution?

In vitro babies should be pre-screened for severe birth defects, argues Jacob Appel. If this creates a slippery slope, parents can find “level places on it” (and maybe save money […]

The bioethicist believes it’s an idea whose time has come. But how could such a market be regulated to prevent abuses?

The bioethicist argues that humans do not gain real sentience until infancy, and that even mothers who commit infanticide should be treated far more gently than other murderers.

Is euthanasia, or physician-assisted suicide, ever justified? And when do vegetative states become inseparable from death?

How bioethicists can steer clear of political tensions on the job, and why past friction between bioethicists and doctors is quickly disappearing.

The discipline is less than 30 years old, but its practitioners have become a fixture in hospitals, and its inquiries have “brought morality back into the field of philosophy.”

A conversation with the bioethicist and fiction writer.

Why the two disciplines are intersecting now more than ever.

How free will and randomness intersect, and how working on ourselves could help events work out in our favor.

The question of human autonomy, the alternate universes that our choices can open up, and the problem of measurement awareness.

People often trick themselves into believing they are significantly more skilled in risky situations than they actually are.

Human beings will make unwise decisions — and sometimes they’ll make radically unwise decisions. But we aren’t fundamentally rational or irrational creatures.

The Florida State University professor on how he got into the study of philosophy and why we sometimes go out and party when we know we should be studying.

A conversation with the Florida State University professor of philosophy.