To learn more about the service, I recently interviewed Karen Barrow, a senior staff editor for Smarter Living; Karron Skog, Smarter Living’s editorial director; and Sarah Graham, a Smarter Living senior digital strategist . Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

What is Ask?

KAREN BARROW I think we realized that as readers go through their lives, over the course of a day, so many questions will come up, like “What’s the best way to make coffee?” or “Why was my run hard today?” Your whole life is a series of questions. Some of them stay in the back of your mind and you never Google them, but some stay at the front of your mind. The New York Times is such a trusted resource and we have so many reporters in the building and access to experts, so we decided to make a place where readers can come and get a definitive answer to the questions that they have.

How does it work?

SARAH GRAHAM Readers log in and ask their questions. Once we have a batch of them, we choose which ones we think will have a broad audience and which ones we want to answer. (It’s often impossible to answer every one.) Then we publish them so everyone can see the answers.

KARRON SKOG If we choose your question, we send you a response directly. All of the answered questions will populate a database that anybody can look at.

BARROW We made it so that the answers are very scannable. There’s a definitive answer at the top, which we call the takeaway, and it’s a sentence or two. So if you just want to read one sentence to get your answer you can. Or if you then want to understand why, there’s a section that goes into the science or rationale behind the answer.