The font is whatever you have as the default in your browser—if you don’t like it then set a better one :)

I agree about the spacing, it feels off to me too but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Whitespace has always been a challenge for me (I still remember my mom looking at my elementary school projects and telling me repeatedly, “Margins! You need more margins!”) and though I’m getting better at it I don’t expect to get a job in graphics design any time soon. If anyone has suggestions for improvements I’d be glad to hear them.

> The font is whatever you have as the default in your browser—if you don’t like it then set a better one :)

The default serif fonts on most systems aren't the best choice for a site that is trying to imitate print media.

If you change the section border-style to dotted and overall font-family to sans-serif your website basically becomes https://www.bloomberg.com :)

Also for large device widths margins of something like 20% makes it more readable. Visit somethings like https://www.nytimes.com and compare how much narrower the content is.

  body {
    font-kerning: none;
    letter-spacing: -0.00214em;
    font-family: Helvetica;
  }

> but I couldn’t put my finger on why

You probably shouldn't use serif, Helvetica is much easier on the eyes and more forgiving.

Not everyone has a Helvetica font installed; at least add the generic sans-serif as a fallback. (Though if the aim is to be reminiscent of a print newspaper, a serif font may still be the better choice.)

Why disable kerning? If the user's font has kerning information, surely a newspaper should respect it.

You're completely right. Helvetica was just a suggestion as most newspapers use it and is widely supported, but he could and should add fallbacks (preferally sans-serif based). As for the kerning it appears something was messing up the spacing for his website and the combination of disabling kerning and letter spacing (even if counter-intuitive) seems to 'make it prettier' at least in firefox.

I'm a bit surprised by the statement that "most newspapers use it [Helvetica]", as my perception is that they mostly use a serif font. (How do you suppose Times Roman got its name?)

But perhaps this varies between markets/regions/languages/etc.

>if you don’t like it then set a better one

Which would affect every site.

Just made some tweaks to the stylesheet, how does it look now?