The author spoke to TIME about 'Going Infinite' and why he thinks most people misunderstand Sam Bankman-Fried....

The inventor of the non-fungible token says he has spent the last two years lurching 'from excitement to dread.' Although artist Kevin McCoy says he is 'gratified' to see people engaging with what started as his 'own private thought experiment,' he claims to be terrified by the gold rush it inspired. In March 2021 during the early throes of NFT mania a single token, tied to an artwork called Everydays: The First 5000 Days, by digital artist Beeple, sold for almost $70 million. When McCoy and his partner, entrepreneur Anil Dash, pitched the idea for a unique crypto-like token that demonstrated ownership of digital goods back in 2014, they had some sense it was an 'important idea.' The intention was to create a mechanism for tracing the provenance of digital works and give small artists a new way to make money. But McCoy says he never imagined NFTs would become a conduit for financial speculation. Over the course of 2021, beginning in earnest with the landmark Beeple sale, a frenzy of buying and selling drove the prices of NFTs sky high. By the end of the year, the average price of an NFT had risen beyond $3,000, despite a tsunami of new tokens diluting the market, while the cheapest NFTs from the most vaunted collections were selling for $200,000 a piece....

The BBVA Foundation awarded three MIT professors Frontiers of Knowledge Awards for their work in climate change, biology and biomedicine, and quantum computation. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Professor Kerry A. Emanuel, Department of Biology Professor David Sabatini, and Department of Mathematics Professor Peter Shor were recognized in the 12th edition of this annual award. Kerry Emanuel Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science, earned the BBVA’s Climate Change award “for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of tropical cyclones and how they are affected by climate change,” according to the committee’s citation. “By understanding the essential physics of atmospheric convection … he has unraveled the behavior of tropical cyclones — hurricanes and typhoons — as our climate changes.” He was also lauded for “extraordinary effectiveness in communicating the science of climate change to the public and policymakers.” Emanuel is the co-founder (with Daniel H. Rothman) and co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center, a climate think tank that fosters creative approaches to learning how climate works. He was the first to link greater hurricane intensity to climate change-induced warming of sea surface waters....