The Daily Folgen

It started with a picture posted on the internet, and ended in an extravagant cryptocurrency bidding war. NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens,” have recently taken the art world by storm. Sabrina Tavernise, a national correspondent for The Times, speaks with the Times columnist Kevin Roose about digital currency’s newest frontier, his unexpected role in it and why it matters.Guest: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times who examines the intersection of technology, business, and culture.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: NFT mania has reached new highs in recent months, with a digital artwork by an artist known as Beeple selling for $69.3 million. A trading card featuring the quarterback Tom Brady sold for $1.3 million and an NFT of the first tweet from Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, went for $2.9 million.What are these nonfungible tokens and why do people pay so much for them? Here’s a primer.A picture of Kevin Roose’s column “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!” was put up for auction and sold for about $725,000. He also wrote about the surreal experience of selling the NFT and spoke to a few people who placed bids.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Europe’s vaccination process was expected to be well-orchestrated and efficient. So far, it’s been neither. Sabrina Tavernise, a national correspondent for The Times, spoke with our colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff about Europe’s problems and why things could get worse before they get better.Guest: Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Brussels correspondent for The New York Times, covering the European Union.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: A cascade of small decisions has led to increasingly long delays in the European Union’s inoculation efforts. While Washington went into business with the drug companies, Brussels took a conservative, budget-conscious approach that left the open market largely untouched. And it has paid for it.Falling behind the pace of vaccine rollouts in countries like Britain, the United States and Israel, Europe is now tightening export rules in a bid to speed up its inoculation campaign and stem political criticism.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

The author Philip Roth, who died in 2018, was not sure whether he wanted to be the subject of a biography. In the end, he decided that he wanted to be known and understood.His search for a biographer was long and fraught — Mr. Roth parted ways with two, courted one and sued another — before he settled on Blake Bailey, one of the great chroniclers of America’s literary lives.Today on The Sunday Read, the journey of rendering a writer whose life was equal parts discipline and exuberance.This story was written by Mark Oppenheimer and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.