How the ‘Technoking’ imbues assets with value in the same way medieval kings would — Where does money come from, and how did it get that way? Most people assume that it all started with bartering, but the barter theory, popularized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations — which supposes that human societies traded goods for one another before developing currency — has…

Time itself is now for sale — The world’s first tweet is now for sale as an NFT, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced last week. In an article about the news for CNN Business, writer Jazmin Goodwin details how NFTs (that is, non-fungible tokens) have become a way to buy and sell what were once unique and…

For the past thirty years, Paul Freedman and I have followed the origins, growth, and proliferation of American food culture. Paul is a Medievalist, and has written one of my favorite food books of all time, along with a recent best-seller. He is arguably America’s foremost expert on restaurants. …

Before there was such a thing as a market economy, metals defined money. Sparkling rocks belie an ugly history, but one worth re-visiting as the precious metals sector of the market reaches for a new era of dominance. Bloomberg News recently reported that “industrial metal prices are powering to the…

The first-ever options trader discovered a key insight about the nature of risk — and how to profit from it — An epic amount of ink has been spilled over the past few weeks about Reddit’s WallStreetBets and wild trading of options for meme stocks like GameStop. Much of this ink describes meme stocks as a unique phenomenon with little or no precedent. But the history of the financial markets is…