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IT STARTED as a joke. Dogecoin was launched in 2013 as a bitcoin parody, using as its mascot a Japanese shiba inu dog, a popular internet meme. The crypto-currency was never really used, except for tipping online, and one of its founders has called it quits. But recently its price has soared: on January 7th the dollar value of all Dogecoins in circulation reached $2bn, a sign of how crazy crypto-currency markets have become. It is also a reminder that, for all the focus on bitcoin, it is no longer the only game in town. Its market capitalisation now amounts to only about one-third of the crypto-market (see chart).

A new crypto-currency is born almost daily, often through an “initial coin offering” (ICO), a form of online crowdfunding. CoinMarketCap, a website, lists about 1,400 digital coins or tokens, including PutinCoin, Sexcoin and InsaneCoin (worth $7m). Most are no more than curiosities, but by January 10th, around 40 had a market capitalisation of more than $1bn.

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YOU have multiple jobs, whether you know it or not. Most begin first thing in the morning, when you pick up your phone and begin generating the data that make up Silicon Valley’s most important resource. That, at least, is how we ought to think about the role of data-creation in the economy, according to a fascinating new economics paper. We are all digital labourers, helping make possible the fortunes generated by firms like Google and Facebook, the authors argue. If the economy is to function properly in the future—and if a crisis of technological unemployment is to be avoided—we must take account of this, and change the relationship between big internet companies and their users.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting better all the time, and stands poised to transform a host of industries, say the authors (Imanol Arrieta Ibarra and Diego Jiménez Hernández, of Stanford University, Leonard Goff, of Columbia University, and Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl, of Microsoft). But, in order to learn...

Multiple roots to success

NO ONE knows quite how much fruit and vegetable produce never reaches the grocery checkout till. A fifth perhaps—or maybe twice that—is judged to be beneath commercial standards. So it is put to use as animal-feed or compost, or simply thrown away in a landfill. This infuriates those appalled at waste. Their outrage, however, has not been enough to create for unwanted fruit and vegetable the kind of sophisticated market that exists for products with more obvious uses, such as securities, currencies, metals, oil and unsullied agriculture. That is starting to change.

At least two companies, Imperfect produce (whose logo is a misshapen potato that looks like a heart) and Hungry Harvest (whose slogan is “Rescued Produce. Delivered”), now provide boxes of subpar stuff directly to retail customers, one concentrating on the west coast of America, the other on the east. Another company, Full Harvest, has the wholesale market in its sights, linking...

WHY is productivity growth low if information technology is advancing rapidly? Prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s, this question has in recent years again become one of the hottest in economics. Its salience has grown as techies have become convinced that machine learning and artificial intelligence will soon put hordes of workers out of work (among tech-moguls, Bill Gates has called for a robot tax to deter automation, and Elon Musk for a universal basic income). A lot of economists think that a surge in productivity that would leave millions on the scrapheap is unlikely soon, if at all. Yet this year’s meeting of the American Economic Association, which wound up in Philadelphia on January 7th, showed they are taking the tech believers seriously. A session on weak productivity growth was busy; the many covering the implications of automation were packed out.

Recent history seems to support productivity pessimism. From 1995 to 2004 output per hour worked grew at an annual average pace of 2.5%; from 2004 to 2016 the pace was just 1%. Elsewhere in the G7 group of rich countries, the pace has been slower still. An obvious explanation is that the financial crisis of 2007-08 led firms to defer productivity-boosting investment. Not so, say John Fernald, of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and co-authors, who estimate that in America, the slowdown began in...

LIKE the showman he sometimes was, Peter Sutherland, on December 15th 1993, concluded seven years of torturous trade negotiations by banging a gavel. He received a standing ovation. Mr Sutherland, who died on January 7th, had an indispensable role in dragging the “Uruguay round” of trade talks to agreement. He did not know that this was to be the last such comprehensive, multilateral trade deal of his lifetime.

As director-general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and, on its founding, of the World Trade Organisation, the Irishman was the public face of bodies helping to integrate the global economy. The sobriquet “father of globalisation” was, at the time, a compliment. He remained proud of the WTO. In 2004 he wrote that “for the first time in history, the world can embrace a rules-based system for economic coexistence.”

Mr Sutherland, a lawyer by training, came to Geneva by way of the Irish attorney-general’s office and the European Union. Briefly in...

IT STARTED as a joke. Dogecoin was launched in 2013 as a bitcoin parody, using as its mascot a Japanese shiba inu dog, a popular internet meme. The crypto-currency was never really used, except for tipping online, and one of its founders has called it quits. But recently its price has soared: on January 7th the dollar value of all Dogecoins in circulation reached $2bn, a sign of how crazy crypto-currency markets have become. It is also a reminder that, for all the focus on bitcoin, it is no longer the only game in town. Its market capitalisation now amounts to only about one-third of the crypto-market (see chart).

A new crypto-currency is born almost daily, often through an “initial coin offering” (ICO), a form of online crowdfunding. CoinMarketCap, a website, lists about 1,400 digital coins or tokens, including UFO Coin, PutinCoin, Sexcoin and InsaneCoin (worth $7m). Most are no more than curiosities, but by January 10th, around 40 had a market capitalisation of more than $...

Quilt, a start-up in Los Angeles, links women who want to schmooze, study and surf the internet — all in the comfort of another’s home, for a fee.

The tennis champion spoke to Vogue about her severe postnatal complications. Her experience underscores a wider problem for new mothers in the United States.

Frances Glessner Lee, the first lady of forensic science, was a cult curiosity. With her “Nutshell Studies” at the Renwick Gallery, she rises to art star.

Thousands of electronics enthusiasts flooded the trade show to see the latest devices, but the darling of the event was the artificial intelligence software that helps these products run.

The “Havana” singer and former Fifth Harmony member opens up about her solo journey and “super awkward” split from the group.

In the movie, “I, Tonya,” the disgraced figure skater looks back on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal and her struggles to tell her side of the story.

Thursday: The governor plays down talk of his legacy, the death count from the mudslides grows, and Representative Darrell Issa is the latest G.O.P. retirement.

Even a “less effective” vaccine packs a payoff in averting illness and death.

Thursday: The city goes from frozen to balmy, modesty in fashion, and the Winter Jazzfest.

Taha Siddiqui, a reporter and frequent critic of Pakistan’s military, escaped an attack by a dozen men who diverted his car just outside the capital.

Adults with eating disorders aren’t represented in pop culture and news outlets, so I assumed we were either supposed to outgrow it or die.

The areas of the country with the largest robot work forces gave the president an unanticipated advantage in the Electoral College.

For white supremacy to thrive, the lowest white man must be exalted above those who are black.

“Fire and Fury” does spectacular damage to Trump’s opposition.