@trenthead

His latest book, the graphic-novel biography “Joseph Smith and the Mormons,” will be published at the end of July. It is a nuanced and complicated portrait of Mormonism’s founder. Using Smith’s short life, from his childhood in upstate New York to his violent death when he was thirty-eight, at the hands of a mob in Illinois, Van Sciver tells his interpretation of the religion’s early years. Van Sciver’s Smith is a would-be prophet, driven by faith yet full of human frailty, who rose from humble beginnings to build a quintessentially American religion in the expansionist years of the eighteen-hundreds. We talked to the author about what compelled him to take on this book.

“We want to see what’s an impossible target,” McCormack said.

On the rainy evening of November 6, a man and a woman arrived in a beat-up car. The man was wearing a Nike baseball cap, the bill obscuring his face. He held a large fountain soda in his left hand, frustratingly disregarding the sign asking visitors not to bring food or drink inside. The woman seemed younger, in jeans and some kind of poncho, with a wet grocery bag in her hand. The two of them walked to the register, where the woman opened the bag to reveal some of the rarest games the staff had ever seen, then arranged them on the glass checkout counter, hoping to make a deal. One of the clerks, Spidey sense triggered, called the Voegeles at home. Mandi came in.

Kolodziejzyk and Miller and others like them — YouTubers like Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez — don’t just inform you about internet ephemera; they also reveal the shady online courses, moneymaking conventions and NFT hype that some of the internet’s influential celebrities have had their hands in. (Celebrities whose audiences, it must be said, consist largely of teenagers.)

“One of two things must be true,” they wrote. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”

Referring to “expensive digital images of monkeys” as “100% based on greater fool theory,” Gates drove home the point that assets like NFTs are entirely contingent on a consumer market that believes they have value. Unlike, say, a house, which retains the intrinsic value of being a place to live, no matter what extrinsic value is conferred upon it by demand in the real estate market, an electronically unique picture of a cartoon monkey does nothing for you, unless everyone believes it is a desirable object. Hard to believe, but there you have it.