Alison Prato writes about popular culture, entertainment, current events, fashion and more--specializing in profiles of celebrities, innovators, thinkers, and doers. She has written for everyone from Playboy to New York to Harper's Bazaar.
Erin Freschi, a California mom who has worked in education for nearly 25 years, has a nightly ritual with her 8-year-old son, Sawyer. Instead of bedtime stories or songs, Freschi and her son wind down by watching TED Talks. The name of their unique ritual? TED Before Bed. “It started when Sawyer was in first […]
All TED Talks are good. Why do only some go viral? Over the last year, a human behavior consultancy called Science of People set out to answer this question. To do so, says founder Vanessa Van Edwards, they polled 760 volunteers, asking them to rate hundreds of hours of TED Talks, looking for specific nonverbal and body language patterns. […]
Jane Andraka has raised two remarkable sons. Luke, age 20, is studying electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. “He was always tinkering and taking things apart — wondering how they worked, wondering how they could be made better. He had ideas coming out of his brain like a firehose,” she says. Meanwhile, Jack, age 18, is […]
There’s wild sex. And then there’s sex in the wild — a topic that biologist and animal sex expert Carin Bondar has been talking about for years, spawning not only a book, The Nature of Human Nature, but also a popular web series, “Wild Sex,” all about the evolution of sexual behavior. In her funny and […]
If you’ve ever had the ending of your favorite TV show ruined by a spoiler-filled tweet, Jennie Lamere feels your pain. The 18-year-old tech whiz won the grand prize at Boston’s TVNext Hack event in April for inventing Twivo, a clever app that blocks all mentions of a show you’re waiting to watch until you’re […]
On St. Patrick’s Day in 2008, Chris Downey, an architect, planner and consultant who lives in Piedmont, California, some 10 miles east of San Francisco, reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was a success. But two days later, his sight started to fail. On the third day, it […]
It might seem strange to show a gallery of images of places the narrator can’t actually see. But as architect Chris Downey explains, he picked these locations in San Francisco because they’re meaningful to him, not because they’re photogenic (though as it happens, they’re that too). “As with any large, great city, its success is […]
New Zealand is located on a continental plate boundary, so earthquakes aren’t unexpected. But no one was ready for the quake that hit at 12.51 pm on February 22, 2011. “Everyone in Christchurch will never forget that moment,” says Danny Squires, who lives in the city with his wife and four children. Even though they’d […]
Christchurch-based Danny Squires is director of Space Craft Systems and co-founder of WikiHouse/NZ, a global project aiming to make it possible for anyone to design, download and “print” houses. Squires was going about his daily business in Christchurch on February 22, 2011, when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake ripped through the city, causing horrific damage and killing […]
David Blaine, the magician, illusionist and endurance artist, is back on prime time TV tonight with the special, David Blaine: Real or Magic. Traveling around the world, the TED speaker (watch his talk, “How I held my breath for 17 minutes“) performs magic and elicits astonished reactions from people on the street — as well as from […]
Bahia Shebab is an artist, activist, and advertising executive who has been living in Cairo since 2003. And she also has been known to head out on the streets in the middle of the night to spray paint stenciled series that protest injustice and reflect on the fast-shifting politics of the city. Of course, Shehab […]
Early one morning, hours before the sun would rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the stripping of veiled women. It’s a campaign she discussed in “A thousand times no,” her inspiring TED Talk, and it was not only […]
As part of this TED profile, we asked Jason Sweeney to make audio recordings at his favorite places in his home city of Adelaide, Australia. Here, hear the sounds of the city — and enjoy the accompanying photographs, shot by Kristin Alford, with commentary by Sweeney. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/112426817″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /] Read […]
Jason Sweeney lives and works in Adelaide, Australia, a city he describes as “a prototype for what a developed city in the western world could be like.” Here, he describes his life in the city. Also, see and hear his favorite Adelaideian spots in the photoessay by Kristin Alford, accompanied by audio snippets of the […]
In the first of a series of city-related articles, we profile Robin Nagle, anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation and long-time resident of New York City. She describes a life dedicated to, well, trash, and documents some of her favorite locations throughout the American city’s boroughs, captured in an accompanying photoessay by Ryan Lash. In […]
Robin Nagle has lived in New York City since 1982. As the anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation in New York, she has more than a passing familiarity with some of the grimier parts of town. But she loves the city for more than just its garbage. In this beautiful photo essay, shot by Ryan […]