Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City. She's contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic Cities, and Scientific American Mind, among other places. Jessica has a Master's degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University and a Bachelor's in anthropology from Princeton University.
“Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data,” biologist Stuart Firestein says in today’s TED talk. “I’d like to tell you that’s not the case.” Instead, Firestein proposes that science is really about ignorance — about seeking answers rather than collecting them. He […]
George Monbiot begins today’s talk by recalling a time he was “ecologically bored.” “We evolved in rather more challenging times than these, in the world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws,” explains Monbiot, an investigative journalist who found himself deeply dissatisfied returning to the United Kingdom after years reporting in the tropics. “We […]
“Is there a reason for governments to be in charge of money?” asks Paul Kemp-Robertson in today’s talk. Judging by the new raft of alternative currencies—from digital coins to point systems that reward customers of a certain brand—the answer might someday be “no.” Again. As Kemp-Robertson suggests, many people seem to trust brands more than […]
“Throughout the history of computers, we’ve been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen,” interface designer Jinha Lee says in today’s talk. Lee points out that the gap has become shorter and shorter—it’s now “less than a millimeter, the thickness […]
Vive les nerds! While the term used to be something of a put-down, meant to mock an excessive interest in math or science, it’s now often used in an almost prideful way to signify a passion for pretty much anything. And that applies to pretty much all of those who end up on the TED […]
June 18th is Autistic Pride Day, a day to celebrate the neurodiversity of people on the autism spectrum. Too often, autistic people are viewed as only autistic, and it’s seen strictly as a disorder. As always, the full picture isn’t drawn in black and white: it’s complex, full of grays. At TED, scores of speakers […]
“What would be a good end of life?” Judy MacDonald Johnston asks in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Her answer — based on her own experience of helping two friends face death in a way that respected the incredible life they’d built — involves five practices, all of which can help maintain a high quality […]
Geoffrey Canada gives a very interesting analogy in today’s TED Talk: He compares the current education system in the United States to the era when banks were only open between the hours of 10am and 3pm. “Now, who can bank between 10 and 3?” asks Canada to a big laugh. “It went on for decades. […]
To an outsider, the Chinese language “seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China,” says ShaoLan Hsueh in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Hsueh’s mission over the past few years has been to break down that barrier, making reading and writing in Chinese accessible to people who didn’t grow up doing it. […]
The analog-to-digital shift that has seen e-readers booting out books, smartphones trumping landlines and tablets making desktops look fuddy-duddy is also bringing new tech tools to the classroom. Last month, I read this New York Times article about CourseSmart, an app that allows teachers to track whether students have done their reading in digital textbooks, […]
In today’s talk, Nilofer Merchant gives a startling statistic: we’re sitting, on average, for 9.3 hours per day—far more than the 7.7 hours we spend sleeping. “Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don’t even question how much we’re doing it,” Merchant says. “In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.” But there […]
Was it a suicide? A homicide? Or an accident? Read and decide….
“When we think about how people work, the naïve intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze,” says behavioral economist Dan Ariely in today’s talk, given at TEDxRiodelaPlata. “We really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.” When you look carefully at […]
“Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland,” Lawrence Lessig begins today’s talk. “Of its 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester,” Lessig says. In Lesterland, this .05% of the population is granted extraordinary power. Each election cycle, there’s a general election, in which the people get to vote, and […]
In today’s talk, Bono — U2 frontman, founder of the anti-poverty organization ONE, and 2005 TED Prize winner — reflects on the past decade’s dramatic reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. “Exit the rockstar, enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist,” he says. Since 2000, according to Bono’s data, eight million more AIDS patients are getting antiretroviral drugs; eight […]
Musician Amanda Palmer has spent her career seeking out connection: first as a living statue on the street, who traded intimate eye contact and a rose for a passerby’s money; then, as one half of the band The Dresden Dolls, who didn’t hesitate to ask fans for support, either in person or over Twitter. “I […]