Morton Bast comments, proofreads, fact-checks, moderates, reads, writes and reasons for TED.com. She has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, a thirst for knowledge, and a medium-sized collection of Hello Kitty paraphernalia. She is also a New Yorker, for which there is no known cure.
After two days of TEDWomen 2015, the jaw-dropping, standing-O moments are still hanging in the air — smart, sad and funny insights on things we don’t often say out loud … “I am a bad feminist and a good woman. I am trying to become better in how I think and say and do — without abandoning what makes […]
On her first day as a principal in a North Philadelphia school, Linda Cliatt-Wayman was determined to lay down the law and set clear expectations. She called her students into the auditorium and told them how things would go at that school. But one voice interrupted her. “Miss,” called out a girl named Ashley, “why do […]
Camille Martinez is a native English speaker who’s fluent in Spanish. In her career, she’s run a language school, worked in medical translation and interpreting, and even started a translation company. But in TED’s Open Translation Project, Martinez occupies a key role: English Language Coordinator. She is one of a handful of volunteers who help […]
The most important rule in our safety briefing on the “Bobsleigh Sport Experience”: Put your gloves on, hold on to the wire inside the sled walls, and DO NOT LET GO.
The Open Translation Project has a global family of over 18,000 volunteers. But for the Dekkers — living in Sde Warburg, Israel — the OTP family isn’t a figure of speech. They’ve made translating TED Talks into Hebrew a true family affair. Husband and wife Ido and Tal Dekkers have worked on more than 2,000 […]
TEDGlobal 2014 has wrapped up — here, some highlights from the last day of the conference. Onstage and online, it’s been a busy and fantastic Friday. Word spreads of Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Peace Prize. Excitement was high at TEDGlobal this morning when the news came out that the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize had gone jointly to Pakistani education activist […]
This session presents speakers who are at home in awe-inspiring places. These bold explorers come bearing discoveries from the tundra and the rainforest, from beneath the ocean’s surface, and even from that most elusive of mighty spaces — the happy human heart. The speakers who’ll appear in this final session of the conference: Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard has […]
Where would we be without our fighters? This session pays tribute to the brave activists who are in the trenches working toward the things that matter. Making their impact through law, journalism and education, these speakers bring a fearsome and tireless dedication to the cause of human dignity. The speakers who’ll appear in this session: Kimberley Motley is the […]
Real solutions can emerge from places surprisingly adjacent to the problems they address. This session examines how progress — from villages to urban spaces, from the artist’s studio to the corporate world — can be found by taking a step to the side. The speakers who’ll appear in this session: Khalida Brohi found an unexpected way to fight […]
Twelve years ago, Ilona Szabó de Carvalho gave up her career as an investment banker to become a civil society diplomat. She wanted to create change in her native Brazil by focusing on two very pressing public concerns: drug policy and homicidal violence. Unfortunately, she says, “Latin America is ground zero for both.” Though many people questioned whether she […]
Chief Tashka of the Yawanawá, an indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest, opens with a song, as is traditional of his people’s gatherings. He then begins to tell the story of Brazil’s indigenous rights movement that developed in the ’70s and ’80s, when many young people from the indigenous population (who make up about 1% […]
There are 365 days in a year. So it feels like a telling coincidence that the organizers of both TEDxCapeTown and TEDxJohannesburg—independently organized events in two of the biggest, busiest cities in South Africa—opted to hold their events within a single week. This confluence of timing shows just how powerful the TEDx platform is for […]
TEDx organizer Seema Raman has held three events in the past year, and traveled from her home in Bangalore to the snowy mountains of British Columbia to learn more about putting on great events. But the funny thing is: Raman never intended to organize anything at all. Raman, a 20-year-old engineering student at PES Institute […]
Bionics designer Hugh Herr spoke today on the TED stage about a future in which disability is a mere memory – a future he believes is both imminent and imperative. With pant legs cropped to reveal his own two bionic legs (“I made sure to shave today,” he joked), he explained the fascinating details of […]
Last week on TED.com, origami-folding techniques transformed a 50-cent piece of paper into a fully functioning microscope, human DNA came tumbling out of a vending machine, and we got a look at how an industry is growing to help governments conduct surveillance on citizens. These fascinating talks have something neat in common: The speakers are […]
“The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows,” says Shereen El Feki in yesterday’s talk. “That is true for all of us, no matter where we live and love.” For five years, El Feki talked to people across Middle East about their bedroom behavior, and what she found over and over was a seemingly deep-rooted […]