I'm a Brit, born in a remote village in Pakistan, in 1957, and spent my early years in Pakistan, India and (pre-war, beautiful) Afghanistan, where my father worked as a missionary eye surgeon. I have two sisters—one is five years older than the other, and I'm right in the middle.
The Long Tail By Chris Anderson Published by Hyperion 256 pages | List price: $24.95 This month’s TED Book Club mailing included a pre-publication copy of the book that’s been generating so much buzz for the past year, The Long Tail. (It was published this week by Hyperion.) Several important things to say. First of […]
Stumbling on Happiness By Dan Gilbert Published by Knopf 304 pages | List price: $24.95 Harvard professor Dan Gilbert gave a stunning talk at TED2004, outlining research that showed how terrible we are at understanding our own emotional responses to countless everyday situations and choices. He’s now fleshed this out into one of the most […]
Design Like You Give A Damn By Cameron Sinclair Published by Metropolis Books 336 pages | List price: $35.00 I’m delighted to share with you the book created by one of this year’s TEDPrize winners, Cameron Sinclair. Design Like You Give A Damn is just bursting with intriguing and often beautiful examples of how designers […]
I’m just back from an incredible few days in Tanzania with Bono and his team, part of his current tour through Africa. Brian Williams of the NBC Nightly News is joining him in Ghana this evening, for the show’s first live broadcast from Africa. I’m sure it’s worth watching. (6.30pm ET, 5.30pm PT, and also […]
The cover of today’s UK Independent is pure genius. They made TED Prize winner Bono guest editor for the day. His front page lead headline reads:"No news today." with a footnote that clarifies: "Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease." The novice editor appears to have had access to […]
My old friend Guy Kewney gave a bizarre interview on the BBC this past week, offering a surprisingly rambling commentary on the Beatles/Apple court case. Except it turned out not to be him at all, but his startled cab driver who had been grabbed by a floor producer apparently because was holding Kewney’s name tag. […]
This posting has absolutely no purpose… except to confess that this made me laugh. A lot.
Not being a regular viewer of Oprah, I somehow missed this a couple weeks’ back. An appearance by the remarkable pianist Jennifer Lin. Two years ago, when she was just 14, she lit up the TED Conference with an astonishing improvisation. (Click the second link on this page.) Her Oprah appearance included some brief clips […]
We’ve just sent out the new 30-year-anniversary edition to the TED bookclub (made up of those people signed up for TED2007). Here’s the reason I gave for its selection. Now why would we send out a 30-year-old book? Well, first of all, we suspect that despite its fame and influence, only a minority of TEDsters […]
Lots of buzz building around the upcoming Al Gore movie "An Inconvenient Truth". The documentary-as-disaster-movie trailer has just been posted online. It’s here on itunes. And here on YouTube. Watch it if you dare. (Select groups of TEDsters in New York and San Francisco Bay Area are attending special prescreenings of the full movie next […]
Al Gore socked us between the eyes with his talk on global warming at TED. Nice to see that an organization that TED has supported in the past, Environmental Defense, has just released a couple of powerful PSAs (especially the second). They’re predicting they’ll get $100m worth of media time to run these, though I’m […]
Next time you miss the quarterly numbers, consider what this must feel like. Elon, you are one brave man.
Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and now CEO of SpaceX, spoke at TED2005. Today’s the launch of their Falcon 1.
Whether or not you saw Thomas’s barnstorming performance of "his song" at TED last month, this is pretty funny.
Sachi Gahan was due to come to TED2006 last week. Tragically her husband Drew Lippolt (pictured here) was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly before TED. She has written movingly about her husband at http://www.goodbyedrew.com and at her blog (a painful real-life example of the power of personal blogging that Mena Trott spoke about last […]
Tony Robbins, Julia Sweeney, Rick Warren, Al Gore and the Main Hall audience. Just a few of the images of an incredible week in Monterey. Many more here. …and some of the early comments from attendees:"My brain hurts""I loved TED last year, but I am now officially addicted. That was amazing.""I am at once exhausted […]