This post first appeared at BillMoyers.com. In the summer of 2014, one of the world’s top nature photographers was on an expedition in the far north to document the changing Arctic. Paul Nicklen was sailing around Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between Scandinavia and the North Pole. The largely uninhabited land sees 24 hours of sunlight […]
Along the remote, frozen coast of Hornstrandir National Park, photographer Chris Burkard (TED Talk: The Joy of Surfing in Ice-Cold Water) and his team were in search of the Shangri-La of ice-cold surfing. Instead, they encountered Iceland’s biggest storm to hit land in 25 years. The challenges and hardships that transpired over those few days, […]
Photographer Angélica Dass captures some of humanity’s truest colors through her portrait project Humanae, a catalogue of human skin color displayed as a simple, captivating collage of Pantone portraits that reflects the deepest shades of brown and black, to the lighter tones of white, pink and everything in between. For Dass, Humanae is more than […]
One year ago today, at TED2015, Monica Lewinsky gave a powerful talk about bullying, shaming and becoming a more empathetic society. She sends this note to our community on her TED-iversary… Dear TEDsters: One year ago today, with the hauntingly beautiful TED2015 theme song playing, I nervously walked out to The Red Circle in front of many […]
Henry Evans is an enthusiastic world traveler. In the past year, he has visited Vermillion, South Dakota; Sydney, Australia; and Qusar, Azerbaijan. He’s explored halls of the Smithsonian, gone scuba diving in California, and flown over Bora Bora. He is in the midst of finagling a trip to space. Evans, it should be noted, does […]
“The White City.” “The City of the Monkey God.” “The Place of Cacao.” Rumors of a majestic city nestled in the remote rainforest of Honduras — referred to by all of these names — have circulated for centuries, wedging their way into Honduran national identity. They seemed to be the stuff of legend. Until a […]
In the small village of Roka in western Cambodia, 272 people have tested positive for HIV since the end of 2014. Among those diagnosed: an 82-year-old celibate Buddhist monk, several babies and 19 members of the same family. This tragic outbreak has been traced to a source: Yem Chrin, a popular medical practitioner who operated […]
Drew Curtis is not a politician. The curator of Fark.com, the legendary online community of news jokes and funny Photoshops, he proudly proclaims this fact on homepage of his latest website. This declaration is only surprising because, just a few inches above, the intention of the website is revealed: “Drew Curtis for Governor.” See, politics […]
For Morgana Bailey, it was nerve-wracking enough to step on the TED stage and reveal that she is a lesbian — a fact she’d kept hidden for 16 years. But walking into a viewing party to watch the talk with her co-workers? That brought a whole new level of anxiety. “I live in a very […]
Hannah Brencher strolled onstage to give her TED Talk, “Love letters to strangers,” with a US Postal Service mail crate propped on her hip. And that mail crate full of letters turned out to be a metaphor for what happened next — a box of surprises and possibilities. Onstage at Joe’s Pub in June 2012, […]
June 2013 was a shocking month for Dan Pallotta, in a good way. “I thought I was living in an alternate universe or something,” he says. “It was like hell freezing over.” Two things happened in June that Pallotta never expected to see. First, this gay father of triplets saw the United States Supreme Court […]
What’s the future of education? It’s a popular question right now, with answers ranging from online learning to charter schools. But Liz Coleman is focused on a more fundamental issue: what will schools teach? And what does that mean for the future of our society? In her eye-opening talk at TED2009, Coleman shared her hopes […]
Who rules the Internet? These days it’s Upworthy, Eli Pariser’s socially-bent aggregator, which fills a gap in viral content where puppies used to sleep. The site’s sheer power on the Interwebs came quickly: In just two years, the site has come to fill the Facebook feeds of 5.4 million people. (So it’s no surprise that haters gonna headline-hate.) Upworthy is Pariser’s […]
“I sometimes look back at the TED Talk and I try to think of where we were at the time. We had four university partners, about a half a million students, 37 courses. Now we have more than six million students, more than 550 courses and 107 institutions that are working for us. And ‘MOOC’ […]
In the opening of Miwa Matreyek’s TED performance, a pair of shadowy hands wave over a plate, and an apple halves itself. From there, goldfish swirl around the plate, before morphing into birds and flying away. For the first minute, you think you are watching video — an intricate blend of real-life footage and animation. […]
When Salman Khan shared his vision for “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere” at TED2011, he turned the education world on its head. As he introduced Khan Academy — a virtual classroom that uses video lessons to create an individualized, self-paced learning experience — his alternative model fueled the nascent dialogue about online education. […]