“Why do the same coping mechanisms that get us through all kinds of life challenges fail us so miserably when our heart gets broken?” asks psychologist Guy Winch. For the past 20 years, Winch has counseled people of all ages reeling from the blow of a breakup, and in this talk, he explains why heartbreak […]
Pico Iyer is a global travel writer whose stories have taken him to the snowy mountains of Japan and a film festival in Pyongyang, North Korea. But the author of the TED Book The Art of Stillness is also a champion of the art of “going nowhere,” a contemplative state of mind that makes a […]
On this weekend’s episode of Super Soul Sunday, Oprah Winfrey asks TED Books author Pico Iyer to explain more precisely what he means by the word ‘stillness.’ It’s not so much about meditation, he says. “It’s sanity and it’s balance, and it’s a chance to put things in perspective,” he says. Like so many others, […]
When TED asked Hannah Fry to write a book on the mathematics of finding true love, Fry happened to be — of all places — on her honeymoon. “[My husband and I] have been together for a really long time, so the whole newlywed thing didn’t quite apply,” she says. “But I did feel like […]
Zak Ebrahim’s The Terrorist’s Son has won an American Library Association award. The memoir — which became the first TED Book in print in September — was named a recipient of the Alex Award today. A coveted honor, the Alex Award is given to the 10 best adult books of the year that also appeal to young-adult readers. […]
We all lead lives that move 1,000 miles per minute. In his TED Book, The Art of Stillness, Pico Iyer posits a bold idea: that in our chaotic time, the greatest luxury is actually the ability to go nowhere and do nothing. To Iyer, it’s this time for quiet, inward, still reflection that snaps all […]
Before Jackie Hodges arrived for orientation at Tufts University School of Medicine, she got a gift from her soon-to-be med school: a free download of the e-book The Upstream Doctors by Rishi Manchanda. In this book, Manchanda — who has worked for a decade as a doctor in community clinics around South Central Los Angeles […]
In his talk, “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is,” Chip Kidd (a TED Books designer in his own right) gives a wonderfully concise description of what book cover designers do. He says, “My job is to ask this question: ‘What do stories look like?’” For David Shoemaker, the designer who made the […]
The “T” in TED stands for technology. So it might sound counterintuitive that we would release a book about the need to unplug. But we live in a madly accelerating world, where new technologies — for all their benefits — are making our lives more crowded, more chaotic and noisier than ever. There’s never been […]
On the anniversary of September 11, we’re proud to launch an idea that is the deepest possible antidote to terror. It’s the powerful story of Zak Ebrahim, who grew up the son of a terrorist (his father helped plan the 1993 WTC bombing), and chose tolerance over hatred. This idea reaches you in a form […]
Zak Ebrahim is the son of a terrorist—his father helped plan the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In the forthcoming TED Book, The Terrorist’s Son: A Story of Choice, Ebrahim tells the incredible story of how he chose a different direction, toward empathy and tolerance. Preview Zak’s riveting story in the trailer above. This title will be the first TED […]
Here’s a treat for Valentine’s Day (in addition to this playlist of TED Talks about love): Below, take a close-up look at a decellularized “ghost heart.” This heart can serve as a scaffold upon which to grow a working heart from human stem cells. Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute created it by stripping all […]
Super Cells is the new TED Book by Nina Tandon and Mitchell Joachim, who take us on an eye-popping tour of the tantalizing array of inventions already being created with nature’s elemental building block, the cell. They argue that we’re entering a new technological revolution, one in which we can create smarter technologies by making […]
Allan Savory has spent decades studying the devastating effects of “desertification“: healthy land degrading into deserts all around the world and accelerating climate change in the process. On the TED2013 stage, Savory offered a fascinating idea for reclaiming degraded land — using livestock to mimic the behavior of herds that used to roam these lands. The […]
All over the world, land is turning into desert at an alarming rate. Biologist Allan Savory has dedicated a lifetime to figuring out what’s causing this “desertification.” Finally, after decades of work in the field, Savory discovered a radical solution—one that went against everything scientists had always thought. He used huge herds of livestock, managed […]
If your home had been devastated by a disaster, would you stay? Why do people choose to remain in potentially life-threatening places? These are just a few of the complex questions that photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart and filmmaker Holly Morris explore in their respective work, documenting the lives of people living in Chernobyl and Fukushima. […]