Spectacles of shadow: Fellows Friday with Christine Marie

Art

Spectacles of shadow: Fellows Friday with Christine Marie

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Imagine 20-foot-tall shadows — animated by live performers — that pop out right next to you. TED Fellow Christine Marie creates an immersive, experimental theater of shadows that layers textured, colored light into wordless storytelling. But while her productions involve 3D stereoscopic effects and feel amazingly cinematic, it’s all done without the aid of computers or projectors. []

TED Talks with novel ways of thinking about epidemics

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TED Talks with novel ways of thinking about epidemics

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As a physician and epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin didn’t think he had much to contribute to the conversation about gun violence in America. But then he began to realize something — that outbreaks of violence follow the same patterns as outbreaks of tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS, all of which he’d worked on reversing during a decade in []

Yo-yo artist BLACK performs with Cirque du Soleil

Art

Yo-yo artist BLACK performs with Cirque du Soleil

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Yo-yo master BLACK, who gave a rousing demonstration of his skills at TED2013 along with a moving talk about how the yo-yo helped him transcend low self-esteem, writes to tell us that he’s finally fulfilled a dream that he shared onstage: Earlier this month, he performed at a one-day Cirque du Soleil event. “Finally, I performed []

Culture

Confessions of a depressed comic: A Q&A with Kevin Breel

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYs05qPycYQ&w=560&h=420] As a teenager, Kevin Breel almost took his own life. His story — so powerfully told in his viral TEDx Talk, “Confessions of a Depressed Comic” — gives voice to an often silent struggle and offers a message of hope. In honor of Worldwide Suicide Prevention Day, we spoke with Kevin about living with []

The 5 most walkable cities in the world

News

The 5 most walkable cities in the world

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City planner Jeff Speck has a big idea for how America can be more economically resilient, more environmentally sustainable, and a whole lot healthier: make our cities more walkable, and the people in them less dependent on cars. In today’s talk, Speck takes a close look at suburban sprawl — and the many unexpected effects it’s []

A walk on the wild side: 7 fascinating experiments in rewilding

Science

A walk on the wild side: 7 fascinating experiments in rewilding

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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 []