Ghetto Life 101 changed my life. I started working on this radio documentary 25 years ago — I gave tape recorders to two kids growing up in the Ida B. Wells Homes in Chicago, one of the most notorious public housing projects in America, and asked them to document a week in their lives. LeAlan […]
Ayana Ishiyama always thought she wanted to be a journalist. Two years ago, when she left her hometown in northern Japan to study abroad in the US, she signed up for journalism courses and wrote articles for the school newspaper to sharpen up her English skills. But while she loved interviewing people and sharing their […]
TED Fellows aren’t easy to classify. In the latest class, there’s a bioengineer who programs bacteria to change the color of urine to signal the presence of cancer — and to make bold, brightly colored art. There’s a data scientist who dreamed up a tool to let anyone with a cell phone build a credit […]
The TED community has been very busy over the past few weeks. Below, some newsy highlights. Powerful thoughts on slavery’s legacy. Last week, Bryan Stevenson spoke with The Marshall Project about the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In a Q&A, Stevenson shared his thoughts on the deeply entrenched legacy […]
Dame Stephanie Shirley had just a few hours to go before giving her talk at TEDWomen 2013. There was just one problem: she could hardly speak. Shirley, a tech entrepreneur who founded a software company in the 1960s, had flown from London to San Francisco to speak at the conference. Her talk told the story […]
Most human beings can tell the difference between a smirk and a smile. Our computers and devices, however? Not so much. Fifteen years ago, Rana el Kaliouby left her home in Egypt to study computer science at Cambridge. With her husband at home, she found herself homesick. “I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than any other human,” she […]
This week as usual, the TED community has lots of news to share. From an unusual neuroscience explainer to a heart-pounding documentary to a book cover reveal, some newsy highlights below. Shave your head for science? Neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher has created a very cool video to explain where the regions of the brain actually are […]
Cockroaches. Moldy walls. Stolen deposits. Bad landlords happen to all of us, and it can be impossible to tell before moving into a property whether the experience will be a good one, especially in housing-short cities like New York, where landlords seem to hold the cards. But TED Fellow Yale Fox is looking to change that with RentCheck — […]
The stars of your favorite TED Talks have been busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Inside the mind of a murderer. What makes murderers do what they do? A BBC piece revealed that some murderers have reduced activity in their prefrontal cortex, which controls emotional impulses, and over-activity in their amygdala, […]
It is hard to believe that this is final session of TED2015. Luckily Session 12, “Endgame,” is our longest ever — with two full hours of talks that took us on a journey through the human experience, from anger to laughter and back again. Read a recap of these inspiring talks. An ode to anger. […]
Monica Lewinsky is one of very few people over the age of 40 who has no interest in being 22 again. “At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss,” she says bluntly as she begins her talk on the TED2015 stage, her hands clasped in front of her. “At the age […]
Pamela Ronald is here to talk about her work as a plant geneticist, about her work “studying genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress.” But first, she’d like to introduce us to her husband. “This is Raoul. He’s an organic farmer,” she says. “People say, ‘Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? […]
Anand Giridharadas brings us to a Dallas mini-mart on the night of September 21, 2001. That night, a man named Mark Stroman walks into the store with a gun. He didn’t want money; he wanted blood in retaliation for September 11. He shot the Bangladeshi immigrant working at the counter, Raisuddin Bhuiyan, in the face. Raisuddin lived; Mark ended up […]
Chris Anderson introduces this talk by saying that we were about to see a technology that could be as game-changing as Jeff Han’s touchscreen demo in 2006, a year ahead of the iPhone.
TED Talks are 18-minute talks shared with the world for free online. However, lots of these talks are given at TED Conferences, in sessions that span more than an hour, with an audience who has paid to be a part of the live experience. This leaves our video team with a balancing act: how do […]
Two days before TEDGlobal 2012, Will True found himself on a train, trekking across Scotland on a mission. See, one of six cases sent by our video team from New York City to Edinburgh for the conference was stuck in Scottish customs. Its contents: hundreds of terabytes of high-speed hard drives. TED Talks are filmed […]