The TED community has been moving-and-shaking as usual. Below, some newsy highlights. What you don’t know about ‘no.’ If your friend is getting ready for a job interview and asks, “Do I look good in this?,” and you answer, “No, totally!,” should they change or stride confidently out the door? This week, Kathryn Schulz writes […]
When we started StoryCorps in 2003, at first, no one came to the booth we’d set up in Grand Central Terminal. I knew that doing an interview would be an incredible experience for people, but it was a hard sell. So when we launched the StoryCorps app at the TED2015 conference, I expected silence. I […]
The stars of your favorite TED Talks have been busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Postcards from Ferguson. A woman flushing pepper spray out of her eyes, a young black man against a fence with both hands in the air, a police car shrouded in tear gas. These are images from […]
1905 was a big year for Albert Einstein. He was 26 years old and working in the Swiss Patent Office when, in the span of seven months, he published four papers that would eventually be hugely influential. In these papers, he proposed that light could be a particle, proved that atoms existed, laid out his […]
In 1995, Kees Moeliker heard a loud bang coming from the Natural History Museum Rotterdam’s new wing. He knew exactly what it was. A curator at the museum, Moeliker had gotten used to the sound of birds hitting the glass exterior of the new wing, and had even taken to stuffing the dead birds for […]
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, […]
For some of us, it’s easy to choose to be healthy — to eat well, to exercise, to live in a part of town with trees and parks. But for many more of us, it isn’t easy, and we don’t have that choice. We live in unsafe neighborhoods. Nutritious food is hard to buy. We don’t have strong families to help us through life’s challenges. A guest essay on building a culture of health.
[ted id=2222] Anybody with a smartphone can now be a part of the StoryCorps movement. As TED Prize Winner Dave Isay reveals in today’s talk, you no longer have to travel to a StoryCorps mobile booth to capture an interview with a friend, family member or stranger — because StoryCorps has created a free app. Now, if you can […]
Tucked into the northeast corner of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a podium was set up for the duration of TED2015. A small camera captured what happened behind it, with a panorama of Vancouver’s mountains and harbor in the distance, complete with sea planes skimming across the water. From this vantage point, classrooms around the world Skyped in […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVSYsKH2AJA&w=560&h=315%5D Above, Christine Sun Kim and Renée Hlozek share a snippet of conversation using American Sign Language and the Big Words app. Christine has been teaching Renée American Sign Language so they can communicate more directly. Renée Hlozek is a cosmologist from South Africa who studies the cosmic microwave background, radiation left over from the Big Bang. Christine […]
There’s a quiet corner at TED, with two comfortable chairs, a table with some paper and pencils, and a well-placed box of tissues. And on Wednesday night, after Dave Isay of StoryCorps shared his TED Prize wish, TEDsters flooded into Citi Ventures’ The Art of Listening exhibit. This social space was an homage to Isay’s oral history project — which […]
A three-wheeled half-motorcycle half-car, the Toyota i-Road is imagined as a future for urban transportation — tiny, battery-powered and hyper maneuverable, perfect for zipping along tightly packed urban streets. The concept car was launched in March 2013, but there are only three i-Roads in North America right now, and all of them are at TED2015 this week. Which is why I found myself down in the loading dock of the […]
If a meet-cute is going to happen at TED2015, it will likely happen downstairs on the first level at the Harmonograph Swingset. This modern-day, hand-crafted timber swing, a take on a 19th-century invention, records harmonic frequencies as visual art. The swingset is made of two seats, set at right angles and connected to two poles […]
The glossy pages of magazines offer fascinating people, absorbing stories and photos that transport you to faraway places. During Session 8 of TED2015, a magazine will spring into three dimensions on the stage, thanks to Pop-Up Magazine. See, every now and then, we hand over the reins to a guest curator. At TED2011, Bill Gates and Juan Enriquez […]
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 […]
There are a lot of great jobs at TED, but Colette Lynch and her Vancouver-based team might just have the best. They lead “food and beverage curation” for our conferences and, like our program curators, spend all year researching and prepping: sifting through food blogs, visiting farmers markets, meeting with culinary visionaries and, of course, […]