Before Danielle Thomson was our TED Prize researcher, she wrote trivia for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and spent years finding difficult-to-source info for The Late Show with David Letterman. And she has quickly established herself as our staff secret weapon. When one of us can’t get our hands on a piece of information […]
The past two weeks have been busy for the members of the TED community. Some news highlights: Artist JR is bringing the past back to life with his new series “Unframed.” He has taken archival photos of the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital in New York, closed since 1954, and pasted them up so that doctors who […]
With Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, Sara Beth Berman of the Davis Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, wanted to create a lesson for the school’s middle school students around the ideas of empathy and forgiveness. “In the month preceding the Jewish New Year, we talk a lot about how to forgive, how to accept forgiveness, and how […]
Power posing is always in style. So we were excited to see it featured in The New York Times Fashion & Style section this weekend in the article “Amy Cuddy takes a stand.” In a glowing article about the wide influence of her TED Talk (watch: Your body language shapes who you are), the writer […]
At our small, fast-moving nonprofit company, everyone does a couple of jobs — and productivity apps help us manage roles that shift between coding, writing/designing and running a full-scale conference twice a year. We asked the TED staff what apps they can’t live without. And beyond the classics—Instagram, Google Maps, Spotify, Uber, Seamless—we found some […]
How colorful is the ocean floor? And what exactly do you do when you run out of air underwater? Yesterday, we invited all of you to talk with oceanographer Sylvia Earle about her adventures as a deep sea diver. Earle is a TED Prize winner and the subject of a new documentary, Mission Blue, which […]
By Kate Torgovnick May and Krystian Aparta Music is the universal language. So why, then, do so many songs get translated? Sometimes, bands adapt their lyrics into English to reach international audiences—which explains why so few of us can sing ABBA in the band members’ native Swedish. Other times, songs are adapted into local languages […]
Members of the TED community have lots of news to share this week. Some highlights: Megan Smith, a longtime TEDster who boldly stepped onto the TEDWomen 2013 stage to fill in when a speaker lost her voice, has been named the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. “Megan has spent her career leading talented […]
In a city of dusty orange skies and water panics, one mysterious delivery driver sees everything. “The Sand Storm,” a lyrical short film from TED Talks’ founding video director, Jason Wishnow, is filled with quietly arresting images of an imagined future China. Within the film’s nine-and-a-half minutes, Wishnow imagines how love, crime and hope will […]
Most of us will, at some point, face a life crisis — divorce, job loss, illness, eviction. In the United States, 95% of social safety nets are provided by charity organizations and NGOs, so finding help in a crisis situation can be confusing and distressing. Erine Gray is the founder of Aunt Bertha, a free-to-use online platform […]
Members of the TED community sure were busy this week. Below, some highlights: Legendary biologist E.O. Wilson has come out with a bold idea: that we set aside half of Planet Earth for wildlife. If we don’t, he warns, he sees us hurtling toward a “biological holocaust” that could send us the way of the […]
Bosnian photojournalist Ziyah Gafić photographs the aftermath of conflict. (Watch his TED Talk, “Everyday objects, tragic histories.”) In his most recent book, Quest for Identity, he catalogs the belongings of Bosnia’s genocide victims, everyday objects like keys, books, combs and glasses that were exhumed from mass graves. The objects are still being used to identify the bodies […]
As always, many members of the TED community have been popping in the news this week. Below, some highlights. Liu Bolin uses paint to make himself disappear into backgrounds. In this video from The Creators Project, Bolin shows the next evolution—group versions of his signature work. Watch him turn his friends into money in the video […]
A while back, we told you about a big initiative underway in the TED office: Project Cleans. Essentially, we are taking each and every one of our 1,800+ talk video files and stripping them of the text and add-ons that were originally baked in, re-encoding the video, and saving the “clean” files in a new media […]
Fisher Stevens produced The Cove, the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about dubious Japanese dolphin-hunting practices, and his latest film takes him back into familiar waters. Stevens co-directed the newly-released doc Mission Blue, spending the last four years trekking around the world—from the Galapagos Islands to the Chesapeake Bay to the Great Barrier Reef—with unstoppable oceanographer Sylvia […]
Global health expert Alanna Shaikh gave an unexpected and moving talk at TEDGlobal 2012, called “How I’m preparing to get Alzheimer’s.” In it, she told the story of her father’s struggle with the disease, and outlined some strategies she’d devised in case dementia struck her later in life, too. The TED Blog was curious: How is her experiment […]