While the TED Blog chills for the next two weeks, take a break to read some of our favorite pieces from around the Internet over the past seven days: A fascinating, at times hilarious, look at business management practices in high-threat terrorist organizations. [Foreign Affairs] A profile of Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who helped […]
Yes, a marathon is about running 26.2 miles. But as May El-Khalil describes in today’s talk, a marathon can also be about so much more — a chance for people to come together and celebrate the human spirit. El-Khalil is the founder of the Beirut Marathon and, in this talk, she describes how a personal […]
Engineer and health entrepreneur Zubaida Bai is passionate about improving women’s lives. Through her company AYZH, she develops health products — such as the $2 Clean Birth Kit — designed to reduce maternal and infant mortality in underprivileged communities around the world. AYZH is about to launch an Indiegogo funding campaign to produce an impact […]
Planting a vegetable garden beside a road is no longer a fineable action in Los Angeles. In a major victory for TED speaker Ron Finley, otherwise known as the renegade gardener of South Central, the Los Angeles City Council voted 15-0 on Tuesday to allow the planting of vegetable gardens in unused strips of city […]
Here at TED, we are big fans of innovative interfaces — from back in 2006, when Jeff Han demoed the multi-touch screen on the TED stage, to 2010 when Tan Le debuted an interface manipulated by brainwaves, to most recently when Jinha Lee showed us how to reach inside our computer screen. Which is why […]
Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inception. In today’s talk, MIT neuroscientists Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu admit that their latest study — in which they located a specific memory in a mouse’s brain and designed a system to activate and deactivate it at will — might remind people of these movies. And there […]
We spend about a third of our lives asleep — a figure that may make all that time spent in bed seem like a waste. But according to neuroscientist Russell Foster, it is quite the opposite. In today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2013, Foster explores why we sleep, a question which no one has been […]
With more and more regular Joes snapping photos in the street, live tweeting breaking news from the ground, and acting as free sources of political, economic and cultural analysis, not everyone is confident about the future of professional journalism. But according to TED speaker Paul Lewis, who shared two dramatic examples of citizen journalism at […]
“I was disappointed in my profession,” says architect Shigeru Ban in today’s talk, which he gave at TEDxTokyo in May. As far as he’s concerned, architecture has lost its way. “We are working for privileged people, for rich people, for government and developers. They have money and power, and those are invisible, so they hire […]
In his TED2013 talk, Robert Gordon points out that in 1900, human beings could only travel as fast as a horse could pull them in a buggy, but by 1960, we could travel at 80% of the speed of sound, thanks to the Boeing 707. Since 1960, though, the needle on how fast we can […]
Margaret Heffernan thinks deeply about what makes businesses work, and her answers are often surprising. At TEDGlobal 2012, she shared why disagreement is vital for innovation. In today’s talk, given at TEDxDanubia, Heffernan turns her eye to willful blindness — the fact that people are primed to ignore evidence that something is amiss in their […]
Derek Paravicini is many things: an incredible piano player, a blind man, an excited talker, a musical savant, and a 30-something with severe autism. In today’s TED Talk, we get a fascinating peek into how he understands music. Paravicini — who was playing major concert halls at the age of 10 — not only has […]
TED Fellow Paul Wicks is changing the way patients with chronic health conditions connect with one another, and how they participate in research. Trained as a neuropsychologist — and specializing in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease — Paul began using the internet in 2002 to bring together communities of patients with life-changing illnesses. […]
The Book. Few things are as universal, as ubiquitous and as transformative. On this Book Lovers Day, we’ve compiled talks that examine all the facets that make books great. Do you judge a book by its cover, like Chip Kidd, or get absorbed into a compelling narrative like Andrew Stanton? Were you taken to new […]
By Grace Rubenstein Eleanor Longden’s new TED Book, Learning from the Voices in My Head, charts her harrowing journey from terrified young woman trembling in a psychiatric ward to a stable, successful doctoral candidate who has learned to live peacefully with her inner voices, medication-free. She recounts how her mind shattered into pieces and how […]
Eleanor Longden’s riveting story — featured in today’s talk and more in depth in the new TED Book, Learning from the Voices in My Head — raises many provocative questions. Longden talks about her recovery after a diagnosis of schizophrenia, in the process calling into question the attitudes of traditional psychiatry, the role of drug manufacturers and […]