As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Man vs. machine? It took Danit Peleg just 100 hours to print the dress worn by fellow TEDster Amy Purdy in the opening ceremony of the Paralympics in Rio (if that sounds slow, consider that it took her 300 […]
At the foundation of every significant transformation is a question: “What if?” These two words unlock the imagination and invite us to explore possibilities. A sentiment of hope, of new ways of thinking, of dreaming and discovery, “What if?” unearths answers waiting to be found. At the second installment of TED@UPS — part of the […]
Many people ask, “How are speakers selected for TEDWomen? The answer is that speakers, like ideas, come from many different sources. TED has an open recommendation process on TED.com, and we review those as well as suggestions that come in from everywhere. Sometimes people self nominate but mostly, fans of TEDTalks submit names of women […]
The conversation around the upcoming US presidential election is full of frenzy, headache and noise. But elections are about more than divisiveness and disagreement — they’re civic events worthy of celebration, and, while it may seem unbelievable at the moment, they hold the promise of transforming governments for the better. At TEDNYC: The Election Edition, six speakers who think about […]
Today you may have heard that TED announced a rather unusual experiment with Audible. I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing here and want to share some thoughts on “Sincerely, X”
Cross-posted from TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell’s blog on the Huffington Post. When Hanna Rosin, the first speaker at the very first TEDWomen conference in 2010, delivered her talk she had titled “The End of Men,” she had only just begun the research for what became her bestselling 2012 book by the same name. And as the […]
At TEDSummit in June, we featured a talk by a young Syrian architect, Marwa Al-Sabouni. In it, she shares an important and original insight about how the roots of conflict can be traced, among other better-studied reasons, to misdirected and divisive urbanism. She offers the example of her own country, where violent conflict has been […]
Sometimes it seems as if the Internet has created a bold new era of openness. But if there is one place where openness appears to be lagging, it would be scientific research. The scientific community is full of intricate (and often little-known) systems that regulate and control it, sometimes to great purpose, but sometimes to its […]
It’s never easy to push against the current, to experiment with what’s never been done before, challenge uncomfortable truths. But 400 TED Fellows do it every day, all around the world. In the newly released free digital book Swimming Against the Tide: Adventures with the TED Fellows, dive into the wonder, kinship, curiosity, hope and creation that […]
Wendy Morales is one of a group of TED-Ed Innovative Educators who got together at our recent TEDSummit conference. She files this report, which we’re cross-posting from her own blog, The Risk-Taking Educator: When asked what I do for a living, sometimes I catch myself saying, “I am just a teacher.” It’s as if I am apologizing […]
TED’s river of ideas is a constant flow — and sometimes vital topics make their way onto our site far before they head into the mainstream. As part of the 10th birthday of TED Talks, we highlight seven Talks that foresaw big trends when they were only ripples in the pond. Wikipedia: Is it really a thing? At […]
Bodacious beats: Kenyan musician, producer and DJ, “Blinky Bill” Sellanga simultaneously brought the house down and the TED audience to their feet with a lively, genre-bending musical performance. “My, oh my,” he sings: “What a wonderful feeling.” Sexual assault, social media and justice. One night, walking home from London’s Tube, Ione Wells was followed home, grabbed from behind, […]
Imagine you’ve been handed the biggest single cache of leaked documents in recent history. Eleven and half million documents to be exact, implicating important figures from around the globe in decades of tax evasion and hidden accounts. But you only have 26 people at your disposal to go through them. What do you do? This […]
This week at TEDSummit, we’re celebrating the creative forces flowing from TEDx events around the world. Check out these stunning video trailers, all of them custom-made for local TEDx events, that capture the regional style, the creativity and craft, the local visions … that represent the imagination of the global TEDx community. “End-beginning,” from TEDxThessaloniki “Taxi drivers,” from TEDxBuenosAires “Thinker,” from […]
Writer Anand Giridharadas has come to TEDSummit to share an open letter to his fellow citizens. Invited by curator Bruno Giussani to address the dismay and confusion many have felt in the week after the Brexit vote result in the UK, the American writer and journalist lays out a vision that is as honest as […]
Who would have thought when you left those high school math problems behind that you would one day be encountering algorithms on a daily basis? Zeynep Tufekci might have guessed; now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information, Tufekci’s first job as a teenager was as a computer programmer. So […]