A great piece in BusinessWeek Online suggests that TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair and his work with Architecture for Humanity could be the silver lining to this year of natural catastrophes…
Many TEDsters have their own blogs, and one of the coolest is Steve Jurvetson’s. Steve (pictured here test-driving Graham Hawkes’ gorgeous Deep Flight Aviator) is currently in China, and I followed a discussion on his ‘BMW style‘ Chinese SUVs to this not-very-confidence-inspiring crash-test video. Perhaps Detroit still has a few years to run… Check out […]
Whether you’re surveying a new season of design offerings, or simply considering a new set of spoons, you might find yourself wondering: WWMMD? What would Murray Moss Do? Moss (TED2002) curates one of the world’s great collections of inspired objets in his eponymous SoHo store. You’ll get a sense of where he’s heading from this […]
Got MUJI? If not, you will soon. The opening last week of a MUJI store-within-a-store at the Museum of Modern Art was a great day for great design. Discerning design geeks already adore MUJI, the “brand-free” Japanese brand that creates elegant, streamlined, delightfully practical products, ranging from scissors to CD players to concept cars. Their […]
Here’s a quirky line-up of "the world’s top 20 public intellectuals" published by a couple of magazines after a widely-promoted internet vote. 1 Noam Chomsky 2 Umberto Eco 3 Richard Dawkins 4 Václav Havel 5 Christopher Hitchens 6 Paul Krugman 7 Jürgen Habermas 8 Amartya Sen 9 Jared Diamond 10 Salman Rushdie 11 Naomi Klein […]
Some of the world’s greatest minds are consumed these days with the threat of avian flu. In an effort to better understand the evolution of the virus, scientists recently decoded — and published — the genome of the 1918 flu virus (which also jumped from birds to humans). A grave mistake, according to two eminent […]
Greg Shove introduces me to the intriguing website 43things.com, encouraging people to write down 43 goals and then share progress on meeting them with others. Aristotle would be shocked at how inward looking everyone is. Here is the list of the top personal goals of all time as measured by their readers (who are, in […]
Continuing the global trend toward museum-as-architectural-showpiece, the new DeYoung opens tomorrow in San Francisco — and stays open for 29 straight hours of welcoming fanfare. Designed by Pritzker-winning architects Herzog & DeMeuron, the boxy copper-faced building was designed to promote meaningful interaction with the landscape, as well as the art. Does it succeed? We await […]
Among the newly minted 2005 MacArthur Fellows: Majora Carter, the charismatic pioneer for urban renewal who will speak at TED2006. Carter, who will receive one of the legendary $500K “genius grants,” founded Sustainable South Bronx, an organization that’s improved air quality, adopted green-roof technology, launched exercise programs, and built parks in a community that’s long […]
When Tom Rielly pointed out the prevalence of hirsute speakers at TEDGlobal (with a wink toward Steven Pinker and Aubrey DeGrey), we didn’t realize there was an organized movement behind it …
TED Prize winner Ed Burtynsky is known for his extraordinary large-format photographs, documenting the impact of humans on Earth. His epic slideshow at TED2005 took us through unorthodox landscapes — mountains of tires, rivers of industrial waste — as eerily beautiful as they are disturbing. You can revisit them (at your own pace) at the […]
At TEDGlobal this summer, Richard Dawkins outlined the limitations of the human mind. We live, he explained, in a middle-sized world, and have difficulty understanding anything very large — like solar systems — or very small, like atoms. So when Dartmouth researchers created the world’s smallest mobile robot, which measures a hundredth of an inch […]
Marketing guru Seth Godin, whose “Purple Cow” talk was a hit at TED2003, has launched an ingenious new site called Squidoo. It plans to accumulate content from anyone willing to play where each page (he calls it a lens) is a self-contained piece of expertise on a single topic. Seth believes this will help make […]
His book The Know-it-all is a current TED Book Club choice. If that isn’t enough for you, try this great article on outsourced assistants. I had tears rolling down my face by the end …
Princeton sophomore Eva Vertes told us her theory at TED2005: That stem cells — seeking to initiate repairs in the body — may actually be the root of cancer. So cancer may, in fact, be the body’s own repair system gone awry. Well, research increasingly is backing her up. Cancer Cell journal reported recently that […]