If you watch my TED Talk from 2010, you might see a confident 12-year-old, cracking jokes and striding around the stage in glasses that keep sliding down her nose. You won’t see me going home and crying, or starting every page in my journal with four words: “I feel sad today.” I divided my life […]
Tides are strong. They move swiftly, sweeping all toward the shore. But TED Fellows refuse to simply drift with the water. They are innovators, advocates and artists who challenge the status quo and work in the spaces between disciplines. At the second TED Fellows Retreat — held from August 25-28, 2015, and themed “Swimming Against the Tide” — about […]
Scott Drummond had been in the Air Force for eight years. It was 1994, and he was eligible to become a commissioned officer, the Air Force’s version of a manager. The average person gets the job after three interviews. Drummond interviewed 16 times over the next ten years before he got the job. Looking back […]
Ayana Ishiyama always thought she wanted to be a journalist. Two years ago, when she left her hometown in northern Japan to study abroad in the US, she signed up for journalism courses and wrote articles for the school newspaper to sharpen up her English skills. But while she loved interviewing people and sharing their […]
TED Fellows aren’t easy to classify. In the latest class, there’s a bioengineer who programs bacteria to change the color of urine to signal the presence of cancer — and to make bold, brightly colored art. There’s a data scientist who dreamed up a tool to let anyone with a cell phone build a credit […]
TED is coming to Broadway. And curious minds of all kinds are invited. “TED Talks Live” will bring six nights of talks to The Town Hall Theater in New York City’s Theater district this November. The program will focus on three topics: The Education Revolution, War & Peace and Science & Wonder. Each night will […]
TED staffers travel a lot — to TEDx events all over the globe, to TED conferences in Canada, Brazil, the UK …. so we love to trade travel tips for making the most of work and fun trips. Here are 40 of our best — including some oddball but practical ideas for vacation travel (to use up those […]
You have an idea. A good one – one that will make people think. But giving a TED Talk on a stage in front of an audience? Well, that doesn’t quite feel like the right way to express it. If giving a traditional TED Talk isn’t your style, you may be excited to hear about […]
The TED community always has lots of news to share. Below, some highlights from the past two weeks. Lessons for the South — from Germany. “Can the American South, still grappling with the legacy of slavery and segregation, learn something from Germany’s grappling with Nazism?” Anand Giridharadas asked this question of four scholars who study […]
No one really wants to talk about the weather. Inspired by TED Talks, here are some questions to start a better conversation in any situation. “So, what’s your favorite word?” [ted id=161] Who to ask: The chatty person who’s sharing an outlet with you at the coffee shop The basic idea: Dictionaries don’t compile themselves — […]
Aomawa Shields is a woman of “contradictions.” An astronomer and astrobiologist, she searches for exoplanets where life might exist by using computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere they’d need to support it. And she’s also a classically trained actor, who — through her organization Rising Stargirls — teaches astronomy to middle school girls of color using theater, writing and visual art to […]
“If you’re a teen, you’ve been called apathetic, narcissistic and social-media obsessed,” said Taylor Trudon, the youth editor at Huffington Post. Standing tall in a crisp white blazer, the 25-year-old shared how she went from keeping a high school diary — decorated with stickers and magazine clippings of John Mayer and Uggs — to becoming […]
Growth is usually a good thing. For a person, it means more wisdom; for a business, it means more profit; for a country, it means increased prosperity. But growth has a darker side too: aging, a sense of impersonality, waste and pollution. At TED@BCG — the latest TED Institute event, held on June 30, 2015, […]
A fun way to find a talk that’s just right for you…
Dame Stephanie Shirley had just a few hours to go before giving her talk at TEDWomen 2013. There was just one problem: she could hardly speak. Shirley, a tech entrepreneur who founded a software company in the 1960s, had flown from London to San Francisco to speak at the conference. Her talk told the story […]
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture was worth all the words I had — it rendered me speechless. It’s an image of six Black women, smiling and hugging, taken by Ryan Lash at the TED2015 conference. There we were — LaToya, Somi, Aomawa, Camille, Danielle and myself — in all […]