On her first day as a principal in a North Philadelphia school, Linda Cliatt-Wayman was determined to lay down the law and set clear expectations. She called her students into the auditorium and told them how things would go at that school. But one voice interrupted her. “Miss,” called out a girl named Ashley, “why do […]
Aspen Baker had just graduated from college when she found out she was pregnant. She was sitting at the bar where she worked and her co-worker, Polly, asked if she wanted a drink. Baker had to confess, “I’m pregnant. I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.” “Without hesitation, Polly replied: ‘Oh, I’ve had an abortion,’” remembers Baker on the TEDWomen […]
A tough and interesting question surfaced yesterday at TEDWomen — and not from the stage. One of our attendees brought a 5-month-old baby to the conference, and this raised the question: How can we make TED more accessible to parents with very young children? TED has always had a “grownups-only” policy; we don’t allow kids […]
Momentum is great. But how do you sustain it? This session will examine what it takes to keep on keeping on, from speakers who are just starting out and those who’ve been at it for decades. Short recaps of the talks in this session… The number one abuse of human rights. Former president Jimmy Carter begins with […]
“Bobby Riggs was one of my heroes. I admired him,” says Billie Jean King. “That’s one of the reasons I beat him — because I respected him.” King’s Q&A on the TEDWomen stage begins with a discussion of one of the greatest sports moments of all time: the Battle of the Sexes, a tennis match between […]
Seduction happens in many forms. The speakers in this session highlight unexpected twists on the topic — a romance of dueling banjos, the allure of insects, and our ever-widening definition of love. Short recaps of the talks in this session… What we learn from insect sex. “You could have an insect-of-the-month calendar and not have to reuse a species for […]
“I initially celebrated the 9/11 attacks,” says Mubin Shaikh. “When the news came in over the radio that a plane had hit the building, the first words that came out of my mouth were ‘God is great.’” This was not a natural response, says Shaikh. “Extremists are made, not born,” he explains. Shaikh grew up […]
Some ideas simmer below the surface. This session is dedicated to speakers who bubble them up, from a surprising management thinker to an Ebola researcher who found new inspiration in a song. Short recaps of the talks in this session… Work, the ultimate social experience. Margaret Heffernan is here to flip our thinking on what makes teams […]
“I have passionate opinions about gender equality,” says writer Roxane Gay. She takes the TEDWomen stage to tell us how she became known as a bad feminist. Turns out, it was a label she gave herself, almost as a personal joke. After all, she thought, real feminists were “angry, hairy, man-hating, sex-hating women” — and she […]
Before there can be momentum, you need a spark to set it off. In the first session of TEDWomen, we hear from speakers with crackling ideas — from re-imagining an irksome weed as something useful, to helping technology sense and react to our emotions. Short recaps of these talks… A weed, transformed. The water hyacinth looks like a beautiful flower. […]
Most human beings can tell the difference between a smirk and a smile. Our computers and devices, however? Not so much. Fifteen years ago, Rana el Kaliouby left her home in Egypt to study computer science at Cambridge. With her husband at home, she found herself homesick. “I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than any other human,” she […]
There’s something so cool about finding a new podcast to love — each little download opens a door to new ideas, new jokes, new ways of seeing the world. Working at TED, as you might guess, many of us have strong opinions about this. Beyond the podcasts we all love: This American Life, Radiolab, The […]
For decades, the farmers of East Africa have battled the African whitefly, a tiny insect that infests the cassava crop. Cassava, also called manioc, arrowroot or tapioca, is an important food all over the world — more than half a billion people (yes, billion with a b) rely on cassava for their daily meals. For East African farmers, a whitefly infestation can completely destroy the year’s […]
“Women’s health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay.” When Paula Johnson uttered this sentence on the TEDWomen 2013 stage, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. “At that moment, it said to me they got it,” she says. Johnson has been working for decades to raise awareness about how diseases behave differently […]
First impressions are full of promise — and anxiety. On Tuesday night, five speakers in TED’s New York office shared a salon that explored the hidden opportunities, truths and humor in these split-second assumptions. First up, NYU associate professor Adam Alter showed how exploiting a simple human trait could actually make us more generous. “We […]
All TED Talks are good. Why do only some go viral? Over the last year, a human behavior consultancy called Science of People set out to answer this question. To do so, says founder Vanessa Van Edwards, they polled 760 volunteers, asking them to rate hundreds of hours of TED Talks, looking for specific nonverbal and body language patterns. […]