Alison Killing thinks a lot about death … and specifically, how its ubiquitous, hidden presence shapes our cities. In Death in Venice, her June 2014 exhibition on the topic, Killing mapped London’s death-associated architectural features — hospitals, cemeteries, crematoria, and so on — making visible the invisible mechanics of death and dying. She asks us to consider: What might […]
We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse: the knowledge that — someday, somehow — we will die. It’s a terrifying thought, and so we look for a way out. In my talk from TEDxBratislava (and in my book Immortality), I walk through four stories that people have told throughout cultures and time, as a […]
The funerals I’ve attended have all been very much the same. Relatives and friends arrive in all black and take seats in the church or synagogue pews for a somber ceremony where prayers are said, memories are shared and tears are shed. The attendees walk slowly out to their cars and form a single file […]
“What would be a good end of life?” Judy MacDonald Johnston asks in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Her answer — based on her own experience of helping two friends face death in a way that respected the incredible life they’d built — involves five practices, all of which can help maintain a high quality […]
At TEDMED 2010, opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick told the story of a revolutionary, life-changing surgery — a double lung transplant. While a doctor had warned her that she would never sing again, she revealed what it felt like to get her voice back. “We need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams,” she […]
Yesterday, two bomb blasts ripped through a snooker hall in the town of Quetta in Pakistan, killing 81 people. We were very saddened to hear that TEDx speaker Irfan Ali, who spoke briefly at TEDxRawalLake just weeks ago, was among those killed. The organizers of the event shared their sadness with us, through Facebook. “Irfan […]
Daniel Ogilvie was shocked when his 4-year-old daughter ran out of her bedroom screaming, “I don’t want to be a thing that dies.” But every child goes through this moment of recognizing their mortality. A Rutgers University professor who has studied philosophy for the past 25 years, Ogilvie has become fascinated with our beliefs about […]