With TEDGlobal 2013 just 17 days in the distance, we in the TED office are getting very excited to “Think Again.” Here, a look at the conference speakers who made the news this week.
- Education innovator Anant Agarwal is interviewed in The New Yorker article “Laptop U.” The founder of edX, Harvard and MIT’s online learning venture, Agarwal will speak at TEDGlobal during the session “Tech Impact.” In the article, Agarwal charmingly introduces himself: “Welcome to our start-up. It is very start-up-y.”
. - The Beirut Marathon — which was founded by Session 6 speaker May El-Khalil — will hold its 10K Women’s Challenge this Sunday, May 26. It will be the first all-female race in Beirut. In this tweet, May El-Khalil’s daughter, Zena, suggests that people run it wearing pink!
- Gabriele Gomez-Mont, who’ll co-host the session “The World on Its Head,” has been named an IFTF Fellow. This is the Institute for the Future’s inaugural group of fellows, selected for their passion in creating innovative solutions to the world’s toughest problems.
- CNN has profiled false memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, who’ll speak during the session “Exquisite Enigmatic Us.” CNN writes of this fascinating researcher: “One conversation with Elizabeth Loftus may shake your confidence in everything you think you remember … Her work is reminiscent of films like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where what you believe happened is probably far from the truth.”
- Here’s a fascinating interview with economist Dambisa Moyo via Slate — in which she suggests how Bill Gates might better help Africa.
- Chrystia Freeland, the author of the book Plutocrats who’ll speak during the session “Money Talks,” wrote an essay for Reuters called “Poor Little Rich Kids.” The deeply surprising thesis: rising spending on education in the upper classes is not only challenging social mobility, but actually turning upper-middle-class kids into an at-risk group.
- Apollo Robbins is co-hosting the National Geographic Channel show Brain Games. The next episode is “Seeing Is Believing,” and it asks the question: Can we trust our eyes? Should we?