If you’re trick-or-treating tomorrow but you haven’t thought about a costume yet — and you have 20 minutes to run to the dollar store — a modest suggestion: be a TED Talks speaker. Instructions:
At first glance, the image above may look like an artistic tangle of worms. But it is actually a visualization of the words that appear most often in TED Talk descriptions. Each line corresponds to a word, and its snaking movement shows how its frequency of use has changed over time. Mouse over the word […]
The past week brought lots of excitement for members of the TED community. Below, some highlights. Morgan Spurlock’s latest project, “We the Economy,” has a tagline that really explains it best. Billed as “20 short films you can’t afford to miss,” this online series brings together filmmakers and economists to answer big questions about the […]
Talks on science, space and dung beetles. Talks on philosophy, medicine and folding paper towels. Every day, all over the globe, TEDx organizers are tirelessly working to find inventive, ingenious speakers ready to bring talks to life. We asked 10 TEDx organizers to share the process behind sourcing great speakers and great talks. Below, 8 pieces […]
Cocktail party trivia: Brainstorming was invented in the 1930s as a practical idea-generation technique for regular use by “creatives” within the ad agency BBDO. That all changed in 1942, when Alex Osborn — the “O” in BBDO — released a book called How to Think Up and excited the imaginations of his fellow Mad Men. […]
Tuesday morning in the former East Berlin, the midcentury Kosmos cinema hummed with new ideas on business, technology and self, at an event called TED@BCG. The event was produced by TED Institute, a project that embeds within organizations and companies to help employees develop their ideas. Six hundred TEDsters, BCG’ers and guests filled the main hall […]
Constance Hockaday makes large-scale installations on open water. Identifying as a Chilean-American queer artist, Hockaday creates spaces that celebrate creative freedom and counterculture communities while defying gentrification. Take the Floating Peep Show — in which out-of-work drag queens and exotic dancers performed in the hulls of sailboats in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Now, Hockaday plans to turn a […]
In 2012, the TED Prize was awarded to an idea: The City2.0, a place to celebrate actions taken by citizens around the world to make their cities more livable, beautiful and sustainable. This week, The City2.0 website evolves. On the relaunched TEDCity2.org, you’ll find great talks on topics like housing, education and food, and how […]
In the days before their event in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the team at TEDxChiangMai spent a large chunk of their time collecting stuff. All kinds of stuff — the quirky, the old, the new, the unwanted, the loved and the thoroughly weird — that could be used for a collaborative art project on the big day. […]
New York is a playground of absurdity. I’ve lived here on and off for the past decade. Since I ate my first workday lunch in a “park” in downtown Manhattan, I’ve been blindly accepting everyone’s inexplicable behavior in this city, not least of all the block-long cronut line I pass on my way to work […]
As always, members of the TED community have been very busy the past few weeks. Below, just a few of them making the news: Earlier this month, Mazda promised to fund one of four projects dreamed up by TED Fellows — based on your votes. The winner: eye surgeon Andrew Bastawrous has won for his […]
One of the best things about a week after a conference? The chance to reflect on the experience. In the last week, several TEDGlobal 2014 attendees and community members have shared their thoughts throughout the blogiverse. Below, some highlights: Steve Song shared his experience preparing to speak at TED in a post called “Steve and […]
Three years ago, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana suffered a rare brain stem stroke that left him fully conscious, yet his entire body paralyzed. It’s a condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” Last month, TED Fellow Kitra Cahana spoke of her father’s experience at TEDMED (watch her talk, “My father, locked in his body but soaring free”), revealing […]
