Malala Yousafzai couldn’t come to TED2014 -- because she has vowed to never miss another day of school. But her voice was heard through this video, which introduced Ziauddin Yousafzai's powerful talk about his daughter and their shared commitment to education.  

Throughout Zak Ebrahim’s childhood, his father -- El-Sayed Nosair -- planned terrorist attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. On November 5, 1990, when Ebrahim was 7 years old, his father shot and killed Rabbi Meir Kahane, the then-leader of the Jewi...

It’s not the norm to see pink balloons, brightly colored dresses and sequined shoes in the halls of the Richmond City Jail. But on March 16, a dozen girls ranging in age from 6 to 16 entered the facility to bring cheer to their incarcerated fathers. The occasion: the second father-daughter dance at the jail, thrown by Camp Diva. At TEDxWo...

Is a private Facebook group the 2017 version of the all-men’s golf getaway? What’s the difference between being “a good man” and “a real man”? In an honest and eye-opening conversation, Baby Boomer Michael Kimmel and his Generation Z son, Zachary, share their experiences of masculinity. Michael Kimmel (TED Talk: Why gender equality is good for ...

For a teenage girl, few things are more awkward than developing a good relationship with her father. This is something that Angela Patton knows well after years of listening to the girls at Camp Diva, her nonprofit dedicated to empowering African-American girls, talk about their dads. Patton wanted to help her campers find a way to invite their ...

In the past week, we’ve noticed some fascinating TED-related news. Here, some highlights. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has discontinued its iconic candy-hued metal admission tags. Museum director Thomas P. Campbell (watch his TED Talk) explains why to The New York Times -- because of the rising cost of tin-plating. Angela Patton (watch her T...

In his TED Talk, Steven Addis shared a tradition that he and his daughter have kept for 15 years, since she was just 1 year old. On a father-daughter trip to New York City, the pair asks a stranger to snap a photo of them on the exact same street corner. Addis calls these photos his 15 most treasured images. Yesterday, Addis and his daugh...

Shanghai. New York. Tehran. Tokyo. Today, dozens of cities worldwide are each home to many millions of people. But those masses of humanity might not exist in such tight quarters if not for John Snow. (No, not that Jon Snow. This John Snow.) Snow was a 19th-century English doctor who's credited with proving that cholera, a sometimes deadly in...

With Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, Sara Beth Berman of the Davis Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, wanted to create a lesson for the school’s middle school students around the ideas of empathy and forgiveness. “In the month preceding the Jewish New Year, we talk a lot about how to forgive, how to accept forgiveness, and how do you want to be...

Today’s talk isn’t so much a “talk” as a hilarious topsy-turvy performance by Hetain Patel that reflects on an identity forged as much from Spider-Man comics and Bruce Lee movies as by a father who emigrated from India to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. An excerpt from his latest stage work, Be Like Water, this talk introduces us to Patel’s...

He is a part of you. Whether you are close or not, whether he was a constant part of your life or not, he impacted who you are today. You love him – except maybe when you can’t stand him. For better or worse, he is your dad. Celebrate this Father’s Day with these nine TED Talks about the importance of dads. From what Steve Addis did to maintai...

"North Korea is often in the news, conjuring images of missiles, weapons, dictatorships and sometimes eccentric habits," says Adrian Hong, TED Fellow and guest curator of Session 9, Forces of Change at TEDGlobal 2013. "But underneath all that bluster is a country racked by starvation, by oppression, by fear, by concentration camps. In many w...

Rory Stewart opens this talk from TEDxHousesofParliament with a joke: “Little Billy goes to school and his teacher asks, ‘What does your father do?’ Billy replies, ‘My father plays piano in an opium den.’” But when the teacher confronts the father about his occupation, she gets a different answer. As Stewart finishes the joke, “The fathe...

Tania Bruguera grew up in Cuba, where she was surrounded by the contradictions between propaganda and reality from an early age. She has channeled these tensions into creating artwork that navigates a path between the two. She starts her TED Talk with a personal story of life in 1993, when she somewhat unexpectedly found herself publishing a...

In October 2012, a Taliban-affiliated gunman shot Ziauddin Yousafzai’s daughter Malala soon after she boarded a bus en route to her school. In Swat, Pakistan -- where Ziauddin and Malala live -- the Taliban had outlawed all girls from attending school -- but Yousafzai, an educator and steadfast crusader for women’s rights in Pakistan, refused ...

The pressure to find great gifts is on. And rather than wait in a long line to purchase yet another sweater, we ask: why not give the gift of an idea? This week, we contacted incredible speakers from 2013 and asked them to gift three people in their life with a TED Talk that will amuse, amaze or inspire them. Below, see which talks Lisa Bu -- T...

Dr. Mahtab Uddin Shaikh, who taught human anatomy and physiology for 30 years at Onondaga Community College, died earlier this month surrounded by family. Many TEDsters got to know his story through his daughter Alanna Shaikh's moving talk, "How I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's" -- which shared his wonderful life and unquenchable heart in the fa...

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, who won the 2016 Oscar for Best Documentary Short, explains why she feels it's her duty to focus on topics others shy away from ... like honor killings. Film has a way of revealing the soul of each person you see onscreen, giving a human face to issues that might otherwise only be expressed as a headline or a statistic. I...

Harry Potter, Pip of Great Expectations, Superman, Cinderella, Lisbeth Salander, Batman, Jane Eyre, Matilda, Moses, Luke Skywalker, Oliver Twist, Celie of The Color Purple. As Lemn Sissay points out in this powerful talk from TEDxHousesofParliament, literature and popular culture is rife with characters who grew up without their biological ...

In a letter to the son he may someday have, poet Clint Smith reflects on the lessons he learned growing up, and shares his hopes for his future child. Son, I want to tell you how difficult it is to tell someone they are both beautiful and endangered. So worthy of life, yet so despised for living. I do not intend to scare you. My father, your...

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 ho...

As I researched my book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, and spoke with people in countries from Afghanistan to Mali, I discovered that just as the personal is political, the political is always personal. This has been the case in my own life as well, and it's why I made the decision t...

What do you say when you see your mother and father so many years after being separated from them during the massacre in Rwanda? Clemantine Wamariya, now a human rights advocate, has lived through this surreal experience. In 1994, Clemantine Wamariya, 6, and her sister Claire, 15, fled the Rwandan massacre, became separated from their parents, ...

From Bihar to the World Bank Sanjay Pradhan grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state. He came home one day, at 6 years old, to find a cart of sweets at the front door. He and his brothers greedily dug in -- but when his father came home, he was livid. Those sweets, it turns out, were a bribe from a contractor. His father built roads in Bih...

When he was a child, John Maeda's father came to a parent-teacher meeting and was told that his son was good at math and art. His father nodded. The next day, at his tofu store, his father told a customer that his son was good at ... math. "That's stuck with me all my life," Maeda says. "Why wasn't art okay?" Maeda is here today to talk a...

A dream analysis app creator. A fearless swimmer. The CEO of Campbell’s Soup. A spacesuit designer. These are the kinds of speakers who will take the stage when TEDWomen 2013 kicks off at San Francisco’s SFJAZZ Center tomorrow. With three sessions centered around the theme “Invented Here,” the event will be a global look at what drives local...

Over the past two days, TEDxWomen brought together 50 speakers from around the globe, each giving a different slice of thinking on the state of women today. Here, a selection of the powerful talks from this event, which was produced and curated by The Paley Center for Media. Session 1: The space between Poverty and Plenty Malehlohonolo...

Xavier Alpasa climbed out of poverty to the top ranks of the Philippines’ premier corporation -- and then realized he wanted to give it all back. As a seminarian, he helped women sewing scraps in a slum connect with top designers to create high-end fashion pieces. Now a Catholic priest, Father Xavier is working to support an ecotourism venture...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson "So I have this android copy of myself," says Henrik Schärfe drily. You know. As you do. But first, Schärfe wants to share a personal story, of waking up one dark November night to the police at his door, informing him of an accident in which his parents had both been killed. "I knew what was going on but ...

Photo: Michael Brands If watching a TEDTalk inspires insights (see this post for more) -- imagine giving one. From speakers' own blogs: Here's what Brené Brown learned >> The first lesson I learned is about vulnerability (no suprise). The folks in the picture are raising their hands in response to two questions that I asked du...