The Great Thanksgiving Listen aims to capture the stories of a generation of elders over one weekend. But really, these great questions from StoryCorps are useful every day. “Imagine if you were able to sit and listen to your great-great-grandparent and get to know them,” says Dave Isay of StoryCorps. That’s the premise behind StoryCorps’ Great...

What do a disease-fighting epidemiologist (retired) and an up-and-coming social psychologist have in common? They're both fascinated by the unseen social problems hidden behind the word "inequality."  Beyond the lack of access to money and power -- what does inequality do to us as human beings? Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson (TED Talk: ...

Your job: Be interesting. Researcher and author Laurel Braitman explains. Let me be clear: I don't like zoos. Looking at captive animals depresses me. They often seem a little glazed over, busy pacing in tight figure eights, eating their own poop or using it to fingerpaint the walls of their enclosures. They’re also prone to depression and the ...

The TED community is busy with new projects and ideas: below, some highlights. A new galaxy cluster hidden in plain sight. Researchers at MIT, including TED speaker Henry Lin, have recently discovered a cluster of hundreds of galaxies obscured by an intensely active supermassive black hole at its center. That extra-bright black hole, named...

JR is an artist with a desire to transform our collective streets -- from French public houses to Brazilian favelas. As he describes in his talk from TED2011, JR headed to the barrier wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories for his project “Face 2 Face,”  pasting massive portraits the size of houses on either side of the wall. Th...

As a TV meteorologist, Emily Sutton has been on the receiving end of negative comments for a decade. Here’s how she deals with them. Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a new post in a series called “How to Be a Better Human,” containing a helpful piece of advice from a speaker in the TED community. To see all the po...

Americans expect their president to be equal parts CEO, diplomat-in-chief, commander of armed forces, party leader and motivational figure. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the presidency itself, suggests historian Jeremi Suri. In its extremes of power and responsibility, the US presidency is probably the most talked about and least understood offi...

Zak Ebrahim is the son of a terrorist. Phyllis Rodriguez lost her son on 9/11. In an inspiring conversation, the two share their personal histories of lives devastated by violence -- and rebuilt by tolerance. Zak Ebrahim’s father was convicted of plotting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Phyllis Rodriguez’s son, Greg, worked in t...

There’s no Academy Award for Best Color -- yet -- but this less-celebrated element of filmmaking is used to propel and convey the plot. Here’s how. A sunny, hopeful yellow. An introspective turquoise. An arresting, violent red. When you see a color in a film, what you see is no accident -- filmmakers carefully compose each frame and make color ...

From healthy food projects to public health campaigns, TED@Unilever highlighted ideas to inspire leaders at every level. At this TED Institute event, which showcased speakers from both inside and outside the wellness company, the focus was on what corporations and individuals can do to initiate change. Below, some words from each of the T...

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...

But there’s good news: the internet can help us dissolve these feelings and create new bonds of solidarity, says media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Once, after delivering a lecture at Berkeley in the 1960s, a psychologist took questions from the audience. A young woman stood up to explain that she understood the deep connection between people and...

A pillar stands in the main hallway of Middletown High School South in New Jersey, with a whiteboard on either side of it. In front of these boards, students line up and excitedly uncap markers to write, of all things, thank-yous. Some only write one or two words; others pen sprawling paragraphs. While so much high school news coverage focus...

By Cynthia Betubiza, Ella Dawson and Kate Torgovnick May Session 1 of TEDYouth 2014 brought us to many worlds imagined. From a look at other planets that could be like Earth, to an introduction to a mysterious dinosaur bigger than T. rex, to a beet-tastic vision for the future of food, this morning's speakers brought wonder, passion and a...

As TED’s social media editor, I have seen a lot of nasty comments. I’ve seen grown men and women deride a 14-year-old girl for her choice of dress. I’ve seen them say they're revolted by a beautiful transgender woman. On every talk about race, I’ve seen a slew of racist comments. But none have ever been as bad as the comments we got when we publ...

8 TED speakers show you how to nudge your mind toward the sunny side We all go through times when we see the world through cloudy-colored glasses. Times when it’s tempting to just climb into bed -- or bathtub -- and hide out, maybe for up to a month. Fortunately for your loved ones, your livelihood and your life, we’ve gathered together eight t...

When people with developmental disabilities have the support they need to thrive, everyone benefits. In a speech at the United Nations on April 1, Steve Silberman made the case that it's past time we all learned to honor neurodiversity. An edited version of his text follows. We are living at a very exciting time -- a time of great hope for auti...

Jason Sweeney lives and works in Adelaide, Australia, a city he describes as "a prototype for what a developed city in the western world could be like." Here, he describes his life in the city. Also, see and hear his favorite Adelaideian spots in the photoessay by Kristin Alford, accompanied by audio snippets of the same places recorded by Sween...

Teenagers love to text—their thumbs pound out an average of 3,339 texts per month. Crisis Text Line turns this into a way to help teens through their hardest times: family issues, stress or suicidal thoughts. Trained counselors text back and forth with advice and resources—and, in the process, collect (anonymous) data that could lead to bett...

Musician and sound artist Jason Sweeney lives and works in Adelaide; he describes it as "a prototype for what a developed city in the western world could be like." Here, he tells Alison Prato about life in his city. As a teenager, Jason Sweeney was bullied. It was the mid-1980s, and he was one of hundreds of students at the Urrbrae Agricultur...

At the end of TED2015, curator Chris Anderson and content director Kelly Stoetzel want people to walk away feeling like “they’ve had with their worldview challenged in a productive, satisfying way.” For this conference, whose theme is “Truth and Dare,” they’ve crafted a speaker lineup that ranges from neuroscientists to machine-learning e...

Jane Andraka has raised two remarkable sons. Luke, age 20, is studying electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. “He was always tinkering and taking things apart — wondering how they worked, wondering how they could be made better. He had ideas coming out of his brain like a firehose,” she says. Meanwhile, Jack, age 18, is a teen innovator an...

Even in the best workplaces, rude coworkers may occasionally appear. But you don’t need to smile and suffer in silence, says management researcher Christine Porath. Oh, coworkers. We spend intense amounts of our waking lives with them, but while we voluntarily chose to be with some of these people, many of them are strangers foisted upon us. ...

The phrase “truth or dare” is a false binary -- facing the truth often requires daring action, and vice versa. That’s why, at TED2015: Truth and Dare, the two go hand-in-hand. TED2015 happens March 16-20 in Vancouver and Whistler, and we dare to think this will be the most provocative, invigorating, mind-shifting TED yet. The 58 speakers on o...

Photographer Eman Mohammed captures the daily lives of incarcerated women and their children at one of the United States’ rare residential parenting programs. Eman Mohammed was just 19 when she began covering her native Gaza for a Bethlehem-based news agency. She spent more than a dozen years navigating violence and gunfire -- and sexism and ha...

Marc Goodman studies how to prevent future crimes -- not in the Minority Report sense, but by thinking about the ways that current and imagined technologies could be used to commit crimes. At TEDGlobal 2012 he gave a talk on some of the ways this could play out -- showing examples of how drug cartels and terrorists could (and already do) use...

Rita Pierson is the kind of teacher you wish you had. An educator for 40 years, she is funny, sharp and simply has a way with words -- so much so that today’s talk feels a bit like a sermon. In this talk, Pierson shares the secret to teaching students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds -- make personal connections with them. ...

Esta Soler helped pass the Violence Against Women Act, 20 years ago. Leslie Morgan Steiner had just left an abusive husband at the time, and now tells her story widely. They talk about the NFL, the hashtags #WhyIStayed and #WhyILeft, and what we can all do to end domestic violence. Esta Soler and Leslie Morgan Steiner know exactly how to ...

How did human emotions evolve to help us survive? For the last decade, cultural anthropologist Chelsea Shields Strayer has studied the indigenous healing practices of the Ashante people of Ghana, discovering that emotional pain serves useful purposes -- including the relief of physical pain. In this conversation with the TED Blog, she tells th...

Whether your weeks ahead contain travel, vacations or just longer and lazier days than usual, our list of recommendations from TED speakers has books for all moods, activities and tastes. When you want to understand why we humans do what we do Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (TED Talk: Our buggy...