Once upon a time, you would have thought long and hard before you bought sneakers from a stranger in another country or rented out your home to one. So what made you feel it was safe, useful and okay? Trust researcher Rachel Botsman explains the process. Try this quick experiment. The next time you are sitting next to someone you don’t know, as...

In the 1950s, 3 out of every 10 people on the planet lived in a city. Today, that ratio has nearly doubled -- and the United Nations projects that by 2050, nearly 7 in 10 people will live in urban settings. Our population is gravitating towards cities, and this shift is creating amazing opportunities as well as critical problems that need our im...

Monica Araya made a big prediction on the TED stage in 2016: Costa Rica, her home country, would be the first nation in the world to pursue 100% renewable energy. Fast forward to 2018, and they’re on their way. Costa Rica already generates over 99% of their electricity through renewable energy, and went 300 days on clean energy in 2017. An...

Who would have thought when you left those high school math problems behind that you would one day be encountering algorithms on a daily basis? Zeynep Tufekci might have guessed; now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information, Tufekci’s first job as a teenager was as a computer programmer. So it’s no sur...

The TED community has been very busy over the past few weeks. Below, some newsy highlights. Powerful thoughts on slavery’s legacy. Last week, Bryan Stevenson spoke with The Marshall Project about the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In a Q&A, Stevenson shared his thoughts on the deeply en...

Wax-print cotton kimonos! Lacquer tribal stools! Since living in Japan, Cameroon-born artist Serge Mouangue has been creating the most fascinating aesthetic fusion. Artist and TED Fellow Serge Mouangue (TEDxConcorde talk: Le kimono africain) is used to moving fluidly among cultures. Born in Cameroon, he and his family immigrated to France when ...

The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation's most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to te...

Edward Tenner, historian of technology and culture, shares the intrigue of unintended consequences: "I didn't always love unintended consequences, but I have learned to appreciate them." Eythor Bender brings out Amanda Boxtel, a wheelchair user wearing an astonishing new exoskeleton. She is walking. Eli Pariser reveals some fri...

What is your reputation? "If someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say?" Rachel Botsman asks us. "The answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will become your most important asset." She introduces us to Sebastian, a host on Airbnb, a site wher...

In January 2011, Fred Villagomez, the head mechanical technician at a Mountain View-based satellite imaging startup, drove east, looping down and around the San Francisco Bay toward Fremont. His destination: an auto plant called NUMMI, a failed joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, whose assets were about to be auctioned off. Vill...

New Zealand is located on a continental plate boundary, so earthquakes aren't unexpected. But no one was ready for the quake that hit at 12:51pm on February 22, 2011. Danny Squires tells Alison Prato about the experience. "Everyone in Christchurch will never forget that moment," says Danny Squires, who lives in the city with his wife and four...

The challenges we face in the 21st century are global in nature. Yet it often seems like we are woefully ill-equipped to address issues such as poverty, violence, security or public health with our large-scale political institutions. In this bold talk, Benjamin Barber suggests that we should transition away from nation states towards a sy...

A cat. A house. A plane. Most 3-year-old children can point at these and identify them by sight. Fei-Fei Li, the director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, has spent the past 15 years teaching machines how to see. Our most advanced machines are like toddlers when it comes to sight, Li says; they can, for instance, recogni...

"We think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier. But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order," said Shawn Achor in his charming, immensely popular TED Talk from TEDxBloomington, "The happy secret to better work.” Achor is the CEO of consulting firm Good Think, which conducts research on positive psychology and helps p...

The image itself looks laid back enough — a 20-year-old man in a hoodie and jeans, walking through New York City. Except that this image is 150 feet tall and pasted on a plaza near the Flatiron Building. Cabs and cars flow around him while pedestrians scamper past. This image, created by TED Prize winner JR, is on the cover of The New Yor...

“Throughout the history of computers, we’ve been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen,” interface designer Jinha Lee says in today’s talk. Lee points out that the gap has become shorter and shorter—it’s now “less than a millimeter, the thickness of a...

On the day a TED conference ends, I’m always a little mopey. After a week of new new new, and people people people, and bright bright bright, this old lady likes to go look at old books, so I wandered around downtown Vancouver and ended up at a great little bookstore on the edge of Gastown. Tuli Kupferberg’s 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft (Grove P...

To build a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide gets released; to construct the same building from wood, 3,100 tons are saved, a difference of about 900 cars taken off the road in a year. Michael Green (TED Talk: Why we should build wooden skyscrapers) builds with wood because not only is it unique and b...

Over on TED Conversations, we're exploring a question from George McCarthy of the Ford Foundation. He asks: "How can we build cities that are sustainable, inclusive and truly just?" He writes: The fact is more than half the world’s people now call cities home. All of the world’s population growth over the next four decades—some 2.3 bil...

Artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab tells Alison Prato how she speaks out against social and political injustice in her adopted city of Cairo. Early one morning, hours before the sun was due to rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the s...

Lars Jan, a TED Fellow, creates multimedia performances that probe the ubiquity of screens and propaganda in our culture. Today, his show ABACUS—billed as "a multimedia talking tour of our hyper-networked world to come"—opens at BAM's Fisher Fishman Space in Brooklyn, New York. It's a show delivered by his invented persona, Paul Abacus, abou...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A real-world test of basic income. Too often, humanitarian aid donations of food and materials, while well-intentioned, aren’t what the recipients actually need. But what about a different approach: giving people a basic income to spend however they l...

We’re just a week into 2013, and the year seems filled with possibility. The turn of the New Year is generally an occasion to look back and reflect on the year that's passed -- the victories and defeats, the lives lost and the experiences found. But after we look back, we inevitably turn forward. We make resolutions and predictions for the y...

A trail of $2 billion in offshore deals that traces to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. The Prime Minister of Iceland, accused of hiding millions of dollars in investments. The Prime Minister of Pakistan’s family, linked to six luxury real estate deals in London. The Panama Papers, revealed yesterday, represent the largest data leak in hist...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Robyn Meredith is a correspondent for Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong and author of The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What it Means for All of Us. She's written about China for years, and she starts her talk with a lyrical image of the western dream of China's promise. "Ever since ...

On the morning after more than a billion viewers worldwide tuned into the Academy Awards and its glitzy salute to motion pictures, 44 TEDsters trekked up to one of the most enduring signs of moviedom for a tour of the fabled Hollywood sign and an update on the successful battle to preserve the scenic hills around it from development. The jour...

RejectTED Talks. Onion Talks. DED Talks. Here in the TED office, you often hear chuckles as someone watches one of the quickly growing crop of TED spoofs floating in the ether. And surprisingly, there are some pretty good lessons for speakers embedded in these spoofs. See what I mean below. The spoof: Stephen Colbert’s RejecTED Talks Cr...

In this excerpt from her new book, Courtney Martin reflects on the repercussions of a world filled with gizmo-laden gadgets ... and shows how a simpler way is both possible and good for the soul. It’s easy to get self-hating when you start reflecting on just how precious and misspent your attention is on a daily basis. It’s enough to make you f...

Suja Lowenthal is the Vice Mayor of Long Beach, but she's also involved in a major project on the other side of the world. She tells us, in the 2012 TED Prize session, a story of a city that is yet to be. Storytelling is a universal language that "survives through our voice and our hearing." There is an African parable about why we hav...

Stacey Abrams's 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she's the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on ho...