TED returns with the second season of The TED Interview, a long-form podcast series that features Chris Anderson, head of TED, in conversation with leading thinkers. The podcast is an opportunity to reconnect with renowned speakers and dive deeper into their ideas within a different global climate. This season’s guests include Bill Gates, Mo...

This spring, TED headed on the road, visiting 14 cities across six continents on the hunt for untapped talent. The idea behind the sweeping search: to let you, the TED community, weigh in and vote on which speakers you’d like to see ascend the stage at TED2013. After holding one-night salons in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, Londo...

At the end of Session 1: Liftoff! at TED2014, DJ and producer Mark Ronson drops the TED Talk intro into a million tiny little pieces. Hair slicked to one side, Ronson mutters self-disparagingly about following Nicholas Negroponte, Chris Hadfield and Ziauddin Yousafzai: "Now I know what it feels like to follow Led Zeppelin, the Stones and the Bea...

In 2015, 60 Minutes aired a story called "When TED talks, people listen," to show what happens when TED Talks are shared across the world. The segment focuses on a few key speakers, including Bryan Stevenson, Maysoon Zayid, Amy Cuddy and Monica Lewinsky, and you can watch a playlist of highlighted TED Talks here. But many of you said: You wa...

According to Colin Powell, the retired four-star general and former United States Secretary of State, learning to give a salute can be life changing. At TED, many have shared what they believe to be missing from our current education system -- Ken Robinson says its space for kids to flex their creative muscles while Geoff Mulgan argues it’s a...

Over the past week, 21 amazing names in the worlds of technology, entertainment and design have curated lists of their favorite TED Talks, to celebrate TED’s billionth video view. The talks they’ve selected have run the gamut from Ben Affleck, who loved Bryan Stevenson’s “We need to talk about an injustice” among others, to Alexis Ohanian of Red...

Next month, TED turns 30 years old. And to celebrate, we’ve put together a lightning round of trivia to test your TED Talk and speaker knowledge. For kicks, post your answers in the comments section below. We’ll post the official answer sheet today, February 13, at 1pm. Ken Robinson, who gave the most-watched talk in TED history, was deeply ...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Steven Pinker  is a linguist and psychologist. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. The pair are also married, and they have taken to the TED stage, in front of a dinner table with several luminaries, to have a very public argument, or, in their rather more academic terms, a Socratic dial...

By Abigail Tenembaum and Michael Weitz of Virtuozo When Oprah Winfrey spoke at the Golden Globes last Sunday night, her speech lit up social media within minutes. It was powerful, memorable and somehow exactly what the world wanted to hear. It inspired multiple standing O's -- and even a semi-serious Twitter campaign to elect her presiden...

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its ow...

It’s a question on so many minds: what will the future of education look like? It’s something Sir Ken Robinson has asked for decades. And tonight in Session 3 of TED2013, Robinson got the opportunity to announce the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, someone who has a bold answer. “So many kids are disengaged from education and there’s a t...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Julie Burstein is waving a pot at us. She is a fan of pottery, it turns out, and she starts off her talk by describing the Raku tradition, generally found in Japanese tea ceremonies. What's particularly wonderful about Raku, she says, is both the speed at which pots are made and the fact that any resulting imp...

Many unusual things have happened on the TED stage over the years. Our incredible speakers have done everything from perform magic tricks to attempt to set themselves on fire, all in the name of spreading their ideas. Although far from a complete list, here are some of the weirdest TED moments that we still haven’t stopped puzzling over. To many...

As usual, the TED community is bursting with new projects and discoveries. Here are a few highlights. The power of representation. Writer and trans activist Tiq Milan, at left in the photo above, was interviewed for a new initiative by Netflix and GLAAD called “First Time I Saw Me.” Alongside Elliot Fletcher, Jamie Clayton, Jazz Jennings and ...

TED2014 will bring together more than 70 speakers with fresh thinking on topics as diverse as leadership, genetics and the magic of fireflies. But this is our 30th anniversary conference, and it’s also time to look back at some of the incredible ideas surfaced in the past. At TED2014, we will hold five All-Stars sessions that bring 50+ favorite ...

The first TED was held in 1984, the year George Orwell imagined in his classic novel. The second was held in 1990. In 2006, TED Talks were offered online for the first time, free to anyone across the world who wanted to watch. In 2009, TED moved to its current home in Long Beach, California. As we prepare for TED2013 -- the anticipation of th...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson How do we get good at anything? Doctor Atul Gawande opens his talk at TED2012 by asking that question. He writes as well as practices medicine, and constantly has to confront that question about everything in his life. But there's a new crisis, the incredible cost of healthcare. The fight is framed as: Is gove...

In this excerpt from the brand-new podcast The TED Interview, the beloved writer tells us how she is learning to live with loss. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert has reached the heights of fame -- her two TED Talks (2009’s “Your elusive creative genius” and 2014’s “Success, failure and the drive to keep creating”) have together gotten more than 24 mill...

Step with me for a minute into an internet time machine. The date: June 27, 2006. The event: the first six TED Talks being posted online. “Today, for the first time ever, we’re thrilled to present some of the most remarkable talks from TEDs past,” reads a blog post from Chris Anderson written on that day. (The image above shows exactly wh...

In South Korea and Finland, it's not about finding the "right" school. Fifty years ago, both South Korea and Finland had terrible education systems. Finland was at risk of becoming the economic stepchild of Europe. South Korea was ravaged by civil war. Yet over the past half century, both South Korea and Finland have turned their schools arou...

. Director Ridley Scott is returning to a genre he defined: Prometheus, a sci-fi epic, is due out in early June. Like the rest of Scott's work, it's a movie steeped in ideas about what it means to be human. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof thought it would be appropriate and, well, incredibly cool to have one of the characters, Peter Weyland, art...

Here's a huge list of TED speaker-recommended books, with all the diversity of titles and topics you might expect. No matter your mood, preference or occasion, we’ve got you covered. When you’re lying in the sun Any book by Isaac Asimov I have stacks of collections of science-fiction short stories. I grab these before getting on a long f...