After his 6-year-old son taught himself to use a computer, 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra wanted to test the idea that kids can learn on their own, by discovery rather than formal training. So Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in the wall near a slum in New Delhi, set up an Internet-connected computer there, and abandoned it in 1999. The...

Last week, I saw Barbara Walters' list of "The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014." It included interesting thinkers like Elon Musk (watch his TED Talk) and George R.R. Martin (the author of Game of Thrones), along with crowd-pleasers like Taylor Swift and Oprah. But reading this list of almost exclusively marquee names made me think about s...

When he was 26, Kailash Satyrathi left his job as an electrical engineer. It sounded like a crazy move, but he was determined to help children in India who were forced into labor. Satyrathi has spent three decades raiding factories where children are held as slaves, building a movement to make the employment of children under 14 illegal i...

As you read this, imagine balloons and confetti fluttering to the ground around you. Because we just posted the 2,000th TED Talk. On June 16, 2015, Margaret Heffernan’s “Why it's time to forget the pecking order at work” became the 2,000th TED Talk. It’s a talk we need now: a sharp reflection on our lives at work. While most companies are bui...

Bran Ferren's life pivoted on a trip to Rome at age 9. He's the son of two passionate abstract expressionist artists, who taught him that art wasn't just decorative but about communicating ideas, and the grandson of a cabinet-making factory owner, who often took him on field trips to buy electronics to take a apart and reassemble. So Ferren di...

In his TED talk, the avuncular Kwame Anthony Appiah points to an atheist Rabbi for the perfect example of how you don’t need faith to have religion. There is, he says, “no ‘thing’ called religion.” The range of things we call “religion” is so broad that many of them have very little in common. Appiah’s ideas deliver an identity crisis. They m...

In her 2007 TED Talk, "This is Saturn," planetary scientist Carolyn Porco blew some minds with images taken by Cassini, the robot spaceship launched in October 1997 to study and photograph Saturn and its accompanying moons. Gleaning "oohs" and "aahs" from the assembled TED audience, she concluded with a stunning shot of a backlit picture of ...

More than 40 years after the Stonewall Riots, even as Caitlyn Jenner dominates pop culture, coming out as gay or transgender remains deeply difficult. In some cases, it’s downright dangerous; in others, it's enough to tear families apart. But as you'll discover in these six StoryCorps interviews, love — of each other, and of oneself — can triump...

In his instantly recognizable, grandly sweeping style, eL Seed has painted Arabic calligraffiti murals everywhere from Tunisia to Paris. Recently, he created his most ambitious project yet: a mural that spans 50 buildings that can only be fully seen from a nearby mountain. eL Seed pursued this self-funded project as a way to make a political poi...

David Pogue is a member of a very select club. As of today, he’s one of the few people with four talks featured on TED.com. (Two others who've reached this mark: Julian Treasure and Juan Enriquez.) Yes, we've shown you his talks on simplicity in tech design, cool phone tricks and the downloading wars. But we just couldn't help but add this c...

Schools out of reach Daphne Koller is a third-generation PhD, and in her own words, she is certainly one of the lucky people. Most people, of course, are not. In some parts of the world, quality education is simply not available. In South Africa, for example, the higher education system was designed during Apartheid, and there are far ...

Zak Ebrahim's The Terrorist's Son has won an American Library Association award. The memoir — which became the first TED Book in print in September — was named a recipient of the Alex Award today. A coveted honor, the Alex Award is given to the 10 best adult books of the year that also appeal to young-adult readers. The Terrorist's Son te...

In this 16-minute documentary, artist Phil Hansen stands in front of a giant blank canvas with a Sharpie in one hand and his cell phone in the other. Soon, using just these tools, a detailed image emerges -- one of three birds maintaining in choppy water. When Hansen’s TED Talk, Embrace the Shake, was posted in May, he launched a Kickstart...

Today, we remember the 11 million lives taken during the Holocaust -- a catastrophe that thoroughly transformed our world. As we take time to honor lives lost, we look towards people like Viktor Frankl, who gave this talk "Why to believe in others." A Holocaust survivor and renowned author, in this rare clip, Frankl discusses the importanc...

Autumn and Yuji are surfers who fell in love on the beach of Motoyoshi, a beautiful spot in Japan above Sendai where northern and southern currents meet. A month after Motoyoshi was hit by a tsunami in 2011, triggering a nuclear disaster at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the two made a startling decision -- they came back to help w...

In a searching session of talks hosted by curator and photographer Deborah Willis and her son, artist Hank Willis Thomas (who spoke together at TEDWomen 2017), 12 speakers explored conflict, love, the environment and activism, and more. The session featured duet talks from Paula Stone Williams and Jonathan Williams, Neha Madhira and Haley Stack,...

When Caroline Harper suddenly found herself jobless in her mid-40s, she decided to step off the corporate ladder and travel to all the places she’d always wanted to go, from Antarctica to Egypt. Here’s how it changed her life -- and her career. Caroline Harper loved her work negotiating big contracts in the oil and gas industry. “I liked the al...

In a major setback last week for the LGBT community, an Indian Supreme Court ruling upheld Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code -- a 153-year-old law criminalizing gay sex. This act overturned a 2009 Delhi High Court ruling that this should not apply to consensual acts and, essentially, recriminalized homosexuality. While the Indian governme...

Last week, education researcher Sugata Mitra won the first-ever $1 million TED Prize to build his School in the Cloud. Prior to his TED Prize win, Mitra was known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment. In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall near an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC and left it there -- w...

These precise re-creations of the world have the amazing ability to bring us up close to people and animals that are far away in space and time, says artist Aaron Delehanty. “I build time machines,” says artist Aaron Delehanty. Actually, his specific day job is constructing dioramas -- freeze-framed vignettes of animals and people in their habi...

“I’m a storyteller.” It’s a sentence that can be found in a wide variety of TED Talks -- because, really, it is the heart of what we do. This is why, for the 10th anniversary of the TED Prize in 2015, we are thrilled to award the million-dollar prize to Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps. A large-scale oral history project, StoryCorp...

Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets. Just when you thought Vijay Kumar's robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can pick up objects...

Andras Forgacs is trying to grow meat. This is a concept he had to be talked into. See, Forgacs and his father, Gabor, co-founded Organovo, which 3D-prints human tissue. And as people found out what the company did, they would often ask: If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather? He thought ...

On the anniversary of September 11, we're proud to launch an idea that is the deepest possible antidote to terror. It's the powerful story of Zak Ebrahim, who grew up the son of a terrorist (his father helped plan the 1993 WTC bombing), and chose tolerance over hatred. This idea reaches you in a form that's new for us: It's the first in a...

Mother's Day is coming up. And since my TED Talk was about how meaningful it was to record a StoryCorps interview with my father, I was inspired to take this chance to interview my beloved mom, Jane Isay. My mom has been an editor and writer for more than 40 years — she edited H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and discovered Mary Pipher’s...

On Monday on the TED Fellows stage, Safwat Saleem made the crowd roar and squirm with his art – satirical and profane posters and animated shorts skewering racism, the absurdity of politics, petty dishonesty and general stupidity. In a word, bullshit. Here at TED2013, he's launching a new project, called "Pardon Me, but WTF?" – a call to the...

Remember TED Talks by Joshua Prager, John McWhorter, Sleepy Man Banjo Boys and Hannah Brencher? All fantastic finds from previous talent searches. Now, we're running a similar event once again. Known as TED@NYC, the evening event will be held on October 8. It's a chance to find fresh voices to ring out on the TED main stage and be heard on t...

Growing up in a small village in India’s Orissa region, Dilip Ratha dreamed of becoming a poet. With only $20 in his pocket, he crossed two oceans and moved to the United States to study and is now an economist at the World Bank. But he always saved up money to send back to his father and brother. His story is not unique. In fact, there a...

Last week, Intel hosted a unique event -- an afternoon of TED Talks delivered by their very own resident innovators, thinkers and dreamers. Through a partnership with TED, they received guidance on event production and curation. The final product -- TED@Intel, themed “the future in progress” -- was a moment for the organization to celebrate an...

It's time to nominate someone for the 2015 TED Prize, a $1 million award to a visionary with a great big idea for creating change in the world. Through Monday, March 31, you can nominate a mentor, a hero, a co-worker, even yourself. TED is looking for someone who has not only a great wish, but a track record that suggests they could accompli...