Author Anne Lamott recently turned 61. So she’s compiled the following list of "every single true thing I know." A brief recap: All truth is a paradox. “Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful gift, and it is impossible here,” she says. Life is “filled with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all...

Thomas Peschak takes stunning, up-close pictures of starfish, sharks and whales. His goal? To make us fall in love with them. A surfing seal. A pair of turtles, necking. A curious fish. Thomas Peschak doesn’t just show us creatures that live in the ocean; his photos capture their personality. “If you want people to care about a species or a ...

Will the societal shocks of 2016 lead to a bumper crop of art in 2017 and beyond? These TED Fellows channel the energy of activism into creative work that can change hearts and minds. There is a debate going on in artistic circles: Will the unsettling political era ahead push people to create more exciting art and music? But the real answer is:...

How does snow artist Simon Beck trace massive, intricate patterns in the snow? With a little math and a lot of legwork. Simon Beck (TEDxKlagenfurt Talk: Snow art) believes that anyone can make a “snow drawing.” Just tread a simple shape into the snow, again and again, until a spectacular pattern emerges. The geometry, he says, is the easy part....

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. New month. New day. New leaf. So you’ve woken up and decided you’re finally going to take on the big, big problem that’s been weighing on you -- perhaps it’s shorin...

Millions of women singlehandedly raise their children in the war-torn country, but their stories are rarely told in the media. Photographer Kiana Hayeri captures their struggles and strength in these photos. Malika is 28 years old. Just 14 when she was married off by her family, she lives with her five children in a small room in the Wazir Abad...

Years ago, Steven Addis’s wife photographed him holding their 1-year-old daughter on the corner of 57 Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. On her second birthday, the family happened to be back in the city, so headed to the same corner for daddy-daughter photo, round two. The next year, Addis brought his daughter back to New York -- on pu...

How do you design a sacred space that invites people in regardless of who they are and what they believe (or don’t)? Architect Siamak Hariri takes us into the planning and poetry behind building the luminous Bahá'i Temple in South America. The architectural specifications for a new Bahá'i Temple of South America were minimal: to design a domed,...

Designer Ayse Birsel shares the everyday objects she loves. Since 2002, product designer Ayse Birsel has worked side-by-side with her husband Bibi Seck. Together they have refined a design process they call “Deconstruction:Reconstruction.” The process of deconstructing a product into the human needs it must fill  -- before leaping to design s...

“My generation has so much potential in changing this world. We have all the tools necessary." -- TEDxYouth@Conejo So, how do we get those tools to the youth at large? How do we help young people not only access those tools, but understand how to use them? From November 19-21, more than 90 events for (and by) young people will unite to answer...

Artist and professor John Sabraw is turning industrial acid runoff into striking pigments and paints that could be used to save Ohio’s rivers and streams. In Ohio, rain is a mixed blessing. Of course, humans and the Earth need it to survive. But every time it pours, water flows down and through the state’s thousands of unsealed, underground min...

Archaeology is a puzzle. For Sarah Parcak, trying to find ancient treasures is made exponentially easier by satellite imagery. Archaeologists have many tools at their disposal: shovels, trowels, satellites. If you are scratching your head at that final entry, check out how TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak uses satellite imagery to locate long-lost...

Our photographer Duncan Davidson loves to shoot timelapses; before every TED, you can find him behind the scenes hiding cameras to snap away for hours and days. In his latest piece, he tracks the construction of a custom robot arena for Raffaello D'Andrea, whose TED Talk was posted just last night. The TED Blog asked Duncan for some of the ge...

Here’s something you might want to consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do, says productivity guru Tim Ferriss. To do or not to do? To try or not to try? Most people will vote no, whether they consider themselves brave or not. Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noise...

When you're an artist, everything you see can seem like a canvas, a blank page with the potential for something beautiful. Alexa Meade sees this quite literally, using actual people as both subject and canvas. Painting on a 1-to-1 scale, Meade takes real-life subjects and turns them into paintings, playing with the shadow and light of the hu...

In the 1980s, psychologist James Flynn discovered that, over the past century, our average IQ has increased dramatically. The difference, in fact, is so stark that the phenomenon garnered its own name: the Flynn effect. In today’s talk, Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents', given at TED2013, Flynn explains that if you score...

Pankaj Ghemawat coined a new phrase in his talk from TEDGlobal: “globaloney.” In other words, Ghemawat takes issue with the idea that national borders are eroding and that we are all just living in “one world.” It’s a notion Ghemawat says was first floated in the 1850s by David Livingston, the Scottish explorer who traveled the Nile, and th...

Afghan-born artist Behnaz Babazadeh hopes to spark a conversation about the burka ... by wrapping herself in candy. When Behnaz Babazadeh was young, her family moved from Afghanistan to the US. She loved almost everything about her new home -- especially America’s amazing selection of candy -- but she also loved wearing her familiar pink-flower...

And you thought all that could be done with scissors and a sheet of paper is making snowflakes? Take a look at the spellbindingly intricate tapestries that artist Karen “Bit” Vejle conjures with just her scissors and imagination. At Easter in Denmark, children commonly make greetings called gækkebrev. Taking a piece of paper, they fold it and c...

Stephen Petranek makes the case that humans will live on Mars in the not-too-distant future. He explains how and when this might happen -- and what risks those who head there first might face. Nearly a decade of anticipation has come down to this moment: the spacecraft inches to the surface as the blast effect of braking rockets kicks up red du...

The day has finally arrived. TED2013, "The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered," kicked off today with attendees pouring into the Long Beach Performing Arts Center in California. At 1:15pm, the conference officially started with two sessions of talks from the TED Fellows, young innovators from across the globe with exciting work to share. And ...

A few numbers to keep in mind: 3, 31, and 1 million. That’s because nominations for the 2016 TED Prize are being accepted through the end of the day on March 31, 2015. You have until then to nominate a mentor, a co-worker or a visionary leader whose work you admire from afar for this prestigious prize, which brings with it $1 million for a w...

Today, Monday March 21, from 11:30am-1:30pm Eastern time, the wise and wonderful Professor Hans Rosling will be answering questions in TED Conversations. Ask him about his latest TEDTalk, on the "magic washing machine," or ask about the latest data tools from Gapminder.org or his recent BBC short film "The Joy of Stats" ... Watch the new TED...

Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn rejuvenate neighborhoods around the world with color and collaboration through large-scale painting projects. Design duo Haas&Hahn -- Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn -- like to ask big questions (TED Talk: How painting can transform communities). For example, why should they use their brus...

Edward Burtynsky finds the eerie beauty in the man-made landscapes that dot our Earth's surface. As a photographer who focuses on the relationship between humans and nature, he travels to the hidden corners of the Earth to document the way people are ravaging our planet. Below, 13 of his haunting images of altered nature. All images shown courte...

Wedding photographer Charleton Churchill is willing to hike the extra mile, plunge into the depths of caves, and scale the highest peaks (think: Everest) to highlight the splendors of nature -- and ensure his images of couples are just as memorable as the ceremonies themselves. A wedding performs many functions. It grants a new legal status to ...

TED2014 begins in five short days, and we have added even more new speakers to look forward to. Below, a bit about each one: Cellist and beatboxer Kevin Olusola from Pentatonix (swoon!) will open Session 1: The Next Chapter. And as a bonus in Session 1, we'll be honoring TED's co-founder, Richard Saul Wurman. In Session 6: Wired, planet de...

Chances are, you’ve heard Ghandi’s famous words: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Now, you have an opportunity to bring the famous adage to life. The TED Prize is a $1 million grant, awarded annually to a bold leader with an idea for a large-scale, high-impact project that will inspire global change. Nominations for the TED P...

Amazing news from the TEDx Tumblr: The TEDx program is not yet three years old, but we are already celebrating a major milestone: the 10,000th TEDxTalk video posted to our channel. These talks come from more than 2,600 independently organized events held in 115 different countries and 39 different languages. They have been viewed over 18 million...

As he approached his 30th birthday, artist Cesar Kuriyama noticed that time seemed to be evaporating. And thus, he began work on a project called 1 Second Everyday. “Basically, I’m recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life—chronologically compiling these one-second, tiny slices of my life into one single continu...