Work comes in all shapes and sizes — there's no one-size-fits-all model for what humans do to make a living. We can see this in the countless TEDTalks from people telling stories about what they do, be it single-handedly creating a polyphonic orchestra, performing magical stunts on city streets, or even studying fungi. While we aren't all glam...

Whenever something is declared the subject of "the year of," you know that subject is ripe for a big fat backlash. So, when The New York Times declared 2012 "the year of the MOOC," it thus came to pass that massive open online courses should next become the subject of massive, open, often online criticism, as critics gathered to air both the...

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. We’re currently living in an era of teamwork. Today, we take for granted the fact that we can be on the same team as somebody who lives on the other side of...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson Ainissa Ramirez comes on stage armed with a blowtorch. Well, that sure got everyone's attention. She promptly uses said blowtorch to straighten a piece of bent piece of wire. Her point: atoms often rearrange usefully to create entirely different types of structures. The Yale associate professor goes on to exp...

David Swancott is a retired biology teacher who lives an hour southeast of Bordeaux, France. He spends his free time bicycling, traveling and, for the past two years, being a “Skype Granny.” Swancott is a part of the “Granny Cloud,” a project created by 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra to make teachers available online to mentor children p...

TEDSketchNotes.Tumblr.com gives you Cliffs Notes to talks from speakers like Del Harvey, Ken Robinson, Andras Forgacs and Ed Yong, in sketchbook form. The passion project of Chicago-area designer Stefani Bachetti, what sets this Tumblr apart from other sketchnote spins on talks (see them from TEDGlobal 2011, TED2012, TED2013 and TED2014) is ...

Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week, with a light Valentine's Day theme: Suleika Jaouad, who writes about being young with cancer, talks about the embarrassing but very real prospect of being a sexually active cancer patient. [The NYTimes Well Blog] For other unconventional responses to...

Wise words and solid advice from BJ Miller, who thinks deeply about the end of life as head of the Zen Hospice Project. Death is an uncomfortable topic. Although we’re well-acquainted with platitudes that remind us to seize the moment and live each day like it’s our last, few of us devote real time to envisioning the end of our lives -- or the ...

Aziz Abu Sarah explains how he recovered from the murder of his brother and learned how peace and love can be potent tools of activism. “You are responsible for the terror attacks” said a man after a lecture I gave about religion and violence at an interfaith event in New Jersey two years ago. "Your people are trying to kill us." He was frus...

Physicians Raj Panjabi and Seth Berkley are on a mission to ensure that every person in the world has access to decent medical care. In a conversation, they discuss the obstacles standing in their way and the bold ideas that could help overcome them. Around the world right now, more than one billion people don’t have access to basic health care...

The world is more interconnected than ever before -- and the need to bridge political and ideological divides has never been more urgent. Now is the time to examine the rules of genuine human engagement, to find common ground for respectful, passionate discourse and to celebrate civility. That's the idea behind TED Salon: Up for Debate, a...

Ok, maybe it won't. The clear winner these days is Upworthy, Eli Pariser’s socially-bent aggregator, which fills a gap in viral content where puppies used to sleep. The site’s sheer power on the Interwebs came quickly: In just two years, the site has come to fill the Facebook feeds of 5.4 million people. (So it's no surprise that haters gonna he...

The current coronavirus pandemic is a truly global one; in fact, Antarctica is the only continent with no cases (although that could change). Most nations have responded with similar measures -- stay-at-home advisories, shutdown of non-essential businesses, social distancing -- but the scope of these changes has varied and so has the human impac...

In agricultural entrepreneur Trang Tran’s native Vietnam, farmers traditionally burn the straw and husks that remain after the rice harvest. This practice happens at least twice a year for two months at a time, releasing noxious smoke and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Tran’s solution: using rice straw to cultivate mushrooms. Her soci...

At TEDxWhitechapel on January 13, 2013, Graham Hancock gave a passionately argued talk in which he described the transformative impact that ayahuasca (containing the drug DMT) had had on him and argued that responsible adult usage of such drugs was a fundamental right. The talk was viewed more than 130,000 times on YouTube. TED's scientific a...

Technology futurists Ayesha and Parag Khanna say that we are rapidly moving from a co-existence with technology to a point of co-evolution with it. In their new TED ebook, Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization, they argue that we have entered the Hybrid Age, where technology is ubiquitous (with trillions of s...

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...

It was one of the original six talks posted on TED.com and it has, over the years, become our most-watched video with 13.5 million views. Sir Ken Robinson’s talk from TED2006, “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity,” is truly a juggernaut. But the real genius is Matt. He has so much creative intelligence, that we're going to do some s...

Dance -- and physical activity -- should have the same status in schools as math, science and language. Psst: it may even help raise test scores, says Sir Ken Robinson. For several years, I’ve been a patron of the London School of Contemporary Dance. In 2016, I was invited to give the annual lecture in honor of founding principal Robert Cohan, ...

What is the city of the future? What will it look like? How will it come to be? This weekend, from Taipei to Melbourne to Mexico City, over 100 local organizers will offer their answers at TEDx events in honor of TEDCity2.0, a day-long TED event celebrating urban innovation. TED challenged organizers to remix the official TEDCity2.0 posters, ...

Monday’s TED Talk, “Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20,” has been a runaway hit: five days later, it has nearly 600,000 views and almost 200 comments on TED.com alone. Commenters of all ages have offered personal anecdotes, helpful resources and a fair dose of criticism, many writing about the hope and/or confusion and/or fear that the talk bro...

Should parents be able to select their children’s talents and personalities? Whatever your opinion, it is precisely the kind of question that Julian Savulescu wants you to take seriously. A professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, Savulescu thinks deeply about the ethics of the biological enhancement of the human race. In hi...

Ever want to play with genes? Synthetic biologist Oliver Medvedik thinks anyone should be able to access a biology lab and tinker with the stuff of life. That's why he co-founded Genspace, the world's first fully equipped community biolab, where citizen scientists of all stripes meet to explore, experiment and learn about genetic engineering. ...

Last week, TED withdrew the TEDx license for the TEDxWestHollywood event. We wanted to write a short note to the community to explain why we did so. First some background: The TEDx program has included more than 5,000 local events to date. TEDx is designed to help local organizers produce independent, TED-style events in their own communities...

The thought of asking your colleague how much she earns makes you cringe inside, and the same goes for telling her your salary. But pay transparency could benefit employees, organizations and society, says management researcher David Burkus. How much do you get paid? No need to say it out loud -- just keep that number in your head. Now: How muc...

David Blaine is the master of the endurance stunt.  In 1999, he was buried alive in a clear box underneath three tons of water. Over the course of seven days, about 75,000 people stopped by to watch him in his self-made tomb. In 2008, Blaine attempted to set the Guinness World Record for holding his breath underwater in front of a packed cro...

New York restaurants and grocers scramble to get their hands on fresh, local produce. So what could be better than veggies grown right in the city? On a rooftop in Brooklyn, Viraj Puri runs Gotham Greens, a hydroponic greenhouse that cultivates delicious, fresh produce -- using a fraction of the water and space needed for conventional agricult...

Until he was 19, Joshua Prager wanted to play professional baseball or be a doctor. After 19, he was just glad he could walk. For eight years Prager was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for his long-form pieces investigating historical secrets. In his talk at TED@New York -- one of t...

Too many people know the situation -- you’re walking down the street, enjoying a cup of coffee and minding your own business, when a string of words curls through the air and smacks you in the face. Sometimes it’s lewd language that feels so upsetting; sometimes the words could be perceived as a compliment in another context, but the fact th...

“I’m an actor, so I’m a bit of an expert on … well, nothing really,” says Joseph Gordon-Levitt onstage at TED2019. Jokes aside, there’s one thing he does know really well: what it feels like to get attention. He’s gotten a lot of it -- since he played Dougie on Family Ties in the late ’80s through to his roles in Batman and beyond -- and ...