Here at the office, we end up screening a fair number of "inspirational" talks, often from people who've overcome tough challenges in their lives. The point being: If I can overcome my problems [modest pause], what can you do? [applause] Stella Young -- comedian, activist, awesome person -- was simply having none of that. She was not planning...

At TEDxOxford last September, legendary stylist Vidal Sassoon, who died this week at 84, shared this moving talk about his extraordinary life. As a YouTube commenter writes: "A good way to remember this humble and inspirational man." Plus! See this talk (and many others from TEDxOxford) illustrated by the Livescribes, a British group of...

The TED office is abuzz about two high-profile mentions this week. First, we were excited to see ourselves included in The New York Times crossword puzzle for the third time on Thursday. The clue for 12 down: “______ talks, offerers of ‘ideas worth spreading.’” We were also amused to see TEDx referenced in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Mur...

Community member Rachael Williams left this thoughtful comment on Andrew Solomon's recent TED Talk, How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are: "Forgive my honesty here but a lot of the time when watching motivational speeches I think, 'Yeah, that's all good and fine, but this is what you do for a living.' The 'hell yeah-ness' (I s...

Before TEDGlobal 2013, director Bruno Giussani reached out to the giant community of TEDx organizers around the world to ask for some comic relief. He asked them, “What are the funniest videos from your event?” And, as usual, TEDx’ers came through -- with wild enthusiasm. Below, the 5 hilarious TEDx Talks Giussani selected to show at TEDG...

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks on August 29th.) Art can be beautiful, inspirational, thought-provoking, and… funny? Here are four talks by artists across the spectrum. 1) How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 ...

Why would 80 designers, technologists and business strategists give up their holiday weekend to collaborate with strangers on a pro bono project? Mostly because of Bryan Stevenson’s inspirational TEDTalk. When longtime TEDsters Christopher Ireland, Mary Anne Masterson and Nathan Shedroff heard Bryan at TED2012 in Long Beach, they did more th...

Power posing is always in style. So we were excited to see it featured in The New York Times Fashion & Style section this weekend in the article “Amy Cuddy takes a stand.” In a glowing article about the wide influence of her TED Talk (watch: Your body language shapes who you are), the writer notes that it has affected “elementary school ...

When Roberto  D’Angelo and Francesca Fideli discovered that their 10-day-old son, Mario, had suffered a stroke, they were shocked. Maria was unable to control the left side of his body and, to help their son, they opted to participate in a pilot program for mirror neuron rehabilitation. As they explain in the talk, mirror neuron therapy invo...

TED Blog exclusive video: Steve Rosenbaum takes us on a private tour of the 9/11 Museum, under construction now at the site of the World Trade Center towers. Below, he talks about why he joined the effort to create a memorial of the people and events of September 11, 2001. Why did you decide to document the curation and construction of the...

Take the TED Conference and add a generous helping of play, a sprinkling of colorful creativity, a lot of red beanbags, an endless supply of coffee, and a plethora of riveting conversations around fire pits with a tribe of smart, quirky people from all over the world and -- voila! -- you have the recipe for TEDActive. TEDActive is a live simu...

Martha Payne may only be 9-years-old, but she is already a world-renowned food blogger. In a preamble to his fascinating TEDTalk about what governments can learn from open-source programming, Clay Shirky told Payne’s inspirational story. In April of 2012, Scottish schoolgirl Payne started the blog NeverSeconds.blogspot.co.uk, which documen...

I’m an anthropology major gearing up for my senior year and all that comes with it -- job applications, extracurricular responsibilities and my senior honors thesis. After a semester abroad, I’m looking forward to returning to the familiarity and challenges that my college, the University of Pennsylvania, presents while incorporating the new per...

TED Talks cover an incredible breadth of topics -- from mathematical origami to self-repairing architecture to personalized medicine. Some talks explore what lies at the very essence of TED -- the act of talking. The 10 talks below explore the various dynamics of speech -- from phonology to cognition to the socio-cultural role of language in...

From the wonderful TED Fellows blog, this report: Fifteen outstanding TED Fellows were invited to attend TEDWomen, held in Washington, D.C, on December 7-8. What unique perspectives did these female filmmakers, scientists, artist-activists and more bring to this TED Conference? We asked each of them about their experiences as women and how w...

Photo: Ryan Lash It was an emotional two sessions at the TED Fellows talks today at the Lyceum Theatre. The audience thrilled to the musical virtuosity of guitarist Usman Riaz and violinist Robert Gupta & Joshua Roman, cheered the political courage of artist Bahia Shehab, marvelled at the ingenuity of Sheref Mansy and Max Little's ...

To make the greatest impact at our jobs -- and also feel the greatest satisfaction -- we need to tap into work’s deeper meaning, says Leah Weiss, a compassion expert and researcher. For humans, purpose can be a matter of life and death. As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Life is never made unbearable by circ...

Adam Spencer is a radio host in in Sydney during the morning commute. But he says he's here not as a radio host or as a comedian, "But as someone who is was and always will be a mathematician." He got bit in second grade when a teacher told him, "That would be like putting a square peg in a round hole." He said, not trying to be funny, "B...

Sharing an idea isn’t like snapping your fingers — things don’t just instantly change. But as more people hear an idea over time, it can trickle into people’s thinking -- and shifts, both subtle and extreme, can happen as a result. In a TEDWomen session called “The 19th Minute,” host Courtney E. Martin invited several guests to talk about wh...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Hearing and feeling an eclipse. An eclipse is a visual phenomenon, difficult to describe, but what if you can’t see it for yourself? Dr. Henry Winter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics partnered with The National Center for Accessible M...

The weeks after TEDGlobal require serious debriefing. Throughout the course of the conference -- which took place June 10 to 14 in Edinburgh, Scotland -- the mind is crammed full of so many fascinating ideas that it takes some time to process them. As we look back on the conference, and continue to post talks from it, the TED Blog wanted to ...

Anyone who has appreciated a meditative mental drift while knitting or mowing a lawn knows that there is something calming about engaging in a familiar, low-impact activity that requires minimal thought and bestows a clear sense of progress. That goes at least some of the way toward explaining the immense appeal of adult coloring books, which no...

  Wendy Morales is one of a group of TED-Ed Innovative Educators who got together at our recent TEDSummit conference. She files this report, which we're cross-posting from her own blog, The Risk-Taking Educator: When asked what I do for a living, sometimes I catch myself saying, "I am just a teacher." It's as if I am apologizing for no...

It’s not every day that you see a desert cyclist, a Tanbour virtuoso, a Persian literature professor and a health systems expert in the same room together. But at the second TEDxTehran, held in September, they all took the stage, sharing stories of their “breakthroughs.” In the audience, representatives from TEDx events in all corners of Ira...

By Courtney E. Martin What do sperm donation, marathon runners, disabled rockstars, and yacht racing have in common? They’ve all been subjects of the careful eye and artistic vision of British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, who has received $125,000 to spend the next ...

Amy Cuddy must be proud: Clay Shirky walks on stage and promptly strikes a power pose. Then he tells us of a 9-year-old Scottish girl who lives about 50 miles from here. Martha Payne started the foodblog NeverSeconds, for which she took her camera into school to document her lunches, using metrics such as "pieces of hair found in food." Firs...

“It is great to be back in Mississippi — yes it is,” said Kermit the Frog on the TEDxJackson stage in 2014. “I have deep roots here.” The Muppet was alluding to the fact that his creator, Jim Henson, was from the area. Kermit spoke about his humble southern upbringing in a swamp not too far from Jackson’s Capri Theater, where the event wa...

Step inside an experimental economy with no money -- but lots of exchange. You're walking down the street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on a lazy summer afternoon. A signboard announces a performance in a former auto repair shop, and it's that kind of open-ended day, you and your friend look at each other and say, Why not? and step inside. ...

By Courtney E. Martin and John Cary Curating the program for TEDCity2.0 -- a one-day conference about the future of cities that takes place, gulp, today -- was a true honor for us. The two of us come at cities from very different angles. John is trained as an architect, but has spent his career building the public interest design moveme...

On August 27, an extraordinary group of people will gather in Arusha, Tanzania, for TEDGlobal 2017, a four-day TED Conference for "those with a genuine interest in the betterment of the continent," says curator Emeka Okafor. As Okafor puts it: "Africa has an opportunity to reframe the future of work, cultural production, entrepreneurship,...