My high school English class had just finished reading Madame Bovary, and we were all confused. (For those of you who have not read it, please skip to paragraph two. Spoiler alert!) Emma Bovary, a listless housewife in search of the passionate love she’s read about in books, has many sordid affairs, falls deeply into debt and kills hers...

TED-Ed Clubs are about to get a lot of visibility in Italian high schools. On Thursday, March 3, in Rome, the Italian Minister of Education, University and Research, Stefania Giannini, and the European Director of TED, Bruno Giussani, signed a 3-year memorandum of understanding on cooperation regarding the spread of the TED-Ed Clubs curricul...

"Using a powerful particle gun, we would shoot small pieces of matter through the force field and into the antimatter to make small, controlled bursts of energy --which we could then harness and put into batteries." This quote reads like a line of dialogue from a science fiction movie. But the (exponentially more exciting) truth is that i...

No television special exploring ideas on improving education in the United States would be complete without hearing from students themselves. And so it was essential that students be able to tell their own stories during our first television special, TED Talks Education, which premiered on PBS last night. To that end, we invited Market Road F...

TED's Curator, Chris Anderson, writes this personal note on his blog: Today marks a big new chapter in the TED story, as we unveil the first part of our TED-Ed initiative. Viewed one way, it's just the release on YouTube of a dozen short videos created for high school students and lifelong learners. But we're committed to growing this archive...

Earlier this month, 450 Chicago public school sophomores and juniors, plus 120 of their teachers, crowded into the city’s Harris Theater for TEDxYouth@Midwest, an event all about inspiring, motivating and empowering the young people of a city known for youth gun violence, but full of so much more -- culture, history, educators and students ded...

Geoffrey Canada gives a very interesting analogy in today's TED Talk: He compares the current education system in the United States to the era when banks were only open between the hours of 10am and 3pm. “Now, who can bank between 10 and 3?” asks Canada to a big laugh. “It went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn’t care. It wasn’t...

Four hundred middle and high school students will fill the TEDYouth auditorium this Saturday -- and many of them will be put straight to work. Students who’ve expressed interest in cinematography will shadow our video production team, students who want to be event planners will hang out with our producers, and those interested in journalism ...

At TED, we’re constantly impressed by the accomplishments of young innovators. With talks like Adora Svitak’s “What adults can learn from kids,” 12-year-old Amy O’Toole assisting Beau Lotto in “Science is for everyone: kids included,” and Thomas Suarez, who was developing apps before he could drive, we can’t help but be hopeful for the futur...

“In this place, you can connect to people that have been drawn apart for years by nationalists and the war. You can put them together in the same room and ... people are talking about the greater good.” This quote was recorded at the first regional Open Translation Project workshop held in Novi Sad, Serbia, on September 14. At the workshop...

We all have important things we want to accomplish, but there are so many distractions and stumbling blocks that may get in our way. Here, writer Bina Venkataraman shares a startlingly easy strategy to use to defeat future challenges. Playing poker is like planning for the future in one sense: You’re making decisions with limited information, a...

What does it mean to belong? For many, belonging provides the foundation of all comfort, a sense of conviction that others have your back, that all will be well. But sometimes belonging can be less tangible, more illusory or fleeting -- it can disappear without warning. At TED Salon: Belonging -- an evening of talks curated and co-hosted by T...

The right kind of preparation can keep us from stumbling during stressful situations, says cognitive scientist Sian Leah Beilock. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. “They choked.” It’s one of...

Legacy is a delightfully complex concept, and it's one that the TED@Westpac curators took on with gusto for the daylong event held in Sydney, Australia, on Monday December 11th. Themed around the idea of "The Future Legacy," the day was packed with 15 speakers and two performers and hosted by TED's Cyndi Stivers and TED speaker and monster p...

Want to persuade a friend or family member to open up to your perspective on a hot-button issue? A former debate coach tells you how. Families – they bring out the best in us and the worst in us. Which means gatherings for the holidays, anniversaries and other big events can sometimes be the scene for major arguments, ranging from the light (wh...

Welcome to "Dear Guy," TED's advice column from psychologist Guy Winch. Twice a month, he'll answer reader questions about life, love and what matters most. Please send them to dearguy@ted.com; to read his previous columns, go here. Dear Guy, When I was a kid and people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never knew what to say. My p...

Are machines going to save or destroy us? It's a question we've been grappling with since we first put 1s and 0s together to create computer code. And it feels like we're no closer to answering it; machines are growing smarter by the day, and while they're taking us to places we've never imagined, we seem to be losing turf as the supreme thinkin...

TED Fellows and Senior Fellows have just opened TED2015 with a bang in the beautiful Kay Meek theatre in Vancouver. In the first session, discover: how bacteria can be programmed to detect and treat cancer, a yellow legal pad that smuggles transgressive data into the halls of power, what makes non-state armed groups tick, hyperactive superma...

Prosthetics as sculpture, the maternal benefits of breast milk, Cuba’s radical approach to free medical education. These are just a few of the subjects tackled at TEDMED 2014: Unlocking Imagination, hosted last week simultaneously in San Francisco and Washington, DC, with a stage program directed by TED Fellow, physician, novelist and activi...

This morning, we kick off TED2017 in the new Community Theater with a program of fresh ideas, music and dance from the TED2017 Fellows and Senior Fellows. These Fellows are change-makers from many fields -- design, tech, education, business, science and many more -- offering a peek at the future us. Stanford Thompson opens the TED Fellows...

TED.com video exists to celebrate great speakers, thinkers, doers -- people with ideas that are passionately held and clearly put. For our speakers, putting their videos online has, in many cases, amplified their work beyond imagination, provoking new connections and directions to their careers and even their lives. As we approached the f...

By more clearly identifying our feelings or by recategorizing them, we can reduce suffering (yes!) and increase well-being, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. “He’s an angry person”; “I’m a very anxious person.” We’ve all made statements like these. They point towards the belief that emotions are hardwired in our brains or automatically ...

Innovation happens at the critical junctures between success and failure, risk and reward, truth and daring, past and future. At TEDGlobal>Geneva, in a former power plant right in the middle of the Rhone river in downtown Geneva, the conference gathered 900 attendees from nearly 80 countries. Against a stage backdrop designed by the student...

Epidemiologist Chikwe Ihekweazu was in the inaugural TED Fellows class of TEDGlobal 2007 in Tanzania. Living in the UK at the time, writing articles on public health issues in his native Nigeria, Chikwe was profoundly affected by his TED experience. Now running an influential Nigerian public health blog, an alumni program for his alma mater,...

With days to go until TED2015, our speakers are putting the final touches on their talks. But that’s hardly all they’ve been up to. Check out which speaker is investing $52 million in cutting-edge vaccine technology, which speaker will have a Ken Burns moment at the end of the month, and which speaker created a fashion show inspired by Agath...

TED@NYC is not your usual TED event. Hosted in a New York City club, speakers here—many of whom responded to an open audition call—give rapid-fire, five-minute talks. Below, a recap of each speaker who took the stage last night during this inspiring evening. The internet can be a place of intelligent conversation, or a place of rumors and...

The event: Talks and performances from TED Fellows, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this life-changing, world-changing program. Session 1 is hosted by TED Fellows director Shoham Arad and TED Senior Fellow Jedidah Isler. When and where: Monday, April 15, 2019, 10:30am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC. Opening: W...

Books can entertain, sucking you like a tornado into incredible new worlds. Books can teach, giving you a richer understanding of time periods, people and ideas you’ve never been exposed to. But books can do so much more. In today’s talk, TED's own Lisa Bu introduces us to the concept of “comparative reading,” the practice of reading book...

Social psychologist Heidi Grant shares 4 common ways that we inadvertently make things weird for other people when we request their assistance. Read this before your next ask. Asking for help isn’t just about what you say and do; it’s also about what you don’t say and do. In my research, I’ve found there are specific things you can say that can...

In 1945, there were 4.5 million hives of bees in the United States. Today, there are just about 2 million. It’s been a subtle decline over time, but one that has dramatically accelerated over the past seven years. And this should be extremely alarming, given that bees pollinate one-third of the world’s crops. In today’s talk, given at TED...