Marina Abramović (TED Talk: An art made of trust, vulnerability and connection) is talking about the role of humor in her life and work. Now, that’s not necessarily a topic you might expect to chat about with the grande dame of the performance art world. Her work is powerful, austere, often overwhelming … but funny? “People know my work and the...

Allan Savory isn’t afraid to own up to the “greatest blunder” of his life. In his incredible talk from TED2013, Savory shares his life’s work managing grasslands in Africa, weaving a gripping tale out of what seems like an unlikely topic.  In the 1950s, Savory helped create large national parks in Africa. But as people left this land to make way...

The former Prime Minister of Greece, George Papandreou, takes the stage as the first speaker at TEDGlobal 2013. It's already been a long morning, with a few dozen protesters earlier objecting to his presence in Edinburgh outside  the conference center. And Papandreou cuts something of a pensive figure as he tells us he's set to give a speech u...

"I am a magnificent failure," Ashton Kutcher announced on the TEDYouth stage in New Orleans earlier today. "I screw up so much it hurts." The star of television show Two and a Half Men said this not to be self-deprecating or to beat up on himself, but to drive home the point that failure is a part of life -- and one that can prompt profou...

Over the years, many writers and storytellers have given great TED Talks. Here, we’ve assembled 12 of our favorite quotes from them.  We've also created special quote images scattered throughout this post for the occasion -- feel free to share them as quote cards (use the hashtag #TEDReads), employ them as wallpaper for your phone or other mo...

At the intersections where we meet and collaborate, we can pool our collective wisdom to seek solutions to the world's greatest problems. But true change begs for more than incremental steps and passive reactions -- we need to galvanize transformation to create our collective future. To celebrate the effort of bold thinkers building a bet...

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...

Photo: Michael Brands If watching a TEDTalk inspires insights (see this post for more) -- imagine giving one. From speakers' own blogs: Here's what Brené Brown learned >> The first lesson I learned is about vulnerability (no suprise). The folks in the picture are raising their hands in response to two questions that I asked du...

"I sometimes look back at the TED Talk and I try to think of where we were at the time. We had four university partners, about a half a million students, 37 courses. Now we have more than six million students, more than 550 courses and 107 institutions that are working for us. And 'MOOC' is now a buzzword in many, many households." Daphne...

In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won a TED Prize with her wish to bring the world together for one day of film. Today during Session 4: Wish, she talks about her latest film, The Square. The Oscar-nominated documentary follows the lives of a group of protestors during the Egyptian Revolution. Their mantra: "We will no longer live in the story...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson "Be nice to nerds..." As the opening slide from a TEDTalk, not too surprising. As the opening line from Regina Dugan, the director of DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), kind of ominous. But the projects she demonstrated are extraordinary, and how they get there, even more so. If you...

They’ve become synonymous with the failure to adapt, but dinosaurs were actually marvels of speed, size, power and versatility, explains paleontologist Kenneth Lacovera. And they could represent one of our best hopes for the future. Albert Einstein was a complete and utter failure. It’s true he revolutionized science, invented our current frame...

Psychologist Guy Winch lays out seven useful ways to reboot your emotional health ... starting right now. You put a bandage on a cut or take antibiotics to treat an infection, right? No questions asked. In fact, questions would be asked if you didn’t apply first aid when necessary. So why isn’t the same true of our mental health? We are expecte...

At TEDMED 2012, Ben Goldacre shared a startling reality: that doctors are not able to read all the studies conducted on a pharmaceutical before prescribing it to their patients. This is because of a bias in medical research toward positive results – while one study confirming a drug’s effectiveness may be published, the results of other stud...

The bad news: We all face powerful mental blocks that stop us when we’re trying to achieve our goals. The good news: We can outwit them. Here’s how, according to cognitive psychologist Amanda Crowell. 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;...

Teacher Diana Laufenberg is onstage right now, sharing her stories of failure and success. So she asked us to share this message with her students: Ms. Laufenberg reminds her students at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia: Be kind to the substitute teacher and make sure to read and reflect on the City on a Hill. I'll be checking in...

Thursday marked the first-ever TED en Español speaker event hosted by TED in its New York City office. The all-Spanish daytime event featured eight speakers, a musical performance, five short films and fifteen one-minute talks given by members of the audience. The New York event is just the latest addition to TED’s sweeping new Spanish-la...

We think of modern marriage as an institution of love -- but when love ends, we cling to old-fashioned stories about divorce. Astro Teller and Danielle Teller suggest we take a more humane, empathetic look at the end of a marriage. When Gwyneth Paltrow announced her split from her husband using the term “conscious uncoupling,” the media and blo...

Joan Halifax: Essential to compassion: We cannot be attached to outcome. Donna Karan: I realized I needed to address people, not just dress them. Sejal Hathi: I made it my mission to build a sisterhood of change-makers. Madeleine Albright: Women's issues are the hardest issues; they are the ones that...

Community member and Montessori educator Della Palacios wrote this in response to Bryan Stevenson's TED Talk, We need to talk about an injustice: "My sister and I just had this conversation. There is a destructive push in her field, criminal justice, for performance-based funding, just like there was with No Child Left Behind. The absolute na...

We all think the way things are now is the way things will continue to be. If you’re flying high, that’s not so bad, but if you’re falling, flailing or treading water, then this is a dangerous tendency, says author Neil Pasricha. Here's how to counteract it. The staircase represents your life so far. And you can’t see up the invisible staircase...

In an experimental Session 6, Bill Gates hosted and guest-curated the speaker lineup. David Christian charts our course from the Big Bang to today: "To understand complexity, you have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it." Amina Az-Zubair on the UN Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria: "We are making p...

Jack Horner describes his work to recreate a living dinosaur from the genes of an unlikely ancestor: What we’re trying to do is take our chicken, modify it, and make a chickenosaurus. Rajesh Rao on deciphering the controversial Indus script: If it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we have ...

At TEDxUW 2011, economics professor Larry Smith gave a memorable talk titled, “Why you will fail to have a great career.” The hilarious talk takes aim at people and the incredible excuses they dream up for not pursuing their passions, from “It’s too hard” to “But I value human relationships more than my work.” His talk was a call for people t...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson Brené Brown is an expert on vulnerability who starts off her talk by describing the extraordinary impact of giving a talk in 2010 at TEDxHouston: The Power of Vulnerability. For starters, she says, the day after giving the talk, she woke up in a state of depression that she'd shared details of her own breakdo...

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...

TED Conversations is a unique space where any member of this community can get feedback on an idea, pose an interesting question, or start a debate with their fellow TEDizens from around the globe. This week, dozens of new conversations were started. Many of them were about issues brought up in our first television special, TED Talks Education, ...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Julie Burstein is waving a pot at us. She is a fan of pottery, it turns out, and she starts off her talk by describing the Raku tradition, generally found in Japanese tea ceremonies. What's particularly wonderful about Raku, she says, is both the speed at which pots are made and the fact that any resulting imp...

Just in time for the second season of TED Talks India, Bollywood actor, producer and series host Shah Rukh Khan selects 8 talks that have inspired him and tells us why. Nearly two years ago, TED launched its first-ever TV series in India: TED Talks India: Nayi Soch (New Thinking). Filmed in Hindi, hosted by actor and producer Shah Rukh Khan, an...

Volunteering at NGOs around the world convinced Peter Haas there had to be a better way to help villages develop. He co-founded the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) to empower locals to start their own businesses that bring clean water, electricity and sanitation to their communities -- and keep them there. Inte...