Confidence and joy in your own body are the keys to healthy intimacy, says educator and author Emily Nagoski. Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a new post in a series called “How to Be a Better Human,” containing a helpful piece of advice from a speaker in the TED community. To see all the posts in the series, clic...

Not every conversation with a climate denier has to lead to raised voices and hurt feelings. Here’s how to do it constructively. “Climate change has become one of the taboo topics -- like sex, politics and religion -- that doesn’t get talked about at the Thanksgiving table,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Chan...

How long have you been staring at a screen? Chances are this is not the beginning of your day on your mobile device or computer -- and it’s very unlikely to be the end of it. You reading this blog post is only a moment in your digital day, nestled among Facebook updates, Twitter posts, Tumblr reblogs, YouTube videos and, of course, more arti...

It’s time to ensure that no American has to worry about where they and their families will sleep tonight, says housing consultant James Stockard. There’s a lot of talk these days about how we can make America great again, with politicians, academics and journalists looking for the answers in areas that include increased defense spending, infras...

Digital minimalist Cal Newport shows how you can turn off the information firehose and follow current events on your own terms. Are you ready to join the attention resistance? In 2010, a trio of Germans with backgrounds in sociology, technology and market research posted a document titled “Das Slow Media Manifest” (the English translation is “T...

I’ll never forget the first images of Sebastião Salgado’s that I ever saw. At the time, I was just getting into photography, and his images of the mines of Serra Pelada struck me as otherworldly, possessing a power that I had never seen in a photo before (or, if I’m honest, since). In the twenty years that I’ve been photographing, his work has...

Sociologist Jill Suitor studies the truth about moms and their kids -- and the surprising effects that parental favoritism can have on us. If you want to start a fight in a multi-child family, try throwing out the question “Who is Mom’s favorite?” While most mothers will insist they love their children equally, many kids will say that Mom has a...

TED2017 begins on Monday in Vancouver, Canada, and will explore the theme “The Future You.” If the future you is anything like the future us, you are likely curled up in a big cushy chair right now, devouring the contents of a book that flips your thinking. Below, some reading suggestions from the speaker program. Read, enjoy and stay tuned ...

Is it possible to define, measure and even increase how wise a person is? Psychiatrist Dilip Jeste is attempting to answer those questions. To assess our health, we weigh ourselves, measure our blood pressure, and check our cholesterol. But one scientist is trying to figure out the connection between our well-being and something much more diffi...

TEDGlobal 2014 will be held in Rio de Janeiro from October 5 through 10. With a speaker program that ranges from a nomadic filmmaker to a Buddhist monk, from a technologist changing the way we detect cancer to a chef who’s preserving the culinary heritage of Brazil, the conference promises to flip our thinking many times over. We spoke to curato...

Musician, ethnomusicologist, author, and social media maven -- Kyra Gaunt (see her TEDxChisinau talk here) won’t limit herself to one way of thinking. Using a variety of media, she works nonstop to help humanity see our own remarkable unity in diversity. Your work encompasses scholarship, musical performance, educational theory, race, gender,...

Linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker's talk at the end of TED2018 Session 1 argued enthusiastically that humanity has, as a whole, made remarkable progress toward prosperity, peace and happiness — backing up his assertions with charts that showed an optimistic trajectory. But is that the whole story? A roundtable of TED Fellows — includin...

Crystal Giants by Giovanni Badino This book shows clearly how the reality of nature can go far beyond human imagination. Badino and the explorers of La Venta bring the reader on the exploration of one of the most astonishing places of the world, the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica, discovered in a silver mine in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2000. This und...

Is a private Facebook group the 2017 version of the all-men’s golf getaway? What’s the difference between being “a good man” and “a real man”? In an honest and eye-opening conversation, Baby Boomer Michael Kimmel and his Generation Z son, Zachary, share their experiences of masculinity. Michael Kimmel (TED Talk: Why gender equality is good for ...

There’s something so cool about finding a new podcast to love -- each little download opens a door to new ideas, new jokes, new ways of seeing the world. Working at TED, as you might guess, many of us have strong opinions about this. Beyond the podcasts we all love: This American Life, Radiolab, The Moth, Serial, and of course our own TED Ra...

Since we know TED speakers love to read, we asked them: What book could you not stop reading? Here are their eclectic picks, ready for sticking in your carry-on or for gifting. If you want to be transported to another place and time The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood This novel is set in the near future and tells a horrifying story of a...

Here's a list of specific steps you can take, as recommended by members of the TED community. Educate Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's New York Times bestseller How to Be an Antiracist is one of the most important books I've ever read. (Watch Dr. Kendi speak on "how to build an antiracist world" here.) He provides an empowering lens and language to unders...