Nearly 400 years ago, a tiny town in Germany made a bargain with God: spare its people from the Black Plague and we'll put on a play in your honor... forever. And it worked! Now every decade, the entire town comes together to stage the play, drawing massive crowds to one of the largest religious spectacles in the world. But problematic parts of ...

Traveling is tricky right now and, for most, the boundaries of our worlds have shrunk dramatically. So a lot of people are spending a lot more time in virtual places, like Sea of Thieves, Fortnite, Ultima Online and more. Explore how these online worlds help us push past real-world boundaries and have vastly new experiences, even become new vers...

What happens to a tourist paradise when no one shows up to visit? Rapa Nui, known to many as Easter Island, typically welcomes more than 120,000 visitors each year—which is a lot for a place with only 10,000 residents. After COVID-19 shuts down flights to this remote island, citizens reimagine what their lives, their livelihood, and their home c...

Meet Liberato Kani, a hip hop artist in Lima, Peru -- or as he says, "the Andean Bronx". At his concerts, a typical call and response you hear is "Quechua es resistencia": Quechua is resistance. Though Quechua is spoken by nearly ten million people, Peru's native language is at risk of dying off because of anti-indigenous prejudice. Liberato and...

From the EG conference: Productivity guru Tim Ferriss' fun, encouraging anecdotes show how one simple question -- "What's the worst that could happen?" -- is all you need to learn to do anything.

New tech spawns new anxieties, says scientist and philosopher Grady Booch, but we don't need to be afraid an all-powerful, unfeeling AI. Booch allays our worst (sci-fi induced) fears about superintelligent computers by explaining how we'll teach, not program, them to share our human values. Rather than worry about an unlikely existential threat,...

Does it seem like Washington has no new ideas? Instead of looking to build the future, it sometimes feels like the US political establishment happily retreats into fear and willful ignorance. Journalist David Rothkopf lays out a few of the major issues that US leadership is failing to address -- from cybercrime to world-shaking new tech to the r...

Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us...

Humanity's fine-tuned sense of fear served us well as a young species, giving us laser focus to avoid being eaten by competing beasts. But it's less wonderful when that same visceral, body-hijacking sense of fear kicks in in front of 20 folk-music fans at a Tuesday night open-mic. Palms sweat, hands shake, vision blurs, and the brain says RUN: i...

In a society obsessed with body image and marked by a fear of fat, Kelli Jean Drinkwater engages in radical body politics through art. She confronts the public's perception of bigger bodies by bringing them into spaces that were once off limits -- from fashion runways to the Sydney Festival -- and entices all of us to look again and rethink our ...

After being diagnosed with a rare genetic condition that deteriorates muscle, Cara E. Yar Khan was told she'd have to limit her career ambitions and dial down her dreams. She ignored that advice and instead continued to pursue her biggest ambitions. In this powerful, moving talk, she shares her philosophy for working on the projects that matter ...

A new drug reduces the risk of heart attacks by 40%. Shark attacks are up by a factor of two. Drinking a liter of soda per day doubles your chance of developing cancer. These are all examples of a common way risk is presented in news articles, and can often be misleading. So how can we better evaluate risk? Gerd Gigerenzer explores the differenc...

We must face our fears if we want to get the most out of technology -- and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of humanity, says Garry Kasparov. One of the greatest chess players in history, Kasparov lost a memorable match to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. Now he shares his vision for a future where intelligent machi...

The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls "fear-setting." Learn more about how this practice can help you th...

After losing her mother in a house fire when she was just six years old, Danielle Torley saw two paths before her: a life full of fear, or one that promised healing and recovery. In this inspiring talk, she describes how she turned her grief into beauty in a most unexpected way -- by dancing with fire.

Daniel Kish has been blind since he was 13 months old, but has learned to "see" using a form of echolocation. He clicks his tongue and sends out flashes of sound that bounce off surfaces in the environment and return to him, helping him to construct an understanding of the space around him. In a rousing talk, Kish shows how this works -- and ask...

In the 1970s, Diana Nyad set long-distance swim records that are still unbroken. Thirty years later, at 60, she attempted her longest swim yet, from Cuba to Florida. In this funny, powerful talk at TEDMED, she talks about how to prepare mentally to achieve an extreme dream, and asks: What will YOU do with your wild, precious life?

It's a fateful moment in history. We've seen divisive elections, divided societies and the growth of extremism -- all fueled by anxiety and uncertainty. "Is there something we can do, each of us, to be able to face the future without fear?" asks Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. In this electrifying talk, the spiritual leader gives us three specific wa...

"We're not in a clean energy revolution; we're in a clean energy crisis," says climate policy expert Michael Shellenberger. His surprising solution: nuclear. In this passionate talk, he explains why it's time to overcome longstanding fears of the technology, and why he and other environmentalists believe it's past time to embrace nuclear as a vi...

Can an algorithm forecast the site of the next riot? In this accessible talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows how complex social behavior can be analyzed and perhaps predicted through analogies to natural phenomena, like the patterns of a leopard's spots or the distribution of predators and prey in the wild.

Finding the right mate is no cakewalk -- but is it even mathematically likely? In a charming talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by math!) for finding that special someone.

Success requires taking risks. Watch as Anja Blacha, renowned mountaineer and VP of Youth at PMI, sits down with TED's current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers to talk about how climbing the world's tallest peaks translates to the professional challenges we all face.

A massive generation of young people is about to inherit the world, and it's the duty of everyone to give them a fighting chance for their futures, says UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore. In this forward-looking talk, she explores the crises facing them and details an ambitious new global initiative, Generation Unlimited, which aims to en...

How does an astronaut prepare physically and mentally to launch into space? NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, who traveled to the International Space Station in April 2021 as part of the SpaceX Crew-2 mission, shares stellar life lessons on how to cultivate the resolve to do incredible things through preparation -- and a dash of bravery. A rare gli...

In 2002, the Colombian guerrilla movement known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) kidnapped Ingrid Betancourt in the middle of her presidential campaign. For the next six years, Betancourt was held hostage in jungle prison camps where she was ravaged by malaria, fleas, hunger and human cruelty until her rescue by the Colombian...

Trust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it's broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it -- something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. "If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unpre...

There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique -- called the memory palace -- and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him.

Can a bird that symbolizes death help the living catch criminals? In this informative and accessible talk, forensic anthropologist Lauren Pharr shows us how vultures impact crime scenes -- and the assistance they can provide to detectives investigating murders. (This talk contains graphic images.)

With each step, you slide 400,000 years back in time. Where are you? Behind a hardware store in New Jersey -- which also happens to be a massive prehistoric graveyard. The only thing that can save it from turning into an apartment complex is geologist Ken Lacovara and a community effort unlike any attempted before. Hear how this town of 15,000 t...

Poet Suheir Hammad performs two spine-tingling spoken-word pieces: "What I Will" and "break (clustered)" -- meditations on war and peace, on women and power. Wait for the astonishing line: "Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded."