When Nancy Lublin started texting teenagers to help with her social advocacy organization, what she found was shocking -- they started texting back about their own problems, from bullying to depression to abuse. So she's setting up a text-only crisis line, and the results might be even more important than she expected.

Stuart Oda is an indoor urban farmer with a passion for innovation and sustainability. His goal: democratize access to fresh and nutritious food by democratizing the means and knowledge of production.

Stuart Brown's research shows play is not just joyful and energizing -- it's deeply involved with human development and intelligence. Through the National Institute for Play, he's working to better understand its significance.

Tristram Stuart sounds the warning bell on global food waste, calling for us to change the systems whereby large quantities of produce and other foods end up in trash heaps.

Stuart Firestein teaches students and “citizen scientists” that ignorance is far more important to discovery than knowledge.

Mothers have so many roles: nurturer, provider, disciplinarian, confidant, mentor, friend, protector. These incredible talks demonstrate all of the above.

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor writes, teaches and engages questions on race and racism in the US.

Curtis “Wall Street” Carroll overcame poverty, illiteracy, incarceration and a lack of outside support to become a stock investor, creator and teacher of his own financial literacy philosophy.

Play invites creativity and collaboration, and can inspire you to think out of the box! Take a recess and learn about the benefits of connecting with your inner-child.

How will tech change our everyday life? Some fascinating ideas with far-reaching implications that could possibly change our world for the better.

When Ashley Graham first started her modeling career, she was followed everywhere by a label she hates: "plus-size model." Defying such regressive pigeonholing, she explains how she stopped devaluing herself and reclaimed her body as her own.

Yves Béhar and Forrest North unveil Mission One, a sleek, powerful electric motorcycle. They share slides from distant (yet similar) childhoods that show how collaboration kick-started their friendship -- and shared dreams.

Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she's done album covers, books, the Citibank logo ...) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Look for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career.

As of August 2020, after many years, the TED Book Club will no longer be active. TED-curated books, sent a couple of times a year, were a part of the membership when registered for the flagship TED conference in Vancouver. Moving in the direction of sustainability, we’re looking at different ways to continue to provide you with recommended book...

Jackson Browne plays a song about being on the ocean ... or really, being anywhere among passionate friends. (He started writing this song aboard Mission Blue Voyage, a Sylvia Earle-inspired conference about saving the ocean.) "If I could be anywhere," he sings, "anywhere right now, I would be here."

Frederick Streeter Barrett reveals how psychedelic experiences may allow us to tap into resources within ourselves to heal and to grow.

When a squirrel chewed through a cable and knocked him offline, journalist Andrew Blum started wondering what the Internet was really made of. So he set out to go see it -- the underwater cables, secret switches and other physical bits that make up the net.

Can jiu jitsu make you a better employee? Francesca Simon-Carboni would never have been described as calm or level-headed in a crisis... until she started taking jiu jitsu. Francesca shares how the skills she built in jiu jitsu practice helped her advance in her career off the mat.

Maya Penn started her first company when she was 8 years old, and thinks deeply about how to be responsible both to her customers and to the planet. She shares her story -- and some animations, and some designs, and some infectious energy -- in this charming talk.

Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world.

Shimpei Takahashi always dreamed of designing toys. But when he started work as a toy developer, he found that the pressure to produce squashed his creativity. In this short, funny talk, Takahashi describes how he got his ideas flowing again, and shares a simple word game anyone can play to generate new ideas. (In Japanese with English subtitles.)

Five years ago, Roz Savage quit her high-powered London job to become an ocean rower. She's crossed the Atlantic solo, and just started the third leg of a Pacific solo row, the first for a woman. Why does she do it? Hear her reasons, both deeply personal and urgently activist.

We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.

Humankind has been looking for the giant squid (Architeuthis) since we first started taking pictures underwater. But the elusive deep-sea predator could never be caught on film. Oceanographer and inventor Edith Widder shares the key insight -- and the teamwork -- that helped to capture the squid on film for the first time.

A year in reflection of what we learned about our personalities, health, hopes and world as we know it.

Scott Dinsmore quit a job that made him miserable, and spent the next four years wondering how to find work that was joyful and meaningful. He shares what he learned in this deceptively simple talk about finding out what matters to you — and then getting started doing it.

When it comes to talking about money with your significant other, most of us ... just don't. But the fact is, if you share a life, you need to discuss your finances now, says behavioral scientist Wendy De La Rosa. She explains why and shares 3 tips to get you started.

Scientist Bijan Zakeri started studying Streptococcus pyogenes -- the pathogen responsible for diseases from strep throat to scarlet fever -- in the hopes of creating a new generation of antibodies to treat cancer. What he developed instead was completely unexpected: a molecular superglue made from its stone-strong chemical bonds that may change...

When two bodies wearing identical wetsuits washed ashore in Norway and the Netherlands, journalist Anders Fjellberg and photographer Tomm Christiansen started a search to answer the question: who were these people? What they found and reported in Norway's "Dagbladet" is that everybody has a name, everybody has a story and everybody is someone.

Jamil Abu-Wardeh jump-started the comedy scene in the Arab world by founding the Axis of Evil Middle East Comedy Tour, which brings standup comedians to laughing audiences all over the region. He's found that, by respecting the "three B's" (blue material, beliefs and "bolitics"), the Axis of Evil comics find plenty of cross-border laughs.