The seven speakers lived up to the two words in the title of the session. Their talks showcased both our collective insanity -- the algorithmically-assembled extremes of the Internet -- and our humanity -- the values and desires that extremists astutely tap into -- along with some speakers combining the two into a glorious salad. Let's dig i...

About this event: TEDxSacramento's stream of TEDxWomen -- hosted by Pat Mitchell and the Paley Center for Media - will take place at The Urban Hive on Saturday, December 1st, 2012. Themed The Space Between -- This is the second edition of TEDxWomen - the first brought to the stage speakers such as Gloria Steinem, Dr. Oz and Jane Fonda and was viewed by 120 TEDx ...

Anita Doron’s first feature film, The Lesser Blessed, is a love story that takes place in a remote community in the Northwest Territories. This moving film is being released theatrically in Canada today, and will arrive in the U.S. on June 13th. As it opens, we asked Doron to tell us about the film, her path from poet to filmmaker, and about...

Do we have the vision and the energy to confront seemingly impossible problems -- like predatory corporations, political deadlock, the wasted potential of millions of refugees? Session 5 rounded up people who are jumping right in. A call to action on fossil fuels. Costa Rica, climate advocate Monica Araya’s native country, gets almost 100 perce...

About this event: The heart: a muscle that pumps blood through the body of every living creature on earth with a vertebral column. Self-regulatory, adaptable, and powerful, it is complex and life-sustaining. In the collective psyche, the heart holds a special, symbolic place. Since the middle ages in Western civilization, it has been linked with love and consider...

Three sessions of memorable TED Talks covering life, death and the future of humanity made the penultimate day of TED2018 a remarkable space for tech breakthroughs and dispatches from the edges of culture. Here are some of the themes we heard echoing through the opening day, as well as some highlights from around the conference venue in Vanco...

On February 25, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program, an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas. These 11 Residents will spend 14 weeks at TED's New York headquarters, working and thinking together. New Residents include: A community organizer preserving disappearing languages An LGBTQ+ digital activist ed...

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...

About this event: In a 100% digital universe, we are losing our identity as humans. In this era of technological revolution, we have to assume an unprecedented responsibility: to achieve the binomial between human and machine, we need to balance the battle between carbon and silicon. Why is it important to vindicate the humanities in a world that seems destined...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Michael Tilson Thomas is the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony and principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Now he's up to round off this session in style, seated at a grand piano that's been wheeled onto the stage just for ...

Rick Ledgett is the deputy director of the National Security Agency. He's here to give a response to Edward Snowden's onstage/virtual appearance at TED earlier in the week. (See the talk, Here's how we take back the Internet.) On Tuesday, the former NSA sysadmin made the case for open government and private lives, arguing that "we don't have...

About this event: “What is possible?”                                                                                                                                                                                      In order to know what is possible, we need to know where we came from, how and why? We go back into the world of the druids. The old roman routes...

While it may result in tremendous good, empathy can also be narrow, biased and surprisingly insensitive, argues psychology professor Paul Bloom. Does empathy make the world a better place? It certainly looks like it. After all, empathy drives people to treat others’ suffering as if it were their own, which then motivates action to make the suff...

There are two ways to see a glass of water—some view it as half full, others refer to it as half empty. During the third day of TEDGlobal, the speakers fell into one of the two camps. While many spoke about the ways in which new technology and increasing global openness can bring people together in unique and fascinating ways, another subset of ...

Historian Yuval Noah Harari offers a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class. The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms tha...

The event: TED Salon: Education Everywhere, curated by Cloe Shasha, TED's director of speaker development; Stephanie Lo, director of programs for TED-Ed; and Logan Smalley, director of TED-Ed The partner: Bezos Family Foundation and ENDLESS When and where: Thursday, January 24, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York City Music: ...

So here's a surprise. Chris Anderson takes the stage to introduce a very special guest -- who's not actually here. Beaming in from a remote location in Russia, controlling a bot he can wheel around the stage to see the assembled audience, here's arguably the most controversial figure in contemporary culture: Edward Snowden. As he wheels slowly...

Collective wisdom might best be found when small groups of people are given a chance to discuss and deliberate, say social scientists Mariano Sigman, Joaquin Navajas, Gerry Garbulsky and Dan Ariely. Could this suggest a better way to vote? For many years, problems with democracy have been pushed under the carpet in the general belief that “demo...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing a tsunami of change that will dramatically affect how we interact with and adapt to technology. The ways we choose to ride this wave will determine the shape of our future. Will we use this as an opportunity to solve our most pressing issues, or allow it to become a calamity that divides us? At...

Tuesday morning in the former East Berlin, the midcentury Kosmos cinema hummed with new ideas on business, technology and self, at an event called TED@BCG. The event was produced by TED Institute, a project that embeds within organizations and companies to help employees develop their ideas. Six hundred TEDsters, BCG'ers and guests filled th...

We live in an interconnected world where boundaries between physical and digital spaces are blurring. We can no longer think about innovation in isolation, but must consider how emerging technologies -- like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, 5G networks, robotics and the decentralized web -- will combine to ...

How can we better understand the world within and around us? In the thought-provoking fifth session of TED2017, hosted by TED's Editorial Director, Helen Walters, talks about neuroscience, philosophy, cognitive science -- and a special experiment in behavioral science -- explored issues like filter bubbles, Alzheimer's and the very essence of...

We know that our world -- our data, our lives, our countries -- are becoming more and more connected. But what should we do with that? In two sessions of TED@IBM, the answer shaped up to be: Dream as big as you can. Speakers took the stage to pitch their ideas for using connected data and new forms of machine intelligence to make material ch...

Photographer Eman Mohammed captures the daily lives of incarcerated women and their children at one of the United States’ rare residential parenting programs. Eman Mohammed was just 19 when she began covering her native Gaza for a Bethlehem-based news agency. She spent more than a dozen years navigating violence and gunfire -- and sexism and ha...

TED2018 hit its stride on day 3, with talks from explorers of space and oceans, builders of cities and bridges, engineers of the future and many more. Here are some of the themes we heard echoing through the opening day, as well as some highlights from around the conference venue in Vancouver. Are we alone in the cosmos? The universe is 13...

Enthusiastic recommendations for uplifting reads, as suggested by TED speakers and TED-Ed educators. If you’re searching for some calm The Peace of Wild Things: And Other Poems by Wendell Berry This little book of poetry is my current morning dose of calm, and I use it like a meditation if I’m feeling stressed about the day ahead. The most f...

Sarah Jane Pell is making preparations to live in the ocean. That’s right, under the sea -- but not until after a jaunt to the Arctic. Never one to be satisfied with the ordinary, Sarah Jane founded the Aquabatics Research Team Initiative to explore water choreography, technology, and human behavior as works of live art. Her future projects wi...

Years ago, I listened to an episode of the podcast On Being where Krista Tippett interviews writer and Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein. This interview has ended up being a touchstone for me -- and one that I continue to come back to --  because of all the generous wisdom that Boorstein shares. But there’s one moment in particular that came ...

Actress + playwright

Over the past 10 years, TED Talks videos have tracked our ever-tighter relationship with technology -- including the tools we use to access it, our interfaces ... from keyboards and mice to magic wands and sensory vests. For our guide to this evolving field, we start with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s talk from the very first TED, ...