Trailblazers: A night of talks in partnership with The Macallan

Curators David Biello and Chee Pearlman host TED Salon: Trailblazers, in partnership with The Macallan, at the TED World Theater in New York City on June 27, 2019. (Photo: Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The event: TED Salon: Trailblazers, hosted by TED design and arts curator Chee Pearlman and TED science curator David Biello

When and where: Thursday, June 27, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York City

The partner: The Macallan

Music: Sammy Rae & The Friends

The talks in brief:

Marcus Bullock, entrepreneur and justice reform advocate

• Big idea: Over his eight-year prison sentence, Marcus Bullock was sustained by his mother’s love — and her photos of cheeseburgers. Years later, as an entrepreneur, he asked himself, “How can I help make it easier for other families to deliver love to their own incarcerated loved ones?”
  Communicating with prisoners is notoriously difficult and dominated by often-predatory telecommunications companies. By creating Flikshop — an app that allows inmates’ friends and families to send physical picture postcards into prison with the ease of texting — Marcus Bullock is bypassing the billion-dollar prison telecommunications industry and allowing hundreds of thousands of prisoners access to the same love and motivation that his mother gave him.
• Quote of the talk: “I stand today with a felony, and just like millions of others around the country who also have that ‘F’ on their chest, just as my mom promised me many years ago, I wanted to show them that there was still life after prison.”

“It’s always better to collaborate with different communities rather than trying to speak for them,” says fashion designer Becca McCharen-Tran. She speaks at TED Salon: Trailblazers, in partnership with The Macallan, at the TED World Theater, June 27, 2019, New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Becca McCharen-Tran, founder and creative director of bodywear line CHROMAT

• Big idea: Fashion designers have a responsibility to create inclusive designs suited for all gender expressions, ages, ability levels, ethnicities and races — and by doing so, they can shatter our limited definition of beauty.
  From day one in school, fashion designers are taught to create for a certain type of body, painting “thin, white, cisgender, able-bodied, young models as the ideal,” says fashion designer Becca McCharen-Tran. This has made body-shaming a norm for so many who strive to assimilate to the illusion of perfection in fashion imagery. McCharen-Tran believes creators are responsible for reimagining and expanding what a “bikini body” is. Her swimwear focused clothing line CHROMAT celebrates beauty in all its forms. They unapologetically counter the narrative through inclusive, explosive designs that welcome all of the uniqueness that comes with being a human.
• Quote of the talk: “Inclusivity means nothing if it’s only surface level … who is making the decisions behind the scenes is just as important. It’s imperative to include diverse decision-makers in the process, and it’s always better to collaborate with different communities rather than trying to speak for them.”

Amy Padnani, editor at the New York Times (or, as some of her friends call her, the “Angel of Death”)

• Big idea: No one deserves to be overlooked in life, even in death.
  Padnani created “Overlooked,” a New York Times series that recognizes the stories of dismissed and marginalized people. Since 1851, the newspaper has published thousands of obituaries for individuals like heads of state and celebrities, but only a small amount of those obits chronicled the lives of women and people of color. With “Overlooked,” Padnani forged a path for the publication to right the wrongs of the past while refocusing society’s lens on who’s considered important. Powerful in its ability to perspective-shift and honor those once ignored, “Overlooked” is also on track to become a Netflix series.
• Fun fact: Prior to Padnani’s breakout project, the New York Times had yet to publish obituaries on notable individuals in history such as Ida B. Wells, Sylvia Plath, Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing.

Sam Van Aken shares the work behind the “Tree of 40 Fruit,” an ongoing series of hybridized fruit trees that grow multiple varieties of stone fruit. He speaks at TED Salon: Trailblazers, in partnership with The Macallan, at the TED World Theater, June 27, 2019, New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Sam Van Aken, multimedia contemporary artist, art professor at Syracuse University in New York and creator of the Tree of 40 Fruit

• Big idea: Many of the fruits that have been grown in the US were originally brought there by immigrants. But due to industrialization, disease and climate change, American farmers produce just a fraction of the types available a century ago. Sam Van Aken has hand-grafted heirloom varieties of stone fruit — peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and cherries — to make the “Tree of 40 Fruit.” What began as an art project to showcase their multi-hued blossoms has become a living archive of rare specimens and their histories; a hands-on (and delicious!) way to teach people about conservation and cultivation; and a vivid symbol of the need for biodiversity in order to ensure food security. Van Aken has created and planted his trees at museums and at people’s homes, and his largest project to date is the 50-tree Open Orchard — which, in total, will possess 200 varieties originated or historically grown in the region — on Governor’s Island in New York City.
• Fun fact: One hundred years ago, there were over 2,000 varieties of peaches, nearly 2,000 varieties of plums, and nearly 800 named apple varieties grown in the United States.
• Quote of the talk: “More than just food, embedded in these fruit is our culture. It’s the people who cared for and cultivated them, who valued them so much that they brought them here with them as a connection to their homes, and it’s the way they passed them on and shared them. In many ways, these fruit are our story.”

Removing his primetime-ready makeup, Lee Thomas shares his personal story of living with vitiligo. He speaks at TED Salon: Trailblazers, in partnership with The Macallan, at the TED World Theater, June 27, 2019, New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Lee Thomas, broadcast journalist

• Big idea: Despite having a disease that left him vulnerable to stares in public, Lee Thomas discovered he could respond to ignorance and fear with engagement and dialogue.
  As a news anchor, Lee Thomas used makeup to hide the effects of vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder that left large patches of his skin without pigmentation. But without makeup, he was vulnerable to derision — until he decided to counter misunderstanding with eye contact and conversation. Ultimately, an on-camera story on his condition led him to start a support group and join others in celebrating World Vitiligo Day.
• Quote of the talk: “Positivity is something worth fighting for — and the fight is not with others, it’s internal. If you want to make positive changes in your life, you have to consistently be positive.”

Belonging: Talks on family, love and loss from the TED World Theater

What does it mean to belong? For many, belonging provides the foundation of all comfort, a sense of conviction that others have your back, that all will be well. But sometimes belonging can be less tangible, more illusory or fleeting — it can disappear without warning.

At TED Salon: Belonging — an evening of talks curated and co-hosted by TED’s head of curation, Helen Walters, and curation coordinator Lorena Aviles — six speakers explored what belonging is really all about. They shared personal meditations on where they find hope for a more welcoming world and shone a light on the breakthroughs and ideas that might get us there. After an effusive, joyful performance of “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed on Freedom)” by the Resistance Revival Chorus, the session kicked off with attorney Mónica Ramírez.

TED’s Lorena Aviles (left) and Helen Walters co-host the TED Salon: Belonging, held on December 11, 2018, at the TED World Theater in New York City. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Elevate those who pick, pack and plant the food we eat every day. Marginalized people are not looking for saviors, says attorney Mónica Ramírez: “They’re looking for individuals who will support them, as day by day they get up and do the best they can to save themselves.” As the daughter and granddaughter of migrant farm workers, Ramírez knows firsthand the problem that affect these often-unseen and isolated groups — from wage theft and sexual harassment to dangerous working conditions. She has been an advocate for these communities nearly her entire life, and what she’s learned is both simple and profound: “If we want to solve problems, we need to call on the very best experts who can bring the very best solutions.” The experts she has in mind? The people directly impacted by some of society’s worst problems, who are best suited to share their truths with the world. Advocates like Ramírez, and citizens in solidarity, must make space for the voices not commonly heard.

Chitra Aiyar encourages her students to see each other as teammates working toward the same goals — and grow together along the way. She speaks at TED Salon: Belonging, held on December 11, 2018, at the TED World Theater in New York City. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Build community when you feel isolated. As the executive director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, Chitra Aiyar works to help low-income youth of color develop the skills they need to thrive in college. When some of the college students Aiyar works with described feeling alienated on campus, she realized they would need to find real community if they were going to succeed. The research backs this up: only 11 percent of low-income first-generation students graduate from college after six years, and 45 percent drop out after their first year. “If you are spending energy thinking about whether you belong, you can’t concentrate on school … and every challenge, every hardship is a reinforcement [of that],” Aiyar says. To combat this, she encourages her students to cultivate spaces for other marginalized students to connect and help each other grow. She was inspired by the pre-med program at Xavier University — where, instead of pitting students against each other by warning of high dropout rates, professors encourage students to see each other as teammates working toward the same goals. Aiyar details three steps to move toward this new kind of community: first, imagine your goal and broaden it beyond yourself; then, start an activity that connects you to others with similar goals — like offering feedback on a classmate’s paper; and finally, take the opportunity to redefine your relationship to your community. Instead of feeling outcast, Aiyar says, her students could see themselves as actively engaged in a larger community that supports them. “We all have times that we don’t feel like we belong,” she says. “If we take the time to make sure that other people belong, in that process, we’ll find belonging as well.”

Reimagining the US-Mexico border wall. What is a border? It’s a line on a map, a place where cultures, languages and beliefs mix and merge. And it’s a place of beautiful, sometimes violent and occasionally ridiculous complexity, says architectural researcher Ronald Rael. Rael studies the US-Mexico border, where nearly 700 miles of wall divide the two countries — “an arcane, medieval architecture … an overly simplistic response to a complex set of issues,” he says. It’s estimated that the wall approved in 2006 will cost $49 billion to construct and maintain over the next 25 years — not including the additional $70 billion estimated for the walls currently proposed. Beyond that, there’s the human toll: more than 7,000 people have died trying to cross the border. To communicate the financial and human cost of the wall, Rael designs moving, sometimes satirical souvenirs — things like postcards, “bordergames” and snow globes that reimagine the social and economic realities of the border. They nod to activities like “wall y ball,” a borderland version of volleyball played across the wall, or patrol agents purchasing treats from vendors through the divide — activities that question the meaning of a “wall.” “There are not two sides defined by a wall — it is one landscape divided,” he says. “We should be designing a ‘Reunited States,’ not a ‘Divided States.'”

We belong to the living world. What do poetry and astrophysics have in common? More than you would expect, says poet Marie Howe. Howe is a professor of “ecopoetry,” which asks the human ego to step outside the picture — “to let the whole living world move into the poem, instead of the human, I, I, I, I.” Reading her poem “The Singularity,” which is inspired by the physics that created the earth, she plays on a big idea: that more than 13 million years ago everything that existed was incredibly small — tiny, compacted density. Physicist Stephen Hawking called this tiny dense material “the singularity,” giving birth to the title of her poem. Howe reads with passion, the final line reverberating through the room: “No I, no we, no one. No was. No verb. No noun. Only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is. All. Everything. Home.”

Too often, we reduce our lives to untrue, uncomplicated stories just to fit in, says Casey Gerald. Speaking at TED Salon: Belonging, Gerald encourages us to embrace vulnerability and embody “the raw strange magic of ourselves.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The price of perfection. “The way we’re taught to live has got to change,” says Casey Gerald. By his late 20s, Gerald was on top of the world, or so it seemed: he had earned degrees from Yale and Harvard, worked on Wall Street and in Washington, started a nonprofit, and yes, given a TED Talk. Still, he recalls, “I was real cracked up — not exactly having a nervous breakdown, but not too far off.” While he’d attained success, he had done so while buffing away the raw edges of his life — his homosexuality, his pain, his very human messiness — and reducing it to an uncomplicated, untrue story of a poor kid “from the other side of the river” who made it. Many of us engage in similar acts of revision just so we can be accepted by the right people, schools and jobs, Gerald says — but he’s come to realize this revision is equivalent to self-erasure. He says it’s time for us to show courage, to embody what he calls “the raw strange magic of ourselves,” and to stand with others in their vulnerability.

Resistance Revival Chorus sing protest songs in tribute to the historical importance of music in movements. They perform at TED Salon: Belonging, December 11, 2018 at the TED World Theater, New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Let’s get the country singing! A collective of more than 60 women, the Resistance Revival Chorus gathers in sisterhood to sing and show how joy can be an act of resistance. To close out the night, the chorus fills the TED World Theater with the music of the labor movement, performing a rousing performance of “The Rich Man’s House.”