Shapeshifters: Notes on Session 9 of TED2024

In Session 9 of TED2024, great minds working on world-shifting innovations shared their work, from a biologist who raised mice with two dads to a computer scientist with a more democratic crowdfunding model. Whether at home or on the global stage, these big ideas have the potential to shape what’s possible.

The event: Talks from Session 9 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson

When and where: Thursday, April 18, 2024, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Katsuhiko Hayashi, Carole K. Hooven, Chris Duffy, Anima Anandkumar, Kevin Owocki, Gibran Huzaifah

Performance: Writer, musician and comedian Elle Cordova personified the most beloved fonts, including Futura, Times New Roman, Garamond and more. The funny and smart typographical adventure included a nod to TED’s preferred Helvetica, as well as an audition from Comic Sans to represent the org with a new motto: “thinky thoughts are good.”

The talks in brief:

Biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi dives into the science behind how his team used breakthrough assisted reproductive technology to raise healthy young from the skin cells of two male mice. The accomplishment has implications for endangered species — and the shape of all future families.

Exploring the intersection of science, parenthood and societal norms, behavioral endocrinologist Carole K. Hooven delves into the evolutionary biology and cultural influence behind the differences between sexes — starting with how and why kids play.

Before he was a comedian and host of the TED podcast How to Be a Better Human, Chris Duffy taught elementary school. He shares what he learned from his fifth graders about nurturing your grown-up sense of humor, proposing that there are perks in seeing the world as a kid does: full of hilarious, amazing and extremely weird things.

Perhaps generative AI can write a competent song lyric, but by itself, it lacks the physical knowledge to build a better airplane. To model physical processes, says AI professor Anima Anandkumar, these systems must grasp the finest details of the real world, from molecular bonds to ocean currents. She shares recent AI projects that demonstrate this ability — forecasting weather, designing medical devices and more.

Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki introduces quadratic funding, a new kind of crowdfunding model. Unlike Kickstarter or Patreon, quadratic funding uses a mathematical formula to match contributions based on the number of contributors rather than the amount given. The more people who care about a project, the more funding it will get.

When Gibran Huzaifah started an aquaculture farm in Indonesia, he was quickly confronted by the lack of technology in the industry. Farmers had insufficient data insights into murky ponds and spent huge sums on manual feeding. So he launched a start-up to automate feeding, eliminate resource waste and solve supply disadvantages for small farmers.

TED2024, held April 15-19, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is a week of talks, discovery sessions, excursions, dinners, performances and more celebrating “The Brave and the Brilliant.” Special thanks to our strategic partners PwC, Adobe, Schneider Electric and Northwestern Mutual.

Moving on up: Talks from day 3 of TEDWomen 2023

For the final day of TEDWomen 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia, a multidisciplinary group of experts took on the challenges and opportunities of navigating change — from reimagining migration for political power and addressing the real threats of AI to championing inclusivity, celebrating nature’s wildness and pondering life’s myriad complexities through art.

The event: Sessions 4 and 5 of TEDWomen 2023, hosted by TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell, TED’s head of curation Helen Walters and activist, filmmaker and entrepreneur Maya Penn

When and where: Friday, October 13, 2023, at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia

Speakers: Charles M. Blow, Sasha Luccioni, Ruha Benjamin, Melonie D. Parker, Sherrell Dorsey, Mary Ann Sieghart, Dyhia Belhabib, Rebecca McMackin, Lucy McBath, Valerie Montgomery Rice, Maira Kalman, Freada Kapor Klein, Sheila Ngozi Oparaocha, Chantale Zuzi Leader

Music: Darkwave artist Abra captivated the TEDWomen audience with her signature blend of gothic, R&B and electronic music.

Societal progress often feels like two steps forward, one step back — how do we change that? New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow calls for a peaceful, reverse migration of Black Americans to southern US states, to write over legacies of oppression and wield political power to change history.

We’ve all heard it recently: “AI could kill us all.” Instead of catastrophizing, AI ethics researcher Sasha Luccioni wants to address AI’s more pressing risks — like carbon emissions, copyright infringement and biased data — by creating tools and legislation that promote transparency.

In the era of superintelligent AI, are health care and housing for all really beyond reach? From the outcry against Atlanta’s “Cop City” to tech-driven democracy in Barcelona, researcher Ruha Benjamin imagines a future where tech and people-power work in tandem, not in opposition.

How can we create safe and inclusive work cultures for all? Google’s chief diversity officer Melonie D. Parker joins journalist and host of the TED Tech podcast Sherrell Dorsey in a nuanced conversation about creating a sustainably inclusive company where every employee can thrive.

We still take women less seriously than men, says author, journalist and broadcaster Mary Ann Sieghart. She explains how we can tackle what she calls the “authority gap” by questioning our biases against women’s intelligence (like judging a woman by the pitch of her voice) and actively promoting female experts.

Criminal groups use sophisticated technology to perpetrate crimes on the ocean: drug smugglers pilot autonomous submarines; pirates use satellites to detect ships they plan to capture and ransom. Maritime crime fighter Dyhia Belhabib introduces Heva, a tool that uses AI to aggregate international criminal records with the goal of detecting and stopping maritime crime.

Ecological horticulturist Rebecca McMackin explores the beauty of letting your garden run wild, surveying the success she’s had increasing biodiversity on the piers of Brooklyn Bridge Park and offering tips for creating wildlife-friendly habitats at home.

Following the death of her only son, US Congresswoman Lucy McBath was elected to office with one major goal: pass comprehensive gun safety legislation. She shares the power of a personal story to bridge divides and make real, impactful change.

“There are challenges and fears that catapult us to become the greatest versions of ourselves, to become great leaders,” says health equity advocate and president and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine Valerie Montgomery Rice. She shares three lessons in leadership and shows how they can guide anyone hoping to break through fear, stand up for what’s right and build opportunity for all.

Multidisciplinary artist Maira Kalman delivers a delightfully wry, sneakily profound reflection on time, death, work, art, family, dreams and more. Backed by her wise, witty illustrations, her talk seems to embody the entirety of life itself, in all its absurd glory.

Impact investor Freada Kapor Klein is building fairness into the core of tech companies. Her VC fund, Kapor Capital, only invests in businesses that commit to hiring diverse teams, fostering inclusive workplaces and creating products and services that close opportunity gaps.

The dominant narrative of energy transition has a problem, says energy equity expert Sheila Oparaocha: it ignores the billions of people without energy access. For just and inclusive climate solutions, Oparaocha says we must empower women and prioritize universal access to sustainable energy.

After surviving devastating violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chantale Zuzi Leader found safety in the US. She urges everyone to consider the problem of displacement with curiosity and compassion — and offers refugees like her a powerful message of hope: “It is possible to break through.”

A world view: Talks from day 1 of TEDWomen 2023

TEDWomen 2023 kicked off in its new home of Atlanta, Georgia with a moving and wide-ranging session of talks and performances about the future of global democracy, the pursuit of freedom in Russia and Ukraine, the path to recovery for survivors and more.

The event: Session 1 of TEDWomen 2023, hosted by TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell, TED’s head of curation Helen Walters and activist, filmmaker and entrepreneur Maya Penn

When and where: Wednesday, October 11, 2023, at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia

Speakers: Yordanos Eyoel, Irina Karamanos Adrian, Oleksandra Matviichuk, Jane Ferguson, Dasha Navalnaya, Ava DuVernay, Christine Schuler Deschryver, Chris Anderson

Music: Introduced by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director Nathalie Stutzmann, chamber music group The Merian Ensemble open the week with an evocative and transporting performance of Nicole Chamberlain’s “Atalanta” for flute, oboe, bass clarinet, harp and viola.

It’s not news that democracy is under attack globally. In order to encourage new democracies (and protect established ones), we need more than robust institutions — we need grassroots action, says democracy entrepreneur Yordanos Eyoel, who explores innovative ways to nurture nascent pro-democracy groups wherever they’re threatened.

As a feminist, Irina Karamanos Adrian was not thrilled to become Chile’s First Lady. She shares how she overturned the position’s institutionalized responsibilities in an effort to make them more transparent, asserting that it’s undemocratic for an unelected position to have such power.

How do we defend people’s freedom and dignity against authoritarianism, asks human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk. In the face of Russian troops occupying Ukraine, she emphasizes the extraordinary capabilities of ordinary people — and urges us all to stand together.

Women journalists shape the way the world sees wars, says war reporter Jane Ferguson. Illuminating the historic impact of female-led reporting, she highlights the perspective-broadening power of humanizing stories from war zones.

Dasha Navalnaya is the daughter of an important man: Alexey Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition and one of Vladimir Putin’s top critics. She shares the story of her father’s poisoning and imprisonment — and why Russians need your help to bring down Putin’s authoritarian regime.

In conversation with TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell, writer, producer and filmmaker Ava DuVernay discusses how she turned Caste — Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning nonfiction analysis of race in the US — into Origin, a gripping narrative film exploring both the book’s thesis and the author’s life story.

Human rights activist Christine Schuler Deschryver shares how her organization, City of Hope, is modeling a new recovery program for women survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one that allows women to reclaim their bodies while developing skills to become future community leaders.

We’re well aware of how quickly hate and misinformation go viral. But in a one-of-a-kind preview of his upcoming book, head of TED Chris Anderson argues generosity can be infectious as well — creating powerful ripple effects that help us thrive.

Closing performance: Mahogany-N-Motion, a student-run women’s dance group from Spelman College — a historically Black liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia — close out the session with an energetic, drumline-infused performance that brought the TEDWomen crowd to its feet.

Dilemmas: Notes from Session 3 of TED Countdown Summit 2023

Session 3 of TED Countdown Summit 2023 tackled some of the knottier issues related to climate change — from the massive amount of money needed to finance the global green transition, to the struggle for energy access in developing nations and the ecosystem effects of fast fashion — and offered glimpses of the world-changing solutions already underway to lead us into a clean, prosperous future for all.

The event: Talks from Session 3 of TED Countdown Summit 2023, hosted by TED’s Lindsay Levin and David Biello

When and where: Wednesday, July 12, 2023, at the Fillmore Detroit in Detroit, Michigan

Speakers: Nili Gilbert, David Blood, Avinash Persaud, Tombo Banda, Steve Presley, Amy Powney, Payton M. Wilkins, Xiaojun “Tom” Wang

How much money is required to decarbonize the world? Sustainable investment experts Nili Gilbert and David Blood provide both macro and on-the-ground perspectives on the kinds of finance flowing to climate solutions. While some progress has been made, hard-to-abate sectors and the Global South are still being left out of solutions. The good news? There’s certainly enough capital; there are no legal barriers to allocating capital to sustainable solutions; there are amazing entrepreneurs and business people doing the work; and public policy is on the move (like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US). The key is to get money moving to the right places and, as Gilbert says, to see this moment for what it is: a massive, multigenerational opportunity for sustainable growth — greater in scale than the Industrial Revolution and on pace to transform the world in less than 30 years.

After Hurricane Maria decimated Dominica in 2017, the country declared its intention to become the first climate-resilient nation in the world. But as they sought to organize their response to future climate disasters, economist Avinash Persaud says, they quickly realized that the only real solution was to halt climate change entirely. For the developing world, the path to a greener, more sustainable future looks different than for wealthier countries. Developing nations can’t ban emissions, tax carbon or shift to renewables without hurting their growing economies and leaving large portions of their workforce unemployed. Persaud introduces the Bridgetown Initiative, a proposal to finance the green transformation of global systems, as a solution. Beginning with reducing barriers to private investment in green technologies in developing nations, the initiative also calls for more generous lending policies for resilience investments and a revenue stream created by taxing emissions from the shipping industry.

When electricity arrived in Zomba, Malawi in 1994, energy access innovator Tombo Banda says it brought her village significant changes to the health, comfort and happiness of its residents. But the reality is that 500 million people still lack access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa, relying on highly polluting materials like diesel and firewood. How do we get more people access to clean electrification quickly? Enter mini-grids, or localized renewable energy systems. By making the mini-grid business model more profitable, these systems can become more scalable — and enticing for private investors. Innovative approaches like using less expensive batteries and appliance financing to increase revenues can also accelerate electrification, Banda says, ultimately making electricity more accessible — and creating better lives for millions of people.

In conversation with TED’s Lindsay Levin, Nestlé North America CEO Steve Presley discusses how one of the world’s largest food companies aims to reach net zero by 2050. Their efforts include sourcing ingredients from regenerative farming, improving packaging to contain less plastic, powering manufacturing with renewable energy and offering financial incentives to local farmers who use sustainable practices. Presley shares where Nestlé has made progress and where it’s still investing for change, encouraging transformation at every step of the food production process.

Fashion designer Amy Powney designs for sustainability first, ensuring all aspects of the clothing made by Mother of Pearl, where she is creative director, are environmentally friendly and ethically produced. That ethos stands in contrast to the fast fashion garments that are often produced by underpaid workers with materials sourced from fossil fuels, endangered forests or plastics. She delves into the problems surrounding our pursuit of cheap clothing, from health and pollution to landfills that are visible from space, calling for everyone to reconsider the value of each item of clothing they own, its connection to the Earth and the lives touched by its creation.

Shutting down the fossil fuel industry means cleaner air and healthier citizens in the long term. But in the short term, it also means fewer jobs and shrinking livelihoods. While green jobs could, in time, supply a needed paycheck, the immediate impacts of closing a mine or refinery are devastating. We can protect both workers and the environment with an age-old solution: unions. As union leader and environmental justice advocate Payton Wilkins tells it, the multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-gender trade union movement could become a formidable force in the fight against climate change — and in places like Denmark, where unions spearhead the ascendance of clean energy, they already are. By showing workers that environmental justice and workplace equity are not mutually exclusive, Wilkins hopes to lead US unions to the front lines of the fight against climate change.

Xiaojun “Tom” Wang grew up in the Chinese province of Shanxi, the world’s largest coal producer. Each year, more than a billion tons of coal are dug out from underneath Shanxi’s mountains, helping heat and power at least 24 other provinces in China. Wang narrates the devastating impacts of coal mining — accidents in coal mines, massive landslides, damage to cultural sites — and calls for Beijing to ease the pressure on Shanxi’s coal industry. Shanxi needs support in breaking free from its coal addiction, he says, not only to transition to a clean economy, but also to protect its rich cultural heritage.

Leaping boldly into new global realities: Notes on Session 3 of TED2023

From climate change to aging to geopolitics, Session 3 of TED2023 surveyed big issues with worldwide implications.

The event: Talks from Session 3 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington-Rodgers

When and where: Tuesday, April 18, 2023, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Jennifer D. Sciubba, Piyachart Phiromswad, Chip Conley, Ashif Shaikh, Barbara F. Walter, Keyu Jin, Ian Bremmer

The talks in brief:

Despite decades of (justified) warnings against the dangers of overpopulation, the world is facing a once-unthinkable possibility: declining population growth, fueled by aging, lower fertility rates and depopulation. But the solution to an aging, shrinking world (and diminished economy) isn’t to have more babies. Instead, says political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba, we must learn to invest in the health and the welfare of the living, build a resilient global workforce and create sustainable systems that can survive dramatic demographic shifts.

Continuing with the theme of understanding and improving our relationship to aging, economist Piyachart Phiromswad explores the technology that can help seniors overcome the physical, mental and societal barriers to employment. Tools like full-body exoskeletons can support people as they lift heavy objects, while robotic arms can steady shaky hands, helping seniors with advanced training and knowledge continue their work with precision. Other technology can set reminders to aid a failing memory or allow seniors to work from home, avoiding strenuous travel. These tools would help the senior population remain active, reduce the financial burden on pension and aid programs, increase economic production and help to eradicate the false assumption that older people can no longer be productive members of society.

“What if we rethought midlife such that it’s not a crisis but a chrysalis?” asks entrepreneur and TED community member Chip Conley. Providing a fresh perspective on a time of life that’s often misunderstood, Conley suggests a new way to the way we think about our 40s, 50s and 60s, tracing the invention of the term “midlife crisis” back to the relatively recent date 1965 and offering an alternative narrative that paints midlife as a transitional stage between adulthood and new stage of life, the way a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

Hundreds of millions of migrant workers leave everything they know behind to seek out means of survival — and climate change will only exacerbate this movement. Migrant advocate and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Ashif Shaikh shares how he and his team at Jan Sahas’ Migrants Resilience Collaborative are building a social safety net by making benefits accessible to vulnerable groups and simultaneously establishing a feedback loop between communities and governments to improve existing systems and policies. He shares a video that shows the real-world impact that this two-pronged approach has had in India and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. “Without a safety net, one job loss, one health emergency, can undermine years of effort and keep [migrants] trapped in the cycles of poverty,” Shaikh says.

We understand the playbook anti-democratic forces use to foment and ignite civil war. Why don’t governments have a similar playbook for preserving stable institutions, civic cooperation and diverse representation? Civil wars expert Barbara F. Walter looks at the United States, which is facing not only degradation to its democratic process through challenges to its elections but also attacks from the hostile demographic groups fading from power, and shares how to respond to these early warning signs of impending trouble.

We associate innovation with big breakthroughs, but no one innovates new applications and processes for existing tech better than China, says economist Keyu Jin. American companies brought us the iPhone and the first mass-market electric vehicles (EVs), but China’s EV infrastructure has since vastly outpaced the US, and Chinese smartphone models now dominate in Africa and are gaining popularity across the globe. Jin explains China’s special sauce — political centralization, economic decentralization — and makes an impassioned case for viewing the US and China systems as complementary, not opposed.

Ask political scientist Ian Bremmer who runs the world and he’ll tell you that today we live in a leaderless world. Bremmer chalks up current geopolitical tensions and conflicts to three things: Russia’s lack of integration into Western institutions and its residual anger as it declines; China’s integration into US-led institutions with the presumption that it’d make the country more American (spoiler: it did not); and finally, millions across the world in wealthy democracies feeling left behind by globalization. So what comes next for the world order? That can be broken into three categories: a global security order (the US and its allies), a global economic order (the US, China, the EU, India) and a new, up-and-coming digital order, run by technology companies (think of social media platforms already powering wars, spreading misinformation, promoting conspiracy theories). Bremmer sounds the alarm on the influence of these technology companies and the power they hold through the almighty algorithm, ending on a simple question aimed at those who run those companies: Are you fine with the fact that what you’ve created destroys democracies, or are you going to do something about it?

Imagination: Notes from Session 10 of TED2022

The wondrous, expansive, absurd creativity of humanity was on full display at Session 10 of TED2022, which featured seven brilliant speakers, one deeply beautiful and imaginative performance and a much-needed comedic interlude.

The event: Talks from Session 10 of TED2022, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters

When and where: Wednesday, April 13, 2022, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Anil Ananthaswamy, Sutu, Gina Gutierrez, Dan Widmaier, Tiffani Ashley Bell, Anicka Yi, JR

Performance: A talented trio of dancers brought choreographer and creative director Nina McNeely’s contemporary dance piece “Once There Was III” to life. The performance featured a mesmerizing combination of choreography, music and projection mapping.

Comedy: Comedian Pardis Parker made his return to the TED stage with a lively stand-up routine, quipping on Canadian etiquette, the mind-boggling wealth of billionaires and the real secret to leaving a legacy (hint: it involves candy).

The talks in brief:

Anil Ananthaswamy, science writer

Big idea: Experiences of “altered selves” — from schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s to foreign limb syndrome — challenge our most basic assumptions about the self.

How? The self is a slippery subject, says science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. If you ask yourself, “Who am I?” you’ll most likely answer in the form of a story. Yet people with Alzheimer’s disease lose the capacity to tell accurate stories about themselves, and still their sense of self remains. What about the body? Surely, our embodied selves are integral to who we are. But people with foreign limb syndrome often see their own body parts as horrendous and unfamiliar, and they retain a sense of self. Similarly, many view agency as integral to the self, but not everyone feels this way. People with schizophrenia, for example, don’t always feel like the agent of their actions — so, even without a sense of agency, the experiencing self persists. In light of these diverse human experiences, Ananthaswamy considers the constructed nature of the self and calls for empathy for those experiencing “altered selves.”

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Sutu, multimedia artist

Big idea: We can use metaverse technology to create digital art that enhances and enriches our physical spaces.

How? When many people imagine our metaverse future, they envision a reality where they’ll spend more and more of their lives at home, online and interfacing with others through a digital avatar. But if you’re anything like augmented reality designer Sutu, you don’t want to be stuck inside staring at screens anymore. Sutu’s work shows us how digital art and digital experiences can heighten our experiences of community, creativity and connection in the real world. He introduces us to the LovePunks, a group of young people (and five grandmas) in Western Australia with whom he created a videogame and a digital comic by first getting dressed up, making costumes, painting faces, building sets and brainstorming stories by acting them out. He also shares how he and augmented reality programmer Lukas Karluk started covering the world in augmented art and sharing these tools with other digital artists. (They even AR- hacked The New York Times!) Finally, Sutu invited the TED audience to create a digital doodle that he then wove into a magical metaverse tapestry, delighting even the most techno-hesitant among us.

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Gina Gutierrez, sexual wellness storyteller

Big idea: The next time you notice you haven’t been in the mood for sex in a while, try some exercises to engage your sexual imagination.

How? The brain is our biggest sex organ, but we often forget about the importance of imagination when it comes to our sex lives, says Gina Gutierrez. As the founder of audio-erotica company Dipsea, Gutierrez wants to remind us of the mind’s power to stoke arousal and desire. Dipsea creates immersive audio stories designed to turn women on. For those who aren’t ready to dive into audio-erotica, she shares some tips to activate your sexual imagination on your own, including settling down before you fantasize (as you might before a meditation) and tapping into your senses. Gutierrez then recommends conjuring a scenario from memory or inventing an entirely new one before imagining an appealing person and how they might approach you. Whatever brings you and your brain pleasure works.

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Dan Widmaier, biomaterials investigator

Big Idea: We can transform the environmental impact of the fashion industry by replacing unsustainable materials with natural ones, like spider silk and mushrooms. 

How? While pursuing his PhD in chemistry and chemical biology, Dan Widmaier fell in love with the strength and durability of spider silk. From there blossomed a love for all nature-based materials, which he believes can replace the unsustainable, non-biodegradable materials currently used in the fashion industry. He began working to create an alternative leather product that could mimic cowhide’s dense collagen structures, which is what makes leather so strong and flexible. Looking to nature, he discovered that mushrooms contain stringy, fibrous strands called mycelium that are remarkably similar to the collagen in cowhide. He then set up a factory where he could grow and harvest mycelium at scale, and many prototypes later, Mylo — a beautiful, functional and sustainable leather-like material — was born. Mylo requires significantly less space and resources to grow than cattle, and the facilities they are grown in are powered entirely by renewable energy. It can take decades for new materials to go mainstream in the fashion industry, but due to the accelerating impact of climate change, Widmaier knows we can’t afford to wait. He launched the Mylo Consortium, a group of fashion brands including Lululemon, Stella McCartney, Kering and Adida to bring Mylo out of the lab and into the hands of designers — and ultimately, into your closet. The sustainable materials revolution is here; innovators across the world are designing green alternatives for the fashion industry. “This is our roadmap: we went looking to nature for a better alternative to leather and found mycelium hiding in plain sight,” Widmaier says. “Fashion has a golden opportunity to lead the charge to live with nature instead of against it.”

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Tiffani Ashley Bell, humanitarian programmer

Big idea: One small idea helped pay $1 million in water bills. To fight injustice, channel your outrage into simple, obvious solutions.

How? A few summers ago, Tiffani Ashley Bell learned that tens of thousands of people were facing water shut-offs in Detroit, and she decided to take action. Channeling her outrage at a system that punished Black and brown people for being poor, she attacked Detroit’s shut-off problem in the “smallest, simplest, most obvious: way possible. Using her skills as a programmer, Bell built a platform that helped strangers directly pay struggling Detroiters’ water bills. As of today, Bell’s non-profit The Human Utility has helped more than 5,000 people with $1 million dollars in water bill payments across the US. “I’m not here to tell you benevolent strangers working from home in their pajamas should replace systemic change,” Bell says. “But if you feel appalled by a problem you see in the world, start small and start simple. What change do you have the time, resources or skills to realize?”

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Anicka Yi, conceptual artist

Big idea: Modern tech designers mostly craft machines to emphasize their cold, digital forms and functions. What if we instead designed our devices to resemble and behave like biological entities? Anicka Yi imagines a world built on a symbiotic relationship between humans and our tools — a world where we connect with technology, rather than become alienated from it.

How? Taking cues from soft robotics and designs from nature, Anicka Yi and her team created what she describes as “an aquarium of machines” at London’s Tate Modern, building lighter-than-air robots that could freely roam the museum space and interact directly with visitors as autonomous life forms. Amongst machines that resemble life forms, we might feel a sense of awe rather than fear — a sense that these machines are fellow creatures, rather than alien beings. “What if our machines could be more than just our tools, and instead, a new type of companion species?” Yi asks. “What would it feel like to live in the world with machines that could live in the wild and evolve on their own?”

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JR, artist

Big idea: Famed for his enormous black and white portraits that tell stories and adorn surfaces from the Louvre to the favelas of Brazil, JR continues to tackle ambitious projects — most recently, a massive mural at a supermax prison in California that tells the stories of those confined inside its walls.

How? Granted unprecedented access to a California maximum-security prison, muralist JR set out to photograph and record the stories of a group of inmate volunteers — and then paste their enormous paper group portrait on the floor of the prison’s exercise yard. Viewed from above using drones (which many prisoners had never seen before), inmates were able to connect with themselves and the outside world from a new perspective — and many of them reaped positive impacts they never deemed possible. “Art can change things … but can it change the world, or can it change a man?” JR asks. “Before you answer that question, think: at some point in your life, have you changed? And if you did, why can’t they?”

Cities: Notes from Session 9 of TED2022

The future of cities is inextricably tied to the future of humanity. They’re sites of innovation, culture, community building — and, at the same time, home to some of the world’s most intractable problems, like homelessness and pollution. In Session 9 of TED2022, six speakers explored an intentionally provocative whiplash of ideas tied to city life, from ancient, leaderless metropolises to future cities on Earth and Mars.

The event: Talks from TED2022, Session 9: Cities, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson

When and where: Wednesday, April 13, 2022, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Marvin Rees, Thomas Heatherwick, Alyssa-Amor Gibbons, Scott Fitsimones, Melodie Yashar, David Wengrow

The talk in brief:

Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol, UK

Big idea: Cities are a major contributor to the climate crisis, but global collaboration among climate-concious mayors can make cities key to the solution.

How? To avoid the worst of the climate crisis, we need to reimagine our world’s cities, says Marvin Rees, mayor of Bristol, UK. Today, cities occupy three percent of the world’s land and are responsible for around 75 percent of CO2 emissions. But the same quality that makes them such large emitters — their dense populations — also creates unique opportunities for combatting climate change. From London to Kampala, cities around the world are working together to meet the moment: waste management systems are turning food waste into fertilizer, net-zero housing is combatting urban sprawl and ambitious infrastructure projects are designing out car dependency. But to unlock the full potential of cities, Rees says, we need to collaborate across borders to fund green infrastructure, viewing cities as global assets rather than national possessions.

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Thomas Heatherwick, designer

Big idea: We’re living through an epidemic of “meh” architecture.

How? New buildings built today are, frankly, boring, monotonous, uninspired, dull, characterless, inhuman … the list goes on. Sure, “form follows function,” but that saying is a century old. What about the function of emotion in design, asks Thomas Heatherwick; for the ability of a building to have meaning and evoke connection? This isn’t just a pet peeve or personal vendetta, but a researched fact: bland architecture is bad for our mental, physical and societal health. But not all is lost. There are designers around the world attempting to address this dearth of emotion in our built surroundings: Sou Fujimoto’s apartment building in France, Francis Kéré’s health center in Burkina Faso, Lina Gotmeh’s housing complex in Lebanon, Acme Studio’s city center buildings in the UK, to name but a few. Heatherwick also shares some examples of how his own studio is reinvigorating historical structures in South Africa, bringing life to higher education in Singapore, humanizing hospital areas in the UK and collaborating locally on an artistic park in China. Heatherwick underscores that there is no single language or approach to deal with this epidemic (or “meh”-pidemic, if you will) of boring, but his goal is simple: to trigger a global humanizing movement that no longer tolerates soulless, short-lasting places. What if, instead, we built structures that we wanted to last for centuries?

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Alyssa-Amor Gibbons, resilience designer

Big idea: Architecture cannot be passive to the realities of climate change. For useful climate solutions, look to Indigenous building designs.

How? As an architectural designer, Alyssa-Amor Gibbons creates structures that hold a deep reverence for nature, while also protecting people from the most extreme aspects of it. Looking to traditional building methods used in her native Barbados, which is afflicted by heavy hurricane seasons, Gibbons points to the brilliance and resilience of low-tech, endemic designs. For example, “jalousie” windows funnel powerful winds through houses (as opposed to trying withstand the force) while stilted designs elevate structures during torrential downpours. By embracing Indigenous knowledge and merging it with well-performing, modern techniques, architecture can be resilient by design.

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Scott Fitsimones, experimental urbanist

Big idea: DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, have the potential to increase economic opportunity, but are they also the key to building new cities?

How? Fitsimones describes DAOs as “internet-native, blockchain-governed, collectively-owned” organizations where members contribute capital, skills and proposals in order to debate and make decisions as a group. DAOs have achieved some democratization of ownership and financial opportunity, including the purchasing of fine art, the donation of millions to defense in Ukraine and, for Fitsimones, the chance to purchase land in the hopes to develop a new city. Frustrated by the constrictive bureaucracy in San Francisco, Fitsimones began CityDAO with a simple Tweet that led to intitial funding raised through governance tokens bought on the open market or with cryptocurrency. At CityDAO, a purchased citizenship token comes with the right to vote, and contributors collectively decided to purchase land in Wyoming, where there’s currently DAO legislation. Now its citizens will vote on what gets built on the land, who gets to use it and when, working towards a city where things like permitting, budgets, laws and records are all transparent on a blockchain and smart contracts speed up transactions. While DAOs pose some challenges — consensus-building and uncharted regulatory waters among them — they’re hoping to expand ownership and opportunity traditionally held by wealthy individuals and corporations. “Today, DAOs let us work together, trust each other and coordinate in a fairer way on larger-scale problems than ever before,” Fitsimones says. “And maybe one day, a DAO can even build the next great city.”

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Melodie Yashar, space architect

Big idea: By designing habitats for extreme, off-world environments, architects are learning to reimagine construction technologies and building practices here on Earth.

How? Mars is an extreme and unforgiving environment. If humans want to survive there, says Melodie Yashar, they’ll need shelters that protect against solar radiation, galactic cosmic rays and extreme temperature swings. As a space architect, Yashar’s job is to design these shelters and figure out how to build them using autonomous robots, 3D printers and local resources like water and dirt. A Mars expedition may be years away, but NASA is already putting Yashar and her team’s ideas to the test with a 3D-printed shelter called Mars Dune Alpha. For one year, four crew members will live and work inside this 1700-square-foot structure at the Johnson Space Center. This work might seem far removed from our daily life, but Yashar believes projects like hers will help uncover radical solutions to problems on Earth that seem beyond our grasp today — like CO2-related construction emissions or urban housing shortages.

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David Wengrow, archaeological historian

Big idea: We’re taught to believe that inequality is the necessary price of civilization. Modern archaeology tells us otherwise.

How? The generally accepted story is that with the invention of agriculture came attachment to and defense of land, labor demand, classes to perform that labor (while others were free to think and create) and the assumption that inequality was the inevitable consequence of technological innovation and population growth. However, archaeologists like David Wengrow know there was a period of 4,000 years after the invention of agriculture, in regions all over the world, in which knowledge was expanded and technology innovated without rigid social classes or evidence of kings, bureaucrats or standing armies. While none of these societies were perfectly egalitarian, in comparison to fifth-century Athens, which was founded on chattel slavery, they were drastically more equal: concentric neighborhoods in modern-day Ukraine are evidence of well-organized cities thousands of years before democracy, and uncovered palaces in the Valley of Mexico were standard housing for 100,000 people. Modern archaeological science tells us our assumptions — about agriculture as the end of egalitarian Eden, about large-scale groups requiring top-down management, about inequality as a consequence of civilization — are false. “Perhaps it’s not too late to learn from all this new evidence of the human past — even to begin imagining what other civilizations people might yet create if we can just stop telling ourselves that this particular world is the only one possible,” Wengrow says.

The talks of TED@BCG 2022

The world is facing an unprecedented pace of change. In a day of talks and performances, a diverse group of experts explore how to stay ahead of the curve — covering everything from the value of purpose in business to the democratization of storytelling and the exciting potential of human-AI collaboration.

The event: TED@BCG 2022 is the twelfth event TED and Boston Consulting Group have co-hosted to spotlight leading thinkers from around the globe. Hosted by TED’s Head of Partnerships Lisa Choi Owens, with opening remarks from Christoph Schweizer, CEO of BCG.

Special feature: For this event, TED reached out to five past speakers (all brilliant business leaders) and asked them one question: What idea in business is not being embraced fast enough? The five speakers — Margaret Heffernan, Angela Duckworth, Danielle Moss, Jacqueline Novogratz and Tim Leberecht — gave diverse, enlightening answers.

Music: Singer-songwriter Lex Land treats the audience to a performance of her Texas mid-century swing.

The talks in brief:

Ashley M. Grice, purpose expert

Big idea: Purpose can embed meaning and authenticity into every aspect of a company, from the top floor to the shop floor. 

How? Ashley M. Grice thinks a lot about how companies can live and breathe their “why.” Different from mission statements or visions, which naturally change over time, a company’s “why” (or purpose) is timeless and impacts its entire ethos. She shares the example of a flight attendant who went above and beyond by thoughtfully giving Grice extra snacks on a busy day, a kind gesture that reflected the airline’s culture of purpose. Sharing useful advice for businesses, Grice details three important things to know about making purpose part of your company’s muscle memory: 1) Be authentic and uphold values; 2) Purpose exists in the crossroads of idealism and realism — and it’s supposed to be uncomfortable; 3) Purpose must impact every layer of a company, from a CEO’s strategy to middle management’s decision-making to frontline workers’ visibility. By continuously reflecting on the journey to purpose, it becomes the norm — and everyone’s role is important. 

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Shervin Khodabandeh, human and AI visionary

Big idea: We often think of artificial intelligence as technology that will one day replace human skill sets — but AI alone can’t solve all our problems. What if, instead of overinvesting in advanced algorithms, we combined the data-driven strengths of AI with the unique capabilities of human thinking? Shervin Khodabandeh shows how fostering a symbiotic relationship between people and AI creates more financial value for companies, a happier workforce and an ideal middle ground upon which challenging problems can be solved.

How? Even though companies across the world spend billions of dollars building AI capabilities, Khodabandeh says that only about ten percent of them see meaningful returns on their investments. He believes that one way to solve this problem is to use AI in conjunction with the creativity, judgment, empathy and ethics that humans offer. But how exactly can companies achieve mutually beneficial human-AI relationships? First, Kodabandeh says companies should identify the unique role AI systems could play in their organization — not simply as replacements for humans but as illuminators of innovative solutions or recommenders to improve decision-making. Next, companies should take advantage of feedback loops, through which humans and AI can learn from each other. Finally, they should use this knowledge to determine which combination of human-AI roles and skills best suits specific business needs. When that happens, an organization’s overall rate of learning increases, making it more agile, resilient and adaptable. “It is the human touch that will bring out the best in AI,” Kodabandeh says.

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Ken Chenault, business leader, in conversation with Whitney Pennington Rodgers, TED current affairs curator

Big idea: During times of crisis, leaders have a responsibility to inspire hope, remain grounded in core values and, ultimately, serve and empower the people they lead. 

How? “The best leaders recognize that leadership is both a responsibility and a privilege,” says Ken Chenault, who believes that if you want to lead, you have to be willing to serve. This mindset is especially crucial during times of crisis, when people depend on leaders to perform two key responsibilities: contextualizing challenges and emphasizing the potential to overcome them. Chenault says that one of the most important leadership strategies a company can have is understanding how to empower the people it serves — from employees and customers to investors and stakeholders. Working with organizations like General Catalyst, which centers technology in building companies, and OneTen, which helps Black Americans secure family-sustaining careers, he advocates for responsible innovation: a principle that says companies can and should meet the needs of their followers in an inclusive way, while making investments in new technologies. By upholding their integrity, fostering creative change and challenging the status quo, leaders have the opportunity to transform the workforce and give people opportunities to embark on their own leadership journeys.

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Hyeonmi Kim, strategy consultant 

Big idea: The next great stories are coming from the bizarre and fantastical world of webtoons.

How? Pop culture is changing with a different kind of storytelling, says Hyeonmi Kim. They’re called webtoons: stories told using comic-like illustrations that are published in short segments (usually on a weekly basis) and meant to be read on a smartphone in five to ten minutes. Originating in Korea, webtoons have leapt out of niche platforms and onto the big screen, as with Netflix’s Hellbound, which hit the platform’s top ten list in 2022 after being released as webtoon in South Korea in 2019. Kim sees webtoons as a democratization of storytelling — anyone can share a story and find an audience — and an opportunity for up-and-coming creators to potentially hit on big-time success. What’s more, webtoons are breaking through mainstream media’s closed ecosystem of scriptwriters, where the same writers script (suspiciously similar) blockbusters, laying down a fresh pipeline of rich, varied storytelling. “The writers are diverse and creative, and so are their stories,” Kim says.

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Bernhard Kowatsch, social entrepreneur

Big idea: Big global challenges are no different than global business challenges.

How? Why do we think so traditionally about some of the world’s biggest challenges? Bernhard Kowatsch points to issues like global hunger, for example. After he and his business partner developed a successful app for easily donating meals to hungry children around the world, Kowatsch was inspired to do more. The opportunity arrived in leading the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator, replicating what Silicon Valley does well but for global social good — in this case, supporting start-up and non-profit innovations worldwide and helping them scale successfully to disrupt hunger. Since 2015, the program has positively impacted the lives of more than eight million people, doubling year over year with initiatives such as Building Blocks (a blockchain-supported way for aid organizations to provide food to refugees) and the invention of a machine that fortifies flour with nutrients. Kowatsch asks: Can accelerated innovation and technology help tackle some of the world’s issues? He absolutely believes so — and has the evidence to prove it. The only barrier now is our own thinking.

What Now … for health and happiness? Notes from Session 2 of TEDWomen 2021

For Session 2 of TEDWomen 2021, seven speakers shared ideas and insights on everything from mental health and family structures to how to uplift personal and collective dignity.

The event: TEDWomen 2021: Session 2, hosted by TED’s head of curation Helen Walters in Palm Springs, California on December 2, 2021

Speakers: Charles C. Daniels, Jr., Smita Sharma, Zarlasht Halaimzai, Kaz, Francisca Mutapi and Diana Adams

Music and comedy: For a bit of comic relief, Marcia Belsky has some fun with a song about scrolling back through a date’s Instagram feed as well as “100 Tampons,” which lampoons NASA’s notorious decision to provide astronaut Sally Ride with an egregious supply of tampons for her six-day trip to the space in 1983. “And they asked: Will that be enough?” she sings.

The talks in brief:

Charles C. Daniels, Jr., scholar, therapist

Big idea: In order to be present and connected to their children, fathers need to learn and be empowered to parent themselves. 

How? An estimated 10 million children in the US see their fathers less than once a month, and research has shown that poverty rates, emotional and behavioral issues and school dropout and crime rates all increase when kids inconsistently see their fathers. Sharing his personal journey, Charles C. Daniels, Jr. recounts the profound impact of not seeing his own father — and explores the complex reasons a parent could have for not being there. The reasons that don’t get talked about are the ones that exacerbate the problem, he explains. That’s why he created Father’s UpLift, an organization that helps dads love, forgive and heal themselves and their children. They work with fathers to navigate shame, guilt and other challenges through group therapy, mentorship, coaching and support. Daniels, Jr. helps fathers reconnect with their kid and learn how to parent themselves so they, in turn, can be better parents.

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Smita Sharma, TED Fellow, photojournalist, visual storyteller

Big idea: Throughout the world, women are cast aside as unworthy of education or self-determination, relegated to tasks of parenting, household duties — and, sometimes, trafficked or enslaved. Through her moving photographs, Smita Sharma shares their stories.

How? By blending into her subjects’ lives and communities (sometimes under the guise of a researcher on “female hygiene,” something men are typically loathe to discuss), Smita Sharma gains the trust of her subjects: women born into poverty who are denied education, become victims of abduction, sexual violence or child marriage. With their consent, Sharma creates powerful visual narratives that depict these forgotten lives with grace and compassion, and that seek to inspire action around systemic issues of gender inequality.

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Zarlasht Halaimzai, writer, advocate for refugee rights

Big idea: Understanding the emotional fallout of violence and displacement is more important than ever.

What Now … for women and the world? Notes from Session 1 of TEDWomen 2021

It’s time for TEDWomen 2021! We couldn’t be more excited to be back in person and feeling the trademark TEDWomen magic together again. This year, the theme is “What Now?” and we’ll be exploring what comes now after nearly everything about how we live and work has been altered by the realities of a global pandemic. In the opening session, five speakers and a performer opened the aperture on this central question as it relates to everything from girls’ education in Afghanistan to thinking like an epidemiologist and advancing allyship.

The event: TEDWomen 2021: Session 1, hosted by TEDWomen curators Pat Mitchell, Helen Walters and Whitney Pennington Rodgers, in Palm Springs, California

Speakers: Shabana Basij-Rasikh, Mounia Akl, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Gillian Tett and Jimmie Briggs

Opening remarks: Jeff L. Grubbe, the Tribal Council chairman of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, graciously welcoming TED back to Palm Springs.

Special guest: Poet and thinker Maria Popova presents an excerpt from “The Universe in Verse,” her annual paean to poetry and the natural world. Linking together the histories of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Edwin Hubble and Tracy K. Smith, Popova crafts an astonishing story of how humanity came to see the edge of the observable universe.

Music: Tuning into some “revolutions of the heart,” singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash performs beautiful, graceful versions of “The Sunken Lands” and “Particle And Wave.”

The talks in brief:

Shabana Basij-Rasikh, educator, social entrepreneur

Big idea: The Taliban forbids female education, yet Shabana Basij-Rasik has managed to keep the girls’ school she founded in Afghanistan open and operating since the Taliban returned to power earlier this year.

How? “When you face the uncertainty of what might be,” says Afghan educator Shabana Basij-Rasik, “you can create the certainty of what will be.” What’s certain for Basij-Rasikh is that she will continue to educate future generations of Afghan women no matter the political situation in Afghanistan. In 2012 — nearly a decade after the Taliban’s first regime, an era when girls’ education was forbidden — Basij-Rasikh started a school for girls in Kabul called School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA). In 2016, the school became the first and only all-girls boarding school in Afghanistan. But when the Taliban resumed power in 2021, SOLA adapted. Basij-Rasik burned all academic records to protect students’ identities and, within two weeks, the school evacuated more than 250 students, educators and family members from the country. For now, SOLA operates abroad, on a campus in Rwanda, but the school hasn’t stopped construction on the property it owns in Kabul’s center, where Basij-Rasik says they’re keeping a light on, in the hope that they will soon return.

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Mounia Akl, film director, screenwriter

Big idea: Coming from Lebanon, Mounia Ali was already accustomed to instability and threats to her safe spaces posed by the outside world. But when Beirut was rocked by a massive explosion during post-production for her first feature film, Costa Brava, Lebanon, Ali came face to face with personal trauma — and the power that pursuing one’s art has to alleviate it.

How? On August 4, 2020, a stockpile of ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut, leveling large swaths of the city, including Ali’s downtown post-production studio. Forced to dig themselves out of the rubble (and lucky to find themselves alive), Ali and her colleagues found a world thrown into chaos, a world where everyone’s safe spaces had been shattered. Meeting after the explosion, the cast and crew were faced with a seemingly impossible task: finish a film in the midst of a city recovering from disaster, economic crisis and a pandemic. But finishing the film became its own safe space, establishing a sense of order and creation in the midst of destruction. “That moment between the action and the cut, that is what felt like home,” she says.

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Jennifer B. Nuzzo, infectious disease epidemiologist

Big idea: We should prepare for pandemics like we prepare for fires: with data, drills and defenses.

How? As an infectious disease epidemiologist, Jennifer B. Nuzzo often gets asked things like, “When will the COVID-19 pandemic end?” and “When will things go back to the way they were?” She shares a story that took place in 1904, when a lit cigarette sparked a massive fire of the six-story Hurst building in Baltimore, Maryland, rapidly spreading and leveling more than a thousand buildings. This tragedy, known as the Great Baltimore Fire, resulted in a remarkable cultural shift and helped transform fire preparedness into a societal priority. Structural vulnerabilities were addressed, fire defense forces were built up and people were taught to defend themselves. (Remember “stop, drop, and roll” and school fire drills?) Much like this historic conflagration, Nuzzo says, COVID-19 now demands the same sort of reaction: We must locate and learn more about the danger; develop cultures of safety that empower individuals and businesses; and establish defenses against future threats. So, when people ask Nuzzo if things will ever go back to the way they were, her answer is: hopefully never. Because this time, we’ll be prepared.

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Gillian Tett, journalist, author

Big idea: There are many ways to see the world differently. Don’t shy away from others’ cultural truths.

How? Before entering the world of financial journalism, Gillian Tett was a cultural anthropologist who studied how the past influences our present lives, thoughts and behaviors. Understanding what shapes a person’s viewpoint can help both make sense of the wider world and yourself, Tett says. She makes the case that anyone can use an anthropological outlook to experience familiar things or commonly accepted beliefs with fresh eyes. A big opportunity to apply this reexamination has been the pandemic, which has shaken society awake and prompted a questioning of values and norms in a way that many find uncomfortable. Tett likens this to a form of “culture shock,” and prompts us not to return to what we already know and accept but rather to take this moment to welcome the new and different cultural truths we may find.

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Jimmie Briggs, essayist, intersectional justice advocate

Big idea: After centuries of toxic gender relationships, Jimmie Briggs believes a “gender reckoning” — a settling of accounts between those who identify as women and those who identify as men — is necessary to heal ourselves. The problems demanding repayment are many: gender pay disparities, threats to reproductive rights and domestic violence being but a few. How will this reckoning happen — and, crucially, what is the role of men in instigating and implementing it?

The answer: In order to bring on this reckoning — and, in doing so, become good allies — Briggs believes men must do three things. First, men must defy the cultural expectations that have been drilled into them: “Don’t be emotional, don’t be soft.” Instead, men must recognize masculinity as a spectrum of behaviors in order to overcome violence to others and inside themselves. Second, men must show up for women, as supporters and as activists, in the same way that queer women of color supported equality for all genders by founding the Black Lives Matter movement. And third, men must hold other men (and themselves) accountable for the physical, emotional and intellectual violence they visit upon women. “Broken masculinity harms societies: full stop,” he says. “When men reckon with that truth, we will finally find our shared humanity.”

Onward! Notes from Session 3 of TEDWomen 2020

For the culminating session of TEDWomen 2020, we looked in one direction: onward! Hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell and TEDx learning specialist Bianca DeJesus, the final session featured speakers and performers who shared wisdom on preparing for new challenges, turning fear into action and finding the way forward — even when the path isn’t clear.

Special appearance: Kirsty de Garis, organizer of TEDxSydney, and Safra Anver, organizer of TEDxColombo, introduced the final two TEDx speakers of the day.

The session in brief:

Gloria Steinem, feminist activist, writer

Big idea: Feminism is the radical yet essential idea that all human beings are equal. Now more than ever, unity and listening are the remedies to fear, discrimination and inequality.

Why? Feminism has been and always will be relevant and vital to all of humanity, says Gloria Steinem. Yet throughout history, the word — and its accompanying movement — have been misunderstood and criticized. Speaking on her lifelong legacy of feminist activism, Steinem shares how she’s fought for women’s rights and overcome her fears with the help of trusted friends and allies. She discusses the intersectionality of racism and sexism and how the fight against both has always been linked — and explains why unity is the key to overcoming them, especially in a world facing COVID-19. She urges future generations of women — or, as she calls them, “friends who haven’t been born yet” — to support each other and face their fears together. “Think of change as a tree,” she says. “You know it doesn’t grow from the top down, so we shouldn’t be waiting for somebody to tell us what to do. It grows from the bottom up. And we are the roots of change.”

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Jamila Gordon, AI advocate

Big idea: Artificial intelligence can break language, education and location barriers for disadvantaged people, giving them the opportunity to thrive. 

How? Born into a war-torn Somalia, Jamila Gordon has always considered herself to be lucky. When her family was separated and she was displaced in Kenya, Gordon’s journey eventually took her to Australia. There, she worked in a Japanese restaurant owned by a couple who showed her that amazing things are possible through hard work and perseverance. Now, she wants AI to do the same, at a massive scale, for disadvantaged people — giving them skills and tools to find work, be great at their jobs and do the work safely. In this way, Gordon believes software can open doors of opportunity for people who face cultural, social and economic barriers. For instance, Gordon’s platform, Lumachain, brings transparency to global supply chains, benefiting producers, enterprises and consumers, while also helping to end modern slavery.

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Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria

Big idea: The sexism that women leaders face shouldn’t overshadow or discourage others from stepping forward and making a positive impact.

Why? In conversation, Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala remark and reflect on their experiences in leadership — for better and worse. Their discussion runs the gamut of what it means to be a powerful woman in a sexist world: encountering unnecessary judgments based on appearance, enduring undue focus on personality over policy and facing criticism based solely on stereotypes. To be viewed as an acceptable leader, women must exude both strength and empathy, Okonjo-Iweala says. If they come across as too tough, they are viewed as hard and unlikeable. But if they seem too soft, they are seen to be lacking the backbone to lead. In fact, women leaders must also be thoughtful about how they portray their achievements to those who look up to and follow them. Emphasizing the positive makes a real difference to the power of role modeling, Gillard says. If the focus stays on the sexist and negative experiences, women may decide that being a leader isn’t for them. Conversely, if leaders shy away from speaking about their hardships, women and girls can be put off because they decide leadership is only for superwomen who never have any problems. It’s all about balance. For women looking to create space for themselves and others, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala offer a list of six standout lessons to build solidarity: there’s no “right way” to be a woman leader, so be true to yourself; sit down with your trusted confidants and wargame how to deal with gendered moments; debunk gendered stereotypes; don’t wait for when you need help to support system changes that aid gender equality; network, but don’t shy away from taking up space in the world; and the last, but not least important: go for it!

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Kesha, musician, actress, activist

“I can’t tell you how to not be afraid, but I can tell you that I’ve experienced how to not be defined by my fears,” says Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Kesha. She shares a bit about how she faced her fears while living in the limelight over the last decade and delivers a powerful performance of “Shadow,” a song about courageously choosing positivity even when others are throwing shade. “Get your shadow outta my sunshine / Outta my blue skies / Outta my good times,” she sings. She’s accompanied by Mary Lattimore on harp, Karina DePiano on piano, and Skyler Stonestreet and Kenna Ramsey on background vocals.

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JayaShri Maathaa, monk

Big idea: There is a simple mantra you can say to calm yourself during troubled times: “Thank you.”

Why? As the world brims with fear, doubt and anxiety during the coronavirus pandemic, JayaShri Maathaa finds that two magical words — “thank you” — fill her life with bliss and grace. How so? When you say “thank you,” you bring your attention inward and, over time, create a feeling of gratitude in your heart that can help you navigate life with peace and joy. For Maathaa, these two words are like music in her mind: they’re the first thing she thinks upon awakening, and the last thing she thinks before falling asleep. By planting these good thoughts in her mind and heart over the years, she now finds them blossoming into something beautiful — creating a harmony within herself and to the world around her. Want to give it a try?

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Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut

Big idea: The day, life and mindset of an astronaut.

Tell us more: In conversation with TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, astronaut Megan McArthur offers a glimpse into what it’s like when space becomes your world, but not your entire life. As a mother and wife (she’s married to fellow astronaut Bob Behnken), McArthur strikes a balance between the emotional outpouring of her husband’s spaceflight and training for her own launch, while supporting their son for his reality as an earthbound child. But when it comes to work, the focus becomes singular in hundreds of hours of preparation, which McArthur emphasizes can be a mindset easily adjusted and applied to any professional role. Using her own example of tackling a new job, she reminds women that even if they come up against a situation they’ve never before encountered, they are ready and prepared from their life experiences to take on that challenge, learn quickly and succeed. 

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Closing out the final session with a flourish, a guitarist sets in motion delicate yet strident chords that reflect both the warmth and momentum of Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey‘s poetry — paired with footage of her masked, standing statuesque in a deserted quarantine courtyard, motionless yet liquid all at once. Far from a mere diatribe, this piece proposes not a revolution, but a re-establishment of the majesty, magic and power of the matriarch, and the hidden traditions that have quietly sustained women for millenia — and that will someday soon renew the world once more.

Bring it on: Notes from Session 1 of TEDWomen 2020

In this moment of great uncertainty, it’s time to be fearless. TEDWomen 2020, a day-long event hosted on TED’s virtual event platform, is all about fearlessness — in the way we think, act, participate — and how this collective mentality can empower us to take a global step forward, together. The day kicked off with an inspiring session of talks and performances, all designed to take us on a journey of curiosity, wonder and learning. Hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell and TEDx learning specialist Bianca DeJesus, seven speakers and performers showed us how to find the strength and clarity needed to navigate an ever-changing, ever-challenging world. 

Music: The group Kolinga performs “Nguya na ngai,” an original song that’s equal parts music, poetry and dance.

Special appearance: Grace Yang, organizer of TEDxMontrealWomen, joins the event to represent the global TEDx community, through which more than 140 TEDx teams in 51 countries are organizing TEDxWomen events alongside the main show.

The session in brief:

To open the session, activist and poet Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey delivers a powerful hymn to the universal matriarch in all of her manifestations — exalting her fearlessness as she faces the unknown, praising her body down to the folds of her skin, shouting against the silence surrounding her oppression, and above all shattering the chains (political and social) that bind her across the globe.

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Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, politician

Big idea: In the face of authoritarianism, the path to fearlessness lies in unity and solidarity.

How? The people of Belarus have been under authoritarian rule since 1994, subject to police violence and everyday assaults on their freedoms. But this year, something changed. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets to participate in anti-government demonstrations, supporting Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign in opposition to the country’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. Tsikhanouskaya stepped in for her husband, who was jailed, to run against Lukashenko in the nation’s recent presidential election — an election she is widely viewed to have won, despite falsified results released by the regime. Now, she tells the story of how a small collection of women-led protests in the capital of Minsk sparked massive, peaceful demonstrations across the country — the likes of which Belarus has never seen — that continue amid calls for a new free and fair election. Even after being forced into exile with her children, Tsikhanouskaya remains determined. “Our courage is born from unity,” she says. “Our solidarity is our strength.”

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Sophie Rose, infectious disease researcher

Big idea: To quickly and equitably vaccinate the world’s eight billion people against COVID-19, we will need several approved vaccines. Human challenge trials may help speed up the development and deployment of effective vaccines.

How? In April 2020, Sophie Rose volunteered to be infected with COVID-19. As a young, healthy adult, she’s participating in a “human challenge trial” — a type of trial in which participants are intentionally exposed to infection — that may help researchers develop, manufacture and implement vaccines in record time, saving the lives of thousands of people. She explains her decision and the difference between challenge trials and the phase III clinical trials typically carried out for drugs and vaccines. Unlike phase III trials, where participants receive a vaccine and are subsequently monitored for possible infection throughout the course of their normal lives, challenge trial participants are purposely exposed to the virus after vaccination. Deliberate exposure allows researchers to know more quickly if the vaccine works (usually within a matter of months, instead of years) and requires fewer participants (around 50 to 100 instead of thousands). Because exposure is certain, challenge trial volunteers must be young, typically between ages 20 and 29, and have no preexisting conditions that could put them at an elevated risk. Since choosing to participate, Rose cofounded 1Day Sooner, a nonprofit that advocates for challenge trial participants and has helped more than 39,000 people around the world volunteer for these trials.

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Renee Montgomery, WNBA champion, activist

Big idea: For people’s voices to be heard in the face of injustice, they need to be “felt.” We can do this by opting out of our comfort zones and taking positive social action.

How? Renee Montgomery hadn’t planned to quit her dream job in the middle of a pandemic, but it was a leap of faith she made in order to do her part in fighting America’s racial injustice. By “opting out” of her career as a WNBA player, she made space to focus on others’ voices and amplify them with her platform. Montgomery explains that, to truly have these experiences heard, they need to be felt: “Making it felt for me is an action,” she says. “It’s not just protesting and raising your voice, but also doing something to show your intentions.” Her intentions? To level the playing field so everyone has the same opportunities, regardless of race, and to turn this moment into positive, lasting momentum.

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Kluane Adamek, Yukon Regional Chief

Big idea: Leadership and matriarchal wisdom of the Yukon First Nations people.

Tell us more: In the Yukon First Nations, women lead — and have done so for generations. Their matriarchs have forged trade agreements, created marriage alliances and ensured business happens across their land for generations. Their matrilineal society is one that deeply values, honors and respects the roles of women. Much of the world doesn’t reflect this way of living, but Yukon Regional Chief Kluane Adamek urges others to follow in the footsteps of her people — by putting more women at the table and learning from the power of reciprocity. There’s so much women can share with the world, she says, encouraging all women to seek spaces to share their perspective and create impact.

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María Teresa Kumar, civic leader

Big idea: The engaged and growing Latinx vote turned out in record numbers during the US 2020 presidential election and has the potential to shape American politics for decades to come. 

How? A historic number of Latinx voters cast a ballot in the US 2020 presidential election. As the nation’s most rapidly growing demographic, Latinx youth are voting for a brighter future. María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, reflects on the issues closest to young Latinx voters and their families, which include health care, climate equity and racial justice. With a look back to FDR’s New Deal, which catalyzed growth, nation-building and paved the way for JFK’s century-defining Moonshot mission, Kumar peeks into the future of the United States and sees the potential for the newest generation of voters to shape the years ahead.

Join us for TEDWomen 2020: Fearless on November 12

TEDWomen 2020 is nearly here! The day-long conference will take place on November 12 via TED’s new virtual conference platform. TEDWomen attendees will experience TED’s signature talks as well as an array of live, interactive sessions, community “idea dates,” small-group speaker Q&As and more. The talks featured in the program have been developed in collaboration with an incredible group of TEDx organizers from Lagos, Nigeria; Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Montreal, Canada; Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Sydney, Australia. TEDWomen will celebrate and amplify dynamic, multi-dimensional ideas from these communities and around the world.

In the midst of uncertainty, the greatest peril is to retreat or become immobilized. At TEDWomen, we’ll hear from bold leaders who are stepping forward and taking action.

TEDWomen 2020 speakers and performers include:

• Kluane Adamek, Assembly of First Nations Yukon Regional Chief
• Kylar W. Broadus, Human and civil rights attorney and advocate
• Kemi DaSilva-Ibru, Women’s health specialist
• Adie Delaney, Educator and performer
• Elizabeth Diller, Architect, artist and designer
• Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia
• Jamila Gordon, AI advocate
• Kesha, Musician, actress, activist
• María Teresa Kumar, Civic leader
• JayaShri Maathaa, Monk
• Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut
• Madison McFerrin, Singer and songwriter
• Renee Montgomery, WNBA champion and activist
• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Economist and international development expert
• Angélique Parisot-Potter, Legal and business integrity leader
• Sophie Rose, Infectious disease researcher
• Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey, Poet and author
• Gloria Steinem, Feminist activist and writer
• Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Politician
• Tracy Young, Builder
• View the full speaker lineup

TED has partnered with a number of organizations to support its mission and contribute to the idea exchange at TEDWomen 2020. These organizations are collaborating with the TED team on innovative ways to engage a virtual audience and align their ideas and perspectives with this year’s programming. This year’s partners include: Boston Consulting Group, Dove Advanced Care Antiperspirant, Project Management Institute and the U.S. Air Force.

TEDWomen 2020 is taking place on November 12, 11am – 6pm ET. TEDWomen applications will be accepted until 9am ET, November 9 (or until sold out). Learn more and apply now!

Conversations on the future of vaccines, tech, government and art: Week 5 of TED2020

Week 5 of TED2020 featured wide-ranging discussions on the quest for a coronavirus vaccine, the future of the art world, what it’s like to lead a country during a pandemic and much more. Below, a recap of insights shared.

Jerome Kim, Director General of the International Vaccine Institute

Big idea: There’s a lot of work still to be done, but the world is making progress on developing a COVID-19 vaccine. 

How? A normal vaccine takes five to 10 years to develop and costs about a billion dollars, with a failure rate of 93 percent. Under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, however, we’re being asked to speed things up to within a window of 12 to 18 months, says Jerome Kim. How are things going? He updates us on the varied field of vaccine candidates and approaches, from Moderna’s mRNA vaccine to AstraZeneca’s vectored vaccine to whole inactivated vaccines, and how these companies are innovating to develop and manufacture their products in record time. In addition to the challenge of making a sufficient amount of a safe, effective vaccine (at the right price), Kim says we must think about how to distribute it for the whole world — not just rich nations. The question of equity and access is the toughest one of all, he says, but the answer will ultimately lead us out of this pandemic.

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Nir Eyal, Bioethicist

Big idea: Testing vaccine efficacy is normally a slow, years-long process, but we can ethically accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development through human challenge trials.

How? Thousands of people continue to die every day from COVID-19 across the globe, and we risk greater death and displacement if we rely on conventional vaccine trials, says bioethicist Nir Eyal. While typical trials observe experimental and control groups over time until they see meaningful differences between the two, Eyal proposes using human challenge trials in our search for a vaccine — an approach that deliberately exposes test groups to the virus in order to quickly determine efficacy. Human challenge trials might sound ethically ambiguous or even immoral, but Eyal suggests the opposite is true. Patients already take informed risks by participating in drug trials and live organ donations; if we look at statistical risk and use the right bioethical framework, we can potentially hasten vaccine development while maintaining tolerable risks. The key, says Eyal, is the selection criteria: by selecting young participants who are free from risk factors like hypertension, for example, the search for a timely solution to this pandemic is possible. “The dramatic number of people who could be aided by a faster method of testing vaccines matters,” he says. “It’s not the case that we are violating the rights of individuals to maximize utility. We are both maximizing utility and respecting rights, and this marriage is very compelling in defending the use of these accelerated [vaccine trial] designs.”

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Ashraf Ghani, President of Afghanistan

Big Idea: Peacemaking is a discipline that must be practiced daily, both in life and politics. 

How? Having initiated sweeping economic, trade and social reforms, Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani shares key facets of peacemaking that he relies on to navigate politically sensitive relationships and the ongoing health crisis: mutual respect, listening and humanity. Giving us a glimpse of Afghanistan that goes beyond the impoverished, war-torn image painted in the media, he describes the aspirations, entrepreneurship and industry that’s very much alive there, especially in its youth and across all genders. “What I hear from all walks of life, men and women, girls and boys, [is] a quest for normalcy. We’re striving to be normal. It’s not we who are abnormal; it’s the circumstances in which we’ve been caught. And we are attempting to carve a way forward to overcome the types of turbulence that, in interaction with each other, provide an environment of continuous uncertainty. Our goal is to overcome this, and I think with the will of the people, we will be able to,” he says. President Ghani also shares perspective on Afghanistan’s relationship to China, the Taliban and Pakistan — expressing a commitment to his people and long term peace that fuels every conversation. “The ultimate goal is a sovereign, democratic, united Afghanistan at peace with itself in the world,” he says. 

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Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp

Big idea: Tech platforms have a responsibility to provide privacy and security to users.

Why? On WhatsApp, two billion users around the world send more than 100 billion messages every day. All of them are protected by end-to-end encryption, which means that the conversations aren’t stored and no one can access them — not governments, companies or even WhatsApp itself. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more of our conversations with family, friends and coworkers have to occur through digital means. This level of privacy is a fundamental right that has never been more important, says Cathcart. To ensure their encryption services aren’t misused to promote misinformation or conduct crime, WhatsApp has developed tools and protocols that keep users safe without disrupting the privacy of all of its users. “It’s so important that we match the security and privacy you have in-person, and not say, ‘This digital world is totally different: we should change all the ways human beings communicate and completely upend the rules.’ No, we should try to match that as best we can, because there’s something magical about people talking to each other privately.”

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Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn Museum

Big idea: We need the arts to be able to document and reflect on what we’re living through, express our pain and joy and imagine a better future.

How? Museums are vital community institutions that reflect the memories, knowledge and dreams of a society. Located in a borough of more than 2.5 million people, the Brooklyn Museum is one of the largest and most influential museums in the world, and it serves a community that has been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pasternak calls on museums to take a leading role in manifesting community visions of a better world. In a time defined by dramatic turmoil and global suffering, artists will help ignite the radical imagination that leads to cultural, political and social change, she says. Museums also have a responsibility to uplift a wide variety of narratives, taking special care to highlight communities who have historically been erased from societal remembrance and artmaking. The world has been irreversibly changed and devastated by the pandemic. It’s time to look to art as a medium of collective memorializing, mourning, healing and transformation.

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Honor Harger, Executive Director of the ArtScience Museum

Big Idea: Cultural institutions can care for their communities by listening to and amplifying marginalized voices.

How: The doors of Singapore’s famed ArtScience Museum building are closed — but online, the museum is engaging with its community more deeply than ever. Executive director Honor Harger shares how the museum has moved online with ArtScience at Home, a program offering online talks, streamed performances and family workshops addressing COVID-19 and our future. Reflecting on the original meaning of “curator” (from the Latin curare, or “to care”), Harger shares how ArtScience at Home aims to care for its community by listening to underrepresented groups. The program seeks out marginalized voices and provides a global platform for them to tell their own stories, unmediated and unedited, she says. Notably, the program included a screening of Salary Day by Ramasamy Madhavan, the first film made by a migrant worker in Singapore. The programming will have long-lasting effects on the museum’s curation in the future and on its international audience, Harger says. “Art changes minds, shifts mentalities, changes the behavior of people and the way they think and how they feel,” she says. “We are seeing the power of culture and art to both heal and facilitate dramatic change.”

WHAAAAAT?: Notes from Session 4 of TED2020

For Session 4 of TED2020, experts in biohacking, synthetic biology, psychology and beyond explored topics ranging from discovering the relationship between the spinal cord and asparagus to using tools of science to answer critical questions about racial bias. Below, a recap of the night’s talks and performances.

Andrew Pelling, biomedical researcher

Big idea: Could we use asparagus to repair spinal cords?

How? Andrew Pelling researches how we might use fruits, vegetables and plants to reconstruct damaged or diseased human tissues. (Check out his 2016 talk about making ears out of apples.) His lab strips these organisms of their DNA and cells, leaving just the fibers behind, which are then used as “scaffolds” to reconstruct tissue. Now, they’re busy working with asparagus, experimenting to see if the vegetable’s microchannels can guide the regeneration of cells after a spinal cord injury. There’s evidence in rats that it’s working, the first data of its kind to show that plant tissues might be capable of repairing such a complex injury. Pelling is also the cofounder of Spiderwort, a startup that’s translating these innovative discoveries into real-world applications. “Every scientist can tell you about the time they ignored their doubts and did the experiment that would ‘never’ work,” he says. “And the thing is, every now and then, one of those experiments works out.”

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Christina Agapakis, synthetic designer

Big idea: Synthetic biology isn’t an oxymoron; it investigates the boundary between nature and technology — and it could shape the future.

How? From teaching bacteria how to play sudoku to self-healing concrete, Christina Agapakis introduces us to the wonders of synthetic biology: a multidisciplinary science that seeks to create and sometimes redesign systems found in nature. “We have been promised a future of chrome, but what if the future is fleshy?” asks Agapakis. She delves into the ways biology could expand technology and alter the way we understand ourselves, exposing the surprisingly blurred lines between art, science and society. “It starts by recognizing that we as synthetic biologists are also shaped by a culture that values ‘real’ engineering more than any of the squishy stuff. We get so caught up in circuits and what happens inside of computers that we sometimes lose sight of the magic that’s happening inside of us,” says Agapakis.

Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of indie pop band Lucius provide an enchanting musical break between talks, performing their songs “White Lies” and “Turn It Around.”

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Jennifer L. Eberhardt, psychologist

Big idea: We can use science to break down the societal and personal biases that unfairly target Black people.

How? When Jennifer Eberhardt flew with her five-year-old son one day, he turned to her after looking at the only other Black man on the plane and said, “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane” — showing Eberhardt undeniable evidence that racial bias seeps into every crack of society. For Eberhardt, a MacArthur-winning psychologist specializing in implicit bias, this surfaced a key question at the core of our society: How do we break down the societal and personal biases that target blackness? Just because we’re vulnerable to bias doesn’t mean we need to act on it, Eberhardt says. We can create “friction” points that eliminate impulsive social media posts based on implicit bias, such as when Nextdoor fought back against its “racial profiling problem” that required users to answer a few simple questions before allowing them to raise the alarm on “suspicious” visitors to their neighborhoods. Friction isn’t just a matter of online interaction, either. With the help of similar questions, the Oakland Police Department instituted protocols that reduce traffic stops of African-Americans by 43 percent. “Categorization and the bias that it seeds allow our brains to make judgments more quickly and efficiently,” Eberhardt says. “Just as the categories we create allow us to make quick decisions, they also reinforce bias — so the very things that help us to see the world also can blind us to it. They render our choices effortless, friction-free, yet they exact a heavy toll.”

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Michael Levin, biological programmer

Big idea: DNA isn’t the only builder in the biological world — there’s also an invisible electrical matrix directing cells to change into organs, telling tadpoles to become frogs, and instructing flatworms to regenerate new bodies once sliced in half. If Michael Levin and his colleagues can learn this cellular “machine language,” human beings may be one step closer to curing birth defects, eliminating cancer and evading aging.

How? As cells become organs, systems and bodies, they communicate via an electrical system dictating where the finished parts will go. Guided by this cellular network, organisms grow, transform and even build new limbs (or bodies) after trauma. At Michael Levin’s lab, scientists are cracking this code — and have even succeeded in creating autonomous organisms out of skin cells by altering the cell electrically without genetic manipulation. Mastering this code could not only allow humans to create microscopic biological “xenobots” to rebuild and medicate our bodies from the inside but also let us to grow new organs — and perhaps rejuvenate ourselves as we age. “We are now beginning to crack this morphogenetic code to ask: How is it that these tissues store a map of what to do?” Levin asks. “[How can we] go in and rewrite that map to new outcomes?”

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Ali Kashani, VP of special projects at Postmates

Big idea: Robots are becoming a part of everyday life in urban centers, which means we’ll have to design them to be accessible, communicative and human-friendly.

How? On the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, delivery robots bustle along neighborhood sidewalks to drop-off packages and food. With potential benefits ranging from environmental responsibility to community-building, these robots offer us an incredible glimpse into the future. The challenge now is ensuring that robots can move out of the lab and fit into our world and among us as well, says Kashani. At Postmates, Kashani designs robots with human reaction in mind. Instead of frightening, dystopian imagery, he wants people to understand robots as familiar and friendly. This is why Postmates’s robots are reminiscent of beloved characters like the Minions and Wall-E; they can use their eyes to communicate with humans and acknowledge obstacles like traffic stops in real-time. There are so many ways robots can help us and our communities: picking up extra food from restaurants for shelters, delivering emergency medication to those in need and more. By designing robots to integrate into our physical and social infrastructures, we can welcome them to the world seamlessly and create a better future for all. “My vision for the future is that when things come to life, they do so with joy,” Kashani says.

The bill has come due for the US’s legacy of racism: Week 3 of TED2020

In response to the historic moment of mourning and anger over the ongoing violence inflicted on Black communities by police in the United States, four leaders in the movement for civil rights — Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, CEO of Center for Policing Equity; Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change; Dr. Bernice Albertine King, CEO of the King Center; and Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union — joined TED2020 to explore how we can dismantle the systems of oppression and racism. Watch the full discussion on TED.com, and read a recap below.

Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity

Big idea: The bill has come due for the unpaid debts the United States owes to its Black residents. But we’re not going to get to where we need to go just by reforming police.

How? What we’re seeing now isn’t just the response to one gruesome, cruel, public execution — a lynching. And it’s not just the reaction to three of them: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. What we’re seeing is the bill come due for the unpaid debts that the US owes to its Black residents, says Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE). In addition to the work that CPE is known for — working with police departments to use their own data to improve relationships with the communities they serve — Goff and his team are encouraging departments and cities to take money from police budgets and instead invest it directly in public resources for the community, so people don’t need the police for public safety in the first place. Learn more about how you can support the Center for Policing Equity »

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Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change

Big idea: In the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, people are showing up day after day in support of the Movement for Black Lives and in protest of police brutality against Black communities. We need to channel that presence and energy into power and material change.

How? The presence and visibility of a movement can often lead us to believe that progress is inevitable. But building power and changing the system requires more than conversations and retweets. To create material change in the racist systems that enable and perpetuate violence against Black communities, we need to translate the energy of these global protests into specific demands and actions, says Robinson. We have to pass new laws and hold those in power — from our police chiefs to our city prosecutors to our representatives in Congress — accountable to them. If we want to disentangle these interlocking systems of violence and complicity, Robinson says, we need to get involved in local, tangible organizing and build the power necessary to change the rules. “You can’t sing our songs, use our hashtags and march in our marches if you are on the other end supporting the structures that put us in harm’s way, that literally kill us,” Robinson says. “This is the time for white allies to stand up in new ways, to do the type of allyship that truly dismantles structures, not just provides charity.”

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Dr. Bernice Albertine King, CEO of The King Center

Big idea: To move towards a United States rooted in benevolent coexistence, equity and love, we must destroy and replace systems of oppression and violence towards Black communities. Nonviolence, accountability and love must pave the way.

How? The US needs a course correction that involves both hard work and “heart work” — and no one is exempt from it, says Dr. Bernice Albertine King. King continues to spread and build upon the wisdom of her father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and she believes the US can work towards unity and collective healing. To do so, racism, systemic oppression, militarism and violence must end. She calls for a revolution of values, allies that listen and engage and a world where anger is given space to be rechanneled into creating social and economic change. In this moment, as people have reached a boiling point and are being asked to restructure the nature of freedom, King encourages us to follow her father’s words of nonviolent coexistence, and not continue on the path of violent coannihilation. “You as a person may want to exempt yourself, but every generation is called,” King says. “And so I encourage corporations in America to start doing anti-racism work within corporate America. I encourage every industry to start doing anti-racism work and pick up the banner of understanding nonviolent change personally and from a social change perspective. We can do this. We can make the right choice to ultimately build the beloved community.”

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Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Big idea: No matter how frightened we are by the current turmoil, we must stay positive, listen to and engage with unheard or silenced voices, and help answer what’s become the central question of democracy in the United States: Can we really become an equal people, equally bound by law, when so many of us are beaten down by racist institutions and their enforcers?

How? This is no time for allies to disconnect — it’s time for them to take a long look in the mirror, ponder viewpoints they may not agree with or understand and engage in efforts to dismantle institutional white supremacy, Romero says. Reform is not enough anymore. Among many other changes, the most acute challenge the ACLU is now tackling is how to defund militarized police forces that more often look like more standing armies than civil servants — and bring them under civilian control. “For allies in this struggle, and those of us who don’t live this experience every day, it is time for us to lean in,” Romero says. “You can’t change the channel, you can’t tune out, you can’t say, ‘This is too hard.’ It is not that hard for us to listen and learn and heed.”

Conversations on social progress: Week 3 of TED2020

For week 3 of TED2020, global leaders in technology, vulnerability research and activism gathered for urgent conversations on how to foster connection, channel energy into concrete social action and work to end systemic racism in the United States. Below, a recap of their insights.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister for social innovation

Big idea: Digital innovation rooted in communal trust can create a stronger, more transparent democracy that is fast, fair — and even fun.

How? Taiwan has built a “digital democracy” where digital innovation drives active, inclusive participation from all its citizens. Sharing how she’s helped transform her government, Audrey Tang illustrates the many creative and proven ways technology can be used to foster community. In responding to the coronavirus pandemic, Taiwan created a collective intelligence system that crowdsources information and ideas, which allowed the government to act quickly and avoid a nationwide shutdown. They also generated a publicly accessible map that shows the availability of masks in local pharmacies to help people get supplies, along with a “humor over rumor” campaign that combats harmful disinformation with comedy. In reading her job description, Tang elegantly lays out the ideals of digital citizenship that form the bedrock of this kind of democracy: “When we see the internet of things, let’s make an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.”

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Brené Brown, Vulnerability researcher, storyteller

Big question: The United States is at its most vulnerable right now. Where do we go from here?

Some ideas: As the country reels from the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, along with the protests that have followed, Brené Brown offers insights into how we might find a path forward. Like the rest of us, she’s in the midst of processing this moment, but believes we can harness vulnerability for progress and work together to nurture an era of moral imagination. Accountability must come first, she says: people have to be held responsible for their racist behaviors and violence, and we have to build safe communities where power is shared. Self-awareness will be key to this work: the ability to understand your emotions, behaviors and actions lies at the center of personal and social change and is the basis of empathy. This is hard work, she admits, but our ability to experience love, belonging, joy, intimacy and trust — and to build a society rooted in empathy — depend on it. “In the absence of love and belonging, there’s nothing left,” she says.

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In a time of mourning and anger over the ongoing violence inflicted on Black communities by police in the US and the lack of accountability from national leadership, what is the path forward? In a wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, the CEO of Center for Policing Equity; Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change; Dr. Bernice Albertine King, the CEO of the King Center; and Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, share urgent insights into how we can dismantle the systems of oppression and racism responsible for tragedies like the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and far too many others — and explored how the US can start to live up to its ideals. Watch the discussion on TED.com.

We the Future 2019: Talks from TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation

At “We the Future,” a day of talks from TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation at the TED World Theater in New York City, 18 speakers and performers shared daring ideas, deep analysis, cautionary tales and behavior-changing strategies aimed at meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global goals created in partnership with individuals around the world and adopted at the United Nations in 2015.

The event: We the Future, presented by TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation to share ingenious efforts of people from every corner of the globe

When and where: Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York, NY

Music: Queen Esther with Hilliard Greene and Jeff McGlaughlin, performing the jazzy “Blow Blossoms” and the protest song “All That We Are”

The talks in brief:

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David Wallace-Wells, journalist

Big idea: The climate crisis is too vast and complicated to solve with a silver bullet. We need a shift in how we live: a whole new politics, economics and relationship to technology and nature.

Why? The climate crisis isn’t the legacy of our ancestors, but the work of a single generation — ours, says Wallace-Wells. Half of all the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in the history of humanity were produced in the last 30 years. We clearly have immense power over the climate, and it’s put us on the brink of catastrophe — but it also means we’re the ones writing the story of our planet’s future. If we are to survive, we’ll need to reshape society as we know it — from building entirely new electric grids, planes and infrastructures to rethinking the way the global community comes together to support those hit hardest by climate change. In we do that, we just might build a new world that’s livable, prosperous and green.

Quote of the talk: “We won’t be able to beat climate change — only live with it and limit it.”

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Kristen Wenz, legal identity expert

Big idea: More than one billion people — mostly children — don’t have legal identities or birth certificates, which means they can’t get vital government services like health care and schooling. It’s a massive human rights violation we need to fix.

How? There are five key approaches to ensuring children are registered and protected — reduce distance, reduce cost, simplify the process, remove discrimination and increase demand. In Tanzania, the government helped make it easier for new parents to register their child by creating an online registration system and opening up registration hubs in communities. The results were dramatic: the number of children with birth certificates went from 16 to 83 percent in just a few years. By designing solutions with these approaches in mind, we can provide better protection and brighter opportunities for children across the world.

Quote of the talk: “When the cost of inaction is that innocent children are left unprotected, unvaccinated, unable to go to school … trapped in a cycle of poverty, exclusion and invisibility, it’s on us to take this issue out of darkness and into the light.”

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Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation, in conversation with TEDWomen curator and author Pat Michell

Big idea: Don Gips turned away from careers in both government and business and became CEO of the Skoll Foundation for one reason: the opportunity to take charge of investing in solutions to the most urgent issues humanity faces. Now, it’s the foundation’s mission to identify the investments that will spark the greatest changes.

How?

By reaching deeper into communities and discovering and investing in social entrepreneurs and other changemakers, the Skoll Foundation supports promising solutions to urgent global problems. As their investments yield positive results, Gips hopes to inspire the rest of the philanthropic community to find better ways to direct their resources.

Quote of the interview: “We don’t tell the changemaker what the solution is. We invest in their solution, and go along on the journey with them.”

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Alejandro Durán, artist

Big Idea: Art can spotlight the environmental atrocities happening to our oceans — leaving viewers both mesmerized and shocked.

Why? From prosthetic legs to bottle caps, artist Alejandro Durán makes ephemeral environmental artworks out of objects he finds polluting the waters of his native region of Sian Ka’an, Mexico. He meticulously organizes materials by color and curates them into site-specific work. Durán put on his first “Museo de La Basura or Museum of Garbage“ exhibition in 2015, which spoke to the horrors of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and he’s still making art that speaks to the problem of ocean trash. By endlessly reusing objects in his art, Durán creates new works that engage communities in environmental art-making, attempting to depict the reality of our current environmental predicament and make the invisible visible.

Quote of the talk: “By making aesthetic, some might say beautiful, arrangements out of the world’s waste, I hope to hook the viewer, to draw in those that are numb to the horrors of the world, and give them a different way to understand what is happening.”

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Andrew Forrest, entrepreneur, in conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson

Big idea: The true — and achievable! — business case for investing in plastic recycling.

How? Since earning his PhD in marine ecology, Forrest has dedicated his time and money to solving the global plastic problem, which is choking our waterways and oceans with toxic material that never biodegrades. “I learned a lot about marine life,” he says of his academic experience. “But it taught me more about marine death.” To save ourselves and our underwater neighbors from death by nanoplastics, Forrest says we need the big corporations of the world to fund a massive environmental transition that includes increasing the price of plastic and turning the tide on the recycling industry.

Quote of the talk: “[Plastic] is an incredible substance designed for the economy. It’s the worst substance possible for the environment.”

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Raj Panjabi, cofounder of medical NGO Last Mile Health

Big idea: Community health workers armed with training and technology are our first line of defense against deadly viral surges. If we are to fully protect the world from killer diseases, we must ensure that people living in the most remote areas of the planet are never far from a community health worker trained to throttle epidemics at their outset.

How? In December 2013, Ebola broke out in West Africa and began a transborder spread that threatened to wipe out millions of people. Disease fighters across Africa joined the battle to stop it — including Liberian health workers trained by Last Mile Health and armed with the technology, knowledge and support necessary to serve their communities. With their help, Ebola was stopped (for now), after killing 11,000 people. Panjabi believes that if we train and pay more community health workers, their presence in underserved areas will not only stop epidemics but also save the lives of the millions of people threatened by diseases like malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea.

Quote of the talk: “We dream of a future when millions of people … can gain dignified jobs as community health workers, so they can serve their neighbors in the forest communities of West Africa to the fishing villages of the Amazon; from the hilltops of Appalachia to the mountains of Afghanistan.”

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Tashka and Laura Yawanawá, leaders of the Yawanawá in Acre, Brazil

Big idea: To save the Amazon rainforest, let’s empower indigenous people who have been coexisting with the rainforest for centuries.

Why? Tashka Yawanawá is chief of the Yawanawá people in Acre, Brazil, leading 900 people who steward 400,000 acres of Brazilian Amazon rainforest. As footage of the Amazon burning shocks the world’s consciousness, Tashka and his wife, Laura, call for us to transform this moment into an opportunity to support indigenous people who have the experience, knowledge and tools to protect the land.

Quote of the talk: “Indigenous people have the answer. If we want to save the Amazon, we have to act now.”

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Alasdair Harris, ocean conservationist

Big idea: To the impoverished fishers that rely on the sea for their food, and who comprise 90 percent of the world’s fishing fleet, outside interference by scientists and marine managers can seem like just another barrier to their survival. Could the world rejuvenate its marine life and replenish its fish stocks by inspiring coastal communities rather than simply regulating them?

How? When he first went to Madagascar, marine biologist Alasdair Harris failed to convince local leaders to agree to a years-long plan to close their threatened coral reefs to fishing. But when a contained plan to preserve a breeding ground for an important local species of octopus led to rapid growth in catches six months later, the same elders banded together with leaders across Madagascar to spearhead a conservation revolution. Today, Harris’s organization Blue Ventures works to help coastal communities worldwide take control of their own ecosystems.

Quote of the talk: “When we design it right, marine conservation reaps dividends that go far beyond protecting nature — improving catches, driving waves of social change along entire coastlines, strengthening confidence, cooperation and the resilience of communities to face the injustice of poverty and climate change.”

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Bright Simons, social entrepreneur and product security expert

Big idea: A global breakdown of the trustworthiness of markets and regulatory institutions has led to a flurry of counterfeit drugs, mislabeled food and defective parts. Africa has been dealing with counterfeit goods for years, and entrepreneurs like Bright Simons have developed myriad ways consumers can confirm that their food and drug purchases are genuine. Why are these methods ignored in the rest of the world?

How? Bright Simons demonstrates some of the innovative solutions Africans use to restore trust in their life-giving staples, such as text hotlines to confirm medications are real and seed databases to certify the authenticity of crops. Yet in the developed world, these solutions are often overlooked because they “don’t scale” — an attitude Simons calls “mental latitude imperialism.” It’s time to champion “intellectual justice” — and look at these supposedly non-scalable innovations with new respect.

Quote of the talk: “It just so happens that today, the most advanced and most progressive solutions to these problems are being innovated in the developing world.”

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LaToya Ruby Frazier, artist 

Big Idea: LaToya Ruby Frazier’s powerful portraits of women in Flint, Michigan document the reality of the Flint water crisis, bringing awareness to the ongoing issue and creating real, positive change.

How? Frazier’s portraits of the daily lives of women affected by the Flint water crisis are striking reminders that, after all the news crews were gone, the people of Flint still did not have clean water. For one photo series, she closely followed the lives of Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb — two activists, poets and best friends — who were working to educate the public about the water crisis. Frazier has continued collaborating with Hasan and Cobb to seek justice and relief for those suffering in Flint. In 2019, they helped raise funds for an atmospheric water generator that provided 120,000 gallons of water to Flint residents. 

Quote of the talk: “Water is life. It is the spirit that binds us from sickness, death and destruction. Imagine how many millions of lives we could save if [the atmospheric water generator] were in places like Newark, New Jersey, South Africa and India — with compassion instead of profit motives.”

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Cassie Flynn, global climate change advisor

Big idea: We need a new way to get citizen consensus on climate change and connect them with governments and global leaders.

How? The United Nations is taking on an entirely new model of reaching the masses: mobile phone games. Flynn shares how their game “Mission 1.5” can help people learn about their policy choices on climate change by allowing them to play as heads of state. From there, the outcomes of their gameplay will be compiled and shared with their national leaders and the public. Flynn foresees this as a fresh, feasible way to meet citizens where they are, to educate them about climate change and to better connect them to the people who are making those tough decisions.

Quote of the talk: “Right now, world leaders are faced with the biggest and most impactful decisions of their entire lives. What they decide to do on climate change will either lead to a riskier, more unstable planet or a future that is more prosperous and sustainable for us all.”

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Wanjira Mathai, entrepreneur

Big Idea: Corruption is a constant threat in Kenya. To defeat it there and anywhere, we need to steer youth towards integrity through education and help them understand the power of the individual.

Why? In 1989, the Karura Forest, a green public oasis in Nairobi, Kenya, was almost taken away by a corrupt government until political activist Wangari Maathai, Nobel Prize recipient and founder of the Greenbelt Movement, fought back fiercely and won. Continuing Maathai’s legacy, her daughter Wanjira explains how corruption is still very much alive in Kenya — a country that loses a third of its state budget to corruption every year. “Human beings are not born corrupt. At some point these behaviors are fostered by a culture that promotes individual gain over collective progress,” she says. She shares a three-pronged strategy for fighting corruption before it takes root by addressing why it happens, modeling integrity and teaching leadership skills.

Quote of the talk: “We cannot complain forever. We either decide that we are going to live with it, or we are going to change it. And if we are going to change it, we know that today, most of the world’s problems are caused by corruption and greed and selfishness.”

Imagine If: A session of talks in partnership with the U.S. Air Force

The event: TED Salon: Imagine If, curated by Bryn Freedman and Amanda Miller, TED Institute

The partner: U.S. Air Force

When and where: Thursday, February 21, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York City

Music: Rapper Alia Sharrief, performing her songs “My Girls Rock” and “Girl Like Me”

The big idea: Imagination is a superpower — it allows us to push beyond perceived limits, to think beyond the ordinary and to discover a new world of possibilities.

New idea (to us anyway): We may be able to vaccinate against PTSD and other mental illnesses.

Good to be reminded: Leaders shouldn’t simply follow the pack. They need to embrace sustainability, equality, accountability — not just the whims of the market.

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Brenda Cartier, Director of Operations at Headquarters Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) and the first female Air Commando selected for the rank of general

• Big idea: “Precision-guided masculinity” allows us to maintain a killer instinct without discarding the empathetic, “feminine” traits that mitigate the “collateral damage” of toxic masculinity.
• How? Viewing gender as a spectrum of femininities and masculinities allows us to select traits as they fit each situation, without tying our identities to them. As we learn to balance our personalities, we become well-rounded human beings and create more just societies.
• Quote of the talk: “This new narrative breaks us out of a one-size-fits-all approach to gender, where we link male bodies and masculinity and female bodies and femininity. ‘Precision-guided masculinity’ begs us to ask the question: ‘Who is it that is employing those masculine traits to protect and defend?'”

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Rebecca Brachman, neuroscientist, TED Fellow and pioneer in the emerging field of preventative psychopharmacology

• Big idea: Brachman and her team have discovered a new class of drugs called “resilience enhancers” that could change the way we treat mental illness like depression and PTSD. These drugs wouldn’t just treat symptoms of the diseases, she says — they could prevent them from developing in the first place.
• How? Brachman’s research applies the fundamental principle of vaccination to mental illness, building up a person’s ability to recover and grow after stress. For example, imagine a Red Cross volunteer going into an earthquake zone. In addition to the typhoid vaccine, she could take a resilience-enhancing drug before she leaves to protect her against PTSD. The same applies to soldiers, firefighters, ER doctors, cancer patients, refugees — anyone exposed to trauma or major life stress. The drugs have worked in preliminary tests with mice. Next up, humans.
• Quote of the talk: “This is a paradigm shift in psychiatry. It’s a whole new field: preventative psychopharmacology.”

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Michele Wucker, finance and policy strategist, founder and CEO of Gray Rhino & Company

• Big idea: Catastrophic events sometimes catch us by surprise, but too often we invite crises to barrel right into our lives despite countless, blaring warning signs. What keeps us from facing the reality of a situation head-on?
• How? Semantics, semantics, semantics — and a healthy dose of honesty. Wucker urges us to replace the myth of the “black swan” — that rare, unforeseeable, unavoidable event — with the reality of the “gray rhino,” the common obvious catastrophes, like the bursting of a financial bubble or the end of a tempestuous relationship, that are predictable and preventable. She breaks down the factors that determine whether we run from problems or tackle them, and lays out some warning signs that you may be ignoring one of those charging rhinos right now.
• Quote of the talk: “Think about the obvious challenges in your own life and how you deal with them. Do you stick your head in the ground like an ostrich and ignore the problems entirely? Do you freak out like Chicken Little over all the tiny things, but miss the big giant wolf coming at you? Or do you manage things when they’re small to keep them from going out of control?”

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Halla Tómasdóttir, CEO of Richard Branson’s B Team and former Icelandic presidential candidate, interviewed by curator Bryn Freedman

• Big idea: Corporate leaders — and the businesses they run — are in a crisis of conformity that favors not rocking the boat and ignores big issues like climate change and inequality. We need new leadership to get us out of this crisis.
• How? It’s not enough for corporate leaders to simply follow the pack and narrowly define the missions of their organizations. If CEOs want to avoid the pitchforks of the masses, they must also ensure that their businesses are global citizens that embrace sustainability, equality, accountability — not just the markets.
• Quote of the talk: “At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves who are we holding ourselves accountable for — and if that isn’t the next generation, I don’t know who.”

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Sarah T. Stewart, planetary scientist at the University of California, Davis, and 2018 MacArthur “Genius” fellow

• Big idea: How did the Moon form? Despite its proximity, we don’t actually know! Adding to the mystery: the Earth and Moon are composed of the same stuff, a rarity we’ve found nowhere else in the universe. In trying to solve the mystery, Sarah T. Stewart discovered an entirely new not-quite-planet.
• How? Stewart and her team smash planets together in computer simulations to learn more about how they were created. While trying to uncover the Moon’s origin, they discovered that the early Earth may have been involved in a massive collision with a Mars-sized planet, which then created a “synestia:” a super-heated doughnut of molten material previously unknown to science, out of which the Moon was born.
• Quote of the talk: “I discovered a new type of astronomical object. It’s not a planet; it’s made from planets.”

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Kashfia Rahman, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair winner and Harvard freshman

• Big idea: Teenagers aren’t necessarily chasing thrills when they make bad decisions. Rather, repeated exposure to risk actually numbs how they make choices.
• How? After wondering why her peers were constantly making silly and irresponsible decisions, Kashfia Rahman decided to conduct an experiment testing how her fellow high school students responded to risk. She found that habituation to risk — or “getting used to it” — impacts how teenagers make choices beyond their cognitive control. With this insight, she believes we can create policies that more holistically tackle high-risk behavior among teenagers.
• Quote of the talk: “Unforeseen opportunities often come from risk-taking — not the hazardous negative risk-taking I studied, but the good ones, the positive risks,” she says. “The more risks I took, the more I felt capable.”

Stacey Abrams’ State of the Union response and more updates from TED speakers

The TED community is brimming with new projects and updates. Below, a few highlights.

Stacey Abrams responds to the US State of the Union. Politician Stacey Abrams spoke from Atlanta on behalf of the Democratic party following the State of the Union address. In her speech, she focused on the fight against bigotry, bipartisanship in a turbulent America and voter rights. The right to vote is especially important to Abrams — last November, she lost the Georgia gubernatorial election by 55,000 votes, a loss that some pundits have attributed to voter suppression. “The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders, not where politicians pick their voters,” she said. “In this time of division and crisis, we must come together and stand for, and with, one another.” Watch the full speech on The New York Times website or read the transcript at USA Today. (Watch Abrams’ TED Talk.)

Remembering Emily Levine. The extraordinary humorist and philosopher Emily Levine has passed away following a battle with lung cancer. Reflecting on life and death, Levine said, “’I am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.” Read our full tribute to Levine on our blog. (Watch Levin’s TED Talk.)

Could you cut the tech giants from your life? In a new multimedia series from Gizmodo, journalist Kashmir Hill details her six-week experiment quitting Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google — and shares surprising insights on how entwined these companies are in daily life. With help from technologist Dhruv Mehrotra, Hill blocked access to one company for a week at a time using a custom VPN (virtual private network), culminating with a final week of excluding all five tech companies. In just her first week of cutting out Amazon, Hill’s VPN logged over 300,000 blocked pings to Amazon servers! Check out the whole series on Gizmodo. (Watch Hill’s TED Talk.)

Exploring the historical roots of today’s biggest headlines. Alongside artist Masud Olufani, journalist Celeste Headlee will launch a new series at PBS called Retro Report that will explore current news stories, “revealing their unknown — and often surprising — connections to the past.” Each one-hour episode will trace the history of four news stories, including Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests, modern-day drug approval laws and the US government’s wild horse care program. Retro Report will launch on PBS this fall. (Watch Headlee’s TED Talk.)

Customizable vegetables now for sale. Grubstreet has a new profile on Row 7, the seed company co-founded by chef Dan Barber that wants to change the way farmers, chefs and breeders collaborate and connect. Alongside breeder Michael Mazourek and seeds dealer Matthew Goldfarb, Barber hopes to design seeds that have the flavors chefs want, along with the qualities (like high yield and disease resistance) that farmers are looking for.  “We’re trying to deepen the context for the seeds, and this conversation between breeders and the chefs,” Barber said. By prioritizing taste and nutrition, Row 7 plans to engineer ever-evolving seed collections that meet the needs of both farmers and chefs. Row 7’s first seed collection is now available for purchase. (Watch Barber’s TED Talk.)

A promising new report on tobacco divestment. The Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge, led by oncologist Bronwyn King, has a new signatory: Genus Capital Investment, a leading Canadian fossil-free investment firm. Genus released a new report — based on a six-year study — about the financial impacts of divesting from tobacco stocks and removing tobacco from its portfolios. They found that over the past 20 years, tobacco divestment did not negatively affect index portfolios, and that in the past five years, portfolios that excluded tobacco actually outperformed the market. In a statement, King said, “This new research adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that investors do not need to invest in tobacco to achieve excellent returns.” Spearheaded by Tobacco Free Portfolios and the United Nations Environment Programme, the Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge was launched last year and has over 140 signatories and supporters. (Watch King’s TED Talk.)

An HBO feature on superhuman tech. On Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, bionics designer Hugh Herr presented his team’s latest prosthetics and explained why he thinks bionics will soon revolutionize sports. Herr spoke to Soledad O’Brien about a future of enhanced athletic ability, saying “There’s going to be new sports … power basketball, power swimming, power climbing. It’ll be a reinvention of sports and it’ll be so much fun.” In a teaser clip, O’Brien tried on a pair of lower-leg exoskeletons developed at Herr’s MIT lab; the full episode can be viewed on HBO. (Watch Herr’s TED Talk.)

 

Have a news item to share? Write us at contact@ted.com and you may see it included in this round-up.

Education Everywhere: A night of talks about the future of learning, in partnership with TED-Ed

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: Nora Brown fingerpicking the banjo

The big idea: We’re relying on educators to teach more skills than ever before — for a future we can’t quite predict.

Awesome animations: Courtesy of TED-Ed, whose videos are watched by more than two million learners around the world every day

New idea (to us anyway): Poverty is associated with a smaller cortical surface of the brain. 

Good to be reminded: Education doesn’t just happen in the classroom. It happens online, in our businesses, our social systems and beyond.

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The talks in brief:

Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist and director of the Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab at Columbia University

• Big idea: We’ve learned that poverty has a measurable effect on the cortical surface of the brain, an area associated with intelligence. What could we do about that?
• How: Experience can change children’s brains, and the brain is very sensitive to experience in early childhood. Noble’s lab wants to know if giving impoverished families more money might change brain function in their preschool kids.
• Quote of the talk: “The brain is not destiny, and if a child’s brain can be changed, then anything is possible.”

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Olympia Della Flora, associate superintendent for school development for Stamford Public Schools in Connecticut, and the former principal at Ohio Avenue Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio

• Big idea: Healthy emotional hygiene means higher academic scores and happier kids.
• How: With help from local colleges and experts, the teachers at Ohio Avenue Elementary learned new ways to improve kids’ behavior (which in turn helped with learning). Rather than just reacting to kids when they acted out, teachers built healthy coping strategies into the day — simple things like stopping for brain breaks, singing songs and even doing yoga poses — to help kids navigate their emotions in and out of the classroom.
• Quote of the talk: “Small changes make huge differences, and it’s possible to start right now. You don’t need bigger budgets or grand, strategic plans. You simply need smarter ways to think about using what you have, where you have it.”

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Marcos Silva, a TED-Ed Innovative Educator and public school teacher in McAllen, Texas; and Ana Rodriguez, a student who commutes three hours every day to school from Mexico

• Big idea: Understanding what’s going on with students outside of school is important, too.
• How: Silva grew up bringing the things he learned at school about American culture and the English language back to his parents, who were immigrants from Mexico. Now a teacher, he’s helping students like Ana Rodriquez to explore their culture, community and identity.
• Quote of the talk: “Good grades are important, but it’s also important to feel confident and empowered.”

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Joel Levin, a technology teacher and the cofounder of MinecraftEdu

• Big idea: Educators can use games to teach any subject — and actually get kids excited to be in school.
• How: Levin is a big fan of Minecraft, the game that lets players build digital worlds out of blocks with near-endless variety. In the classroom, Minecraft and similar games can be used to spark creativity, celebrate ingenuity and get kids to debate complex topics like government, poverty and power.
• Quote of the talk: “One of my daughters even learned to spell because she wanted to communicate within the game. She spelled ‘home.'”

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Jarrell E. Daniels, criminal justice activist and Columbia University Justice-In-Education Scholar

• Big idea: Collaborative education can help us create more justice.
• How: A few weeks before his release from state prison, Daniels took a unique course called Inside Criminal Justice, where he learned in a classroom alongside prosecutors and police officers, people he couldn’t imagine having anything in common with. In class, Daniels connected with and told his story to those in power — and has since found a way to make an impact on the criminal justice system through the power of conversation.
• Quote of the talk: “It is through education that we will arrive at a truth that is inclusive and unites us all in a pursuit of justice.”

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Liz Kleinrock, third-grade teacher and diversity coordinator at a charter school in Los Angeles

• Big idea: It’s not easy to talk with kids about taboo subjects like race and equity, but having these conversations early prevents bigger problems in the future.
• How: Like teaching students to read, speaking about tough topics requires breaking down concepts and words until they make sense. It doesn’t mean starting with an incredibly complex idea, like why mass incarceration exists — it means starting with the basics, like what’s fair and what isn’t. It requires practice, doing it every day until it’s easier to do.
• Quote of the talk: “Teaching kids about equity is not about teaching them what to think. It’s about giving them the tools, strategies and opportunities to practice how to think.”

Moving forward: Notes from Session 6 of TEDWomen 2018

After three days of astonishing speakers and bold ideas, you may be asking yourself: Where do we go now? The answer: forward.

The final session of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, featured a dynamic lineup of forward thinkers: Ariana Curtis, Galit Ariel, Majd Mashharawi, Soraya Chemaly, Katharine Hayhoe, Cecile Richards, Kakenya Ntaiya, Farida Nabourema and surprise speaker Stacey Abrams. All together, they helped us look at how things are now — and imagine how they could be.

The stories of everyday women are essential, too. Public representations of women are too often enveloped in the language of the extraordinary, says museum curator Ariana Curtis. The stories of extraordinary women are seductive, but they are limited — by definition, to be extraordinary is to be non-representative, atypical. Curtis is dedicated to women’s history that reflects both the remarkable and the quotidian. “If we can collectively apply the radical notion that women are people, it becomes easier to show women as people are — familiar, diverse, present,” she says. As the curator for Latinx Studies at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, she’s empowered to change the current narrative where, she says, “respectability politics and idealized femininity influence how we display women and which women we choose to display.” This in turn leads to the exclusion “of the everyday, the regular, the underrepresented and usually the non-white.” As she says: “I will continue to collect from extraordinary history-makers. Their stories are important. But what drives me to show up today and every day is the simple passion to write our names in history, display them publicly for millions to see, and,” as she quotes poet Sonia Sanchez, to “walk in the ever-present light that is women.”

Exploring new worlds, right here on Earth. Technologist Galit Ariel believes that space is humanity’s final frontier — but she’s not talking about the dark, cold expanse between the planets and stars. She’s talking about the mind-blowing, space-bending technology known as augmented reality or AR. “While similar immersive technologies such as virtual reality aspire to transport you into a completely parallel world, augmented reality adds a digital layer directly onto or within our existing physical environment,” she says. AR can map, understand and react to physical spaces; imagine your entire living room transformed into a lush jungle, for instance, as a jaguar hunts for prey between your sofa and the door. Since our bodies and minds are wired for rich physical interactions, Ariel says, it’s crucial that we create technologies that help us be more present and connected to the world — instead of inside our phones. “Technology will no longer be something that happens elsewhere, but a powerful tool to explore and extend the world, society and ourselves,” she says. In the near future, expect to see more and better platforms — things like wearables and maybe even devices directly embedded into our bodies (Black Mirror, anyone?). “Amazing journeys await us right here on planet Earth,” Ariel says. “Bon voyage.”

Rebuilding Gaza, one brick and one solar cell at a time. “For more than ten years, I and two million people back home have been living in darkness, locked between two borders that are nearly impossible to leave,” says Majd Mashharawi. She lives in Gaza, and she reflects on growing up with “a whole lot of nothing” in the conflict-ridden region — and deciding that she would create something from that nothing. She gravitated toward two urgent needs: for building materials and for electric power, both in short supply in Gaza. After months of research and more than 150 failed experiments, Mashharawi has created a building block that’s made out of the ashes and rubble of demolished houses. The block is light, cheap and strong, and with it, Mashharawi launched the Gaza-based startup GreenCake — which has trained both women and men graduates in manufacturing. “This block is not just a building block,” she says. “It changed the stereotype about women in Gaza, which stated: ‘This type of work is just for men.'” Now Mashharawi has turned her attention to electricity, helping to create a smart solar kit for energy and light. With a business model centered on sharing the solar units among several families, the device is catching on — returning electric power to the hands of people, one solar cell at a time.

Changing the cultural conversation about women and anger. Even though we live in an age where unisex bathrooms and unisex clothing exist, some emotions still get assigned to a single sex. “In culture after culture, anger is reserved as the moral property of boys and men,” says journalist Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. In contrast, angry women are seen as unhinged, irrational or shrill, and they’re often mocked, penalized or punished if they let out their rage (with women of color facing the most severe consequences). Instructions to use one’s “nice” voice and keep smiling start early on, says Chemaly: “As a girl, I learnt that anger is better left entirely unvoiced.” Instead, it emerges in the form of tears, headaches, stomach-churning discontent or teeth-grinding frustration. Turning anger into a no-go zone for women is not only damaging to psyches and bodies, it also prevents real gender equity, Chemaly says: “Societies that don’t respect women’s anger don’t respect women.” As she notes of anger, “If it’s poison, it is also the antidote. We have an anger of hope.” She calls for people of all genders to accept — and not reject — women’s rage, and for women to turn their rage into a seismic force for compassion, justice, accountability and creativity. (Read an excerpt from her book on TED Ideas.)

Let’s talk about climate change — from the heart. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech University, which is in Lubbock, Texas, a place once named the second most conservative town in America. When it comes to talking about climate change there, people immediately see it as political. And that’s not specific to Texas, Hayhoe says — across the US, climate change is viewed as a partisan issue. But in her mind, “to care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a liberal or a political activist,” she says. “We just have to be a human who wants this planet to be a safe home for all of us.” So, how can we speak about climate change without making it political? Hayhoe suggests an approach less focused on the science and more focused on the heart — by starting the conversation from a place of agreement and mutual respect, and then connecting the dots to why climate change matters personally to you. For instance, maybe climate change affects the places you live, your grandchildren or your favorite outdoor hobbies. It’s not a good idea to paralyze people with fear, Hayhoe says. After all, solutions aren’t that far out of reach. Even in Hayhoe’s home state of Texas, almost 20 percent of the state’s electricity comes from renewable sources. “Working together, we can fix it,” she says. “We can’t give in to despair. We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act — and that hope begins with a conversation, today.”

The next political revolution: women. The former president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards has been fighting for women’s rights her entire life. On the TEDWomen stage, she has an urgent message — if women are not at the table, then they are on the menu. What does this mean? Well, though women have made great strides in the last 100 years, they still lack real political power. She offers another way of looking at things: “If half of Congress could get pregnant, we would finally quit fighting about birth control and Planned Parenthood.” So just how do women go about building this political revolution? Richards says that it’s already started and proven by events like the 2017 Women’s March in DC and the unprecedented amount of women who ran for office and won in the 2018 US elections. Now we need to build a sustained global movement for women’s equality — one that’s intersectional and inter-generational. We can do this without waiting for instructions or permission to make a difference, she says, by being vocal about what we stand for, realizing nobody is free until everybody’s free and voting in every election. “One of us can be ignored, two of us can be dismissed — but together, we’re a movement,” she says. “And we’re unstoppable.”

How one girl’s dream transformed a community. Kakenya Ntaiya dreamed of getting an education. But in her village of Enoosaen, Kenya, Maasai girls were expected to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) at puberty, get married and give up school. So Ntaiya negotiated with her father: she would undergo FGM, but in return, she would stay in school. Eventually, she left for college in the United States, vowing to return to repay her community for their support. Ntaiya returned, founded the education NGO Kakenya’s Dream, and built the Kakenya Center for Excellence, a school where girls can live and study safely. Believing that empowering a community must extend beyond the girls themselves, Ntaiya works with parents, grandmothers and community leaders to make sure they know how well their girls are doing. And realizing that nothing will truly change if boys grow up “with the same mindset as their fathers before them,” she helped launch a program to teach children about gender equality, health and human rights. Kakenya’s Dream shows that “it truly does take a village to make this kind of a dream come true.”

Everything you know about autocracy is wrong. There’s a certain naiveté in the way the press covers dictatorship, activist Farida Nabourema tells us. During interviews about her struggle against Togolese dictator Faure Gnassingbé, her interviewers often emphasize his abuses, “because they believe that will gain attention and sympathy” for activists. “But in reality, it serves the purpose of dictators — it helps them advertise their cruelty,” and consolidates their grip on power. Instead, why not focus on “the stories of resistance, the stories of defiance, the stories of resilience,” and inspire people to fight back? That naiveté extends to citizens of democratic countries, who often assume that oppressed countries are less “morally advanced,” that the world is moving towards freedom, and that very soon, dictatorships will disappear. The reality is much different, Nabourema warns us. “No country is actually destined to be oppressed, but at the same time, no country or no people are immune to oppression or dictatorship.” Any country with a large concentration of power, a reliance on propaganda, excessive militarization, and a disdain for human rights risks falling into autocracy — and we should all be vigilant.

Be aggressive about your ambition. Stacey Abrams‘s 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she’s the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on how to move forward through setbacks — and some hints at what her future might be. Read a full recap of her talk here.

Showing up: Notes from Session 1 of TEDWomen 2018

Women the world over are no longer accepting the status quo. They’re showing up and pushing boundaries. Whatever their focus and talent — business, technology, art, science, politics — pioneers and their allies are joining forces in an explosion of discovery and ingenuity to drive real, meaningful change.

At TEDWomen 2018 — three days of ideas and connections at La Quinta Resort and Club in La Quinta, California — a dynamic and diverse group of leaders, thinkers and people seeking change are facing challenges head-on while empowering us all to shape the future we want to see. The conference kicked off with an electrifying session hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell on Wednesday night — with talks and performances by Simona Abdallah, Tarana Burke, Ai-jen Poo, Dolores Huerta, Ashweetha Shetty, Katharine Wilkinson, Marian Wright Edelman and Flor de Toloache.

A rallying beat to show up and be. Percussionist Simona Abdallah opens TEDWomen with a rapturous bang of the darbuka, a drum of Middle Eastern origin traditionally played by men. Beneath a spotlight with eyes closed and face alight with expression, Abdallah fills the room with the crisp, resounding rhythms of her drum. Her passion and talent in percussion has vaulted her over barriers to international success. And as she welcomes the audience to clap along, it feels like an invitation for everyone watching to find the rhythm of their own.

Propelled by possibility. In 2006, Tarana Burke was consumed by a desire to do something about the rampant sexual violence she saw in her community. She took out a piece of paper, wrote “Me Too” across the top and laid out an action plan for a movement centered on the power of empathy between survivors. More than a decade later, she reflects on the state of what has now become a global movement — and makes a powerful call to action to end sexual violence. “We owe future generations nothing less than a world free of sexual violence,” she says. “I believe we can build that world.” Read a full recap of her talk here.

What domestic workers can teach us about creating a more humane world. What is it like to be both absolutely essential and yet completely invisible? What is it like to care for the world’s most treasured humans but not be seen as possessing value of one’s own? These riddles help capture the painful existence of domestic workers — the nannies, cleaners, elder-care attendants and other low-paid laborers to whom many people entrust their loved ones and their homes. Their lack of status is tied to gender and race, as domestic workers are overwhelmingly women of color, says Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). For the past two decades, NDWA has pressed state legislatures to pass laws protecting such employees from discrimination and harassment and granting them basic benefits like paid time off and days of rest. But despite mistreatment and outright abuse, the workers she’s met are unstinting in their devotion to the people they’re hired to nurture, “to care no matter what.” In June 2018, Poo and other allies stood vigil at a border processing center in Texas, where they saw separated migrant children herded onto buses, their hands reaching through the windows for help. She recalls thinking, “If domestic workers were in charge, this never would have happened. Our humanity would never be so disposable that they would be treated this way.” She concludes: “We live in a time of moral choices. Everywhere we turn is full of moral choices, whether it’s at the border, at the ballot box, in our workplaces or in our homes. As you go about your day and you encounter these moral choices … think like a domestic worker who shows up and cares no matter what.”

Can women change the world? “¡Si se puede!” — “Yes we can!” Helen Keller once pointed out that while science has been able to cure many evils, it has found no remedy for the worst human evil of all: apathy. And legendary civil rights activist Dolores Huerta believes that this evil cripples those who should wield the most power: women. Why do so many women become apathetic? Huerta believes that they’re traumatized by aggression, taught to be victims, and are so overwhelmed by their emotive duties that they feel they don’t have the resources to become activists or to make demands of elected officials. But if the world is going to change, women must not only vote, they also must get others to vote — and vote people-centric activists into power. According to Huerta (building on an idea of Coretta Scott King), we will never have peace in the world until feminists take power. “We have power. Poor people have power. Every citizen has power, but in order to achieve the peace that we all yearn for, then we’ve all got to get involved.”

One woman’s story of perseverance. In a powerful personal talk, education advocate Ashweetha Shetty describes how she fought societal assumptions in her rural community in India — and ultimately found purpose creating opportunities for others through her foundation, Bodhi Tree. Throughout her life, Shetty felt boxed into the traditional domestic role assigned to her and other women in her village; she was told that because she was a poor rural girl, she wasn’t worthy of education. But she persisted, defying norms to graduate from college and land a prestigious year-long fellowship in Delhi. Now, she works to empower rural girls to pursue education and reclaim their voices and passions. Through Bodhi Tree, Shetty is determined to help create “a world where a girl like me is no longer a liability or a burden but a person of use, a person of value, a person of worthiness.”

Women and girls can heal mother earth. Author and environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson believes in the potential of girls and women to fight climate change — that by rising up to fight, emissions can be brought down. As vice president of communication and engagement at Project Drawdown, Wilkinson has spent the past several years studying how we can reverse global warming — and how climate change disproportionately affects women and girls. But if we can gain ground on gender equity, we also gain ground on addressing global warming. She outlines three key areas to tackle in order to fight global warming and empower women. First, we must support women smallholders — women who grow food on small areas of land with little resources. If we give these women access to better resources, their farm yields could increase by as much as 30 percent. Better farming on smaller plots could cause emissions from deforestation to drop. Wilkinson’s second solution is education. When women and girls are educated, they have more control over their health and finances, as well as the ability to succeed in a climate-changing world, she says. Educated women also marry later in life and have fewer children. Finally, Wilkinson calls for access to voluntary and high-quality reproductive healthcare. Giving more women control over the size of their family may mean one billion fewer people inhabiting Earth in 2050. “We need to break the silence around the condition of our planet,” Wilkinson says. “To address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility.”

Passion, purpose and advocacy. Marian Wright Edelman started the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) 45 years ago. She’s been on the front lines fighting for children ever since. In conversation with Pat Mitchell, Wright Edelman discusses her upbringing in the segregated American South, the beginning of the CDF and how growing older has made her more radical. “God runs a full-employment economy, and if you just follow the need, you’ll never lack for purpose in life,” Wright Edelman says, echoing the call to action she heard her father repeat growing up. After working with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Poor People’s Campaign for two years, Wright Edelman started the CDF, and since then the Fund has taken up causes borne out of the experiences Wright Edelman had growing up — things like immunization against preventable diseases and unequal access to education. Now she sees her purpose as drawing attention to injustice wherever it harms children and building a better world for the next generation. “We are not finished,” she says. “We are not ever going to feel finished until we end child poverty in the richest nation on earth.”

Mariachi that will put a spell on you. Named after the Mexican medicinal flower (also known for its use in love potions), Latin Grammy-winning mariachi band Flor de Toloache wrapped the opening session of TEDWomen 2018 with heartfelt music played from the soul. Between songs, the all-female group shared the tale of how they came together in New York City, connected by passion and the desire to create a sound that both celebrates and expands the genre and tradition of mariachi. Their soaring, bilingual vocals and masterful playing brought the stage to life with light, sincerity and spell-binding melodies.

Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu win Tech in Journalism Award and more TED news

It’s been a busy few weeks for the TED community. Below, our favorite highlights.

Meet 2018’s Technology in Journalism Honorees. Journalists Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu received this year’s Technology in Journalism Award from the National Press Foundation for their work on “The House That Spied On Me.” The article details how they transformed Hill’s apartment into a fully operational smart home by installing 18 different internet-connected appliances and devices. They tracked and monitored the data each device collected on Hill’s habits with fascinating, even scary, insights for digital home improvement. A hearty congratulations to the both of them! (Watch Hill and Mattu’s TED Talk.)

10 nights of women-led storytelling. Activist Halima Aden, researcher Brené Brown, comedian Maysoon Zayid, model Geena Rocero, artist Cleo Wade and creator Luvvie Ajayi will be featured at Together Live, a touring storytelling event celebrating women through “raw, hilarious, vulnerable, authentic stories.” This year will feature 30 women across 10 cities; the program is produced in collaboration with hellosunshine, a media company founded by Reese Witherspoon. (Watch Aden’s, Brown’s, Zayid’s, Rocero’s, Wade’s and Ajayi’s TED Talks.)

A new documentary on the extraordinary life of Halima Aden. Al Jazeera has released a 25-minute documentary on Halima Aden, exploring the model’s life, ambitions and her mainstream impact in the face of Islamophobia. Aden was born in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp before relocating to Minnesota; she shot to fame as the first hijab-wearing model in the Miss USA pageant. In an interview with Star Tribune, Halima says, “I also do think being black, being Muslim, being Somali, being American on top of that, a lot of different people relate to different parts of my story.” (Watch Aden’s TED Talk.)

Radical hope and laughter. LitHub’s Daniel Asa Rose interviewed writer Anne Lamott on her 18th book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. They discussed how to find resounding happiness despite the world’s many miseries. “We need laughter in our lives. Laughter is carbonated holiness,” she says, “I celebrate that we’re all crazy and damaged and we’re all sort of floundering and flailing, and yet we stick together. We take care of each other the best we can. And that is so touching it fills me with hope.” (Watch Lamott’s TED Talk.)

A new cartoon brand launches. Cartoonist Bob Mankoff retired from the New Yorker in May but he hasn’t slowed down — he’s just launched a new cartoon company, Cartoon Collections. To form Cartoon Collections Mankoff merged Cartoon Bank, the cartoon archive he started in the early ’90s, with another archive called CartoonStock. “When you really want to communicate a point in a meaningful way, I think single-panel cartoons can do that better than anything.” he says in an interview with Folio Mag. (Watch Mankoff’s TED Talk.)

 

Unconventional ideas: A night of talks from TED and the Brightline Initiative

Today’s volatile world demands that we do things differently — that we pay attention to things most people don’t see. At TEDSalon: Unconventional, presented by TED and the Brightline Initiative and hosted by TED’s Cloe Shasha and Alex Moura, six leaders and visionaries shared novel ideas that are driving the world’s most impactful organizations.

The power of laughing at ourselves. A sense of humor is one of the most important — and overlooked — tools in business, says author and cartoonist Tom Fishburne. With his “Marketoonist” cartoons as a backdrop, he shares three ways that laughing at ourselves is good for business. First, humor gives us a way to bond with others, opening up conversations and making people feel connected to each other. It’s also disarming, letting us talk about things that we’d otherwise be uncomfortable bringing up; in other words, “It helps us say what needs to be said.” And humor lets us be vulnerable, to let down our guard and confront our fears. “Fear kills creativity,” Fishburne says, “and humor is our most powerful tool to drive fear out of the system.”

What Henry Ford can teach us about AI. Henry Ford is best known for the assembly line, but a different aspect of his work interests AI strategist Kathryn Hume: charcoal briquettes. Ford began making charcoal in the 1920s to reuse wood scraps from his auto plants, eventually leading to the creation of the charcoal briquette used to power portable grills. By the mid-1930s, he was marketing “picnic kits” for suburban families driving to parks (in their Models Ts, of course), repurposing a byproduct of his core business to develop a whole new revenue stream. Hume brings this concept to her own work, where she helps companies use AI to optimize their current work and then use the data collected to create new businesses. She gives the example of a medical device company that uses machine learning to identify high-risk moments in prostate surgery: each operation has become a learning opportunity, and the data is being repurposed to empower an autonomous surgeon robot. This is the true promise of AI and machine learning, Hume says: using AI to make a process better, and then repurposing the data collected to build something entirely new. Or, as she puts it: “Take the fruits of yesterday’s work and transform it into tomorrow’s value.”

Transforming reading (and writing) for the smartphone age. Imagine if you could settle into a seat for your train or bus ride home from work, tap an app on your phone and get an engaging story that costs under $1 and occupies you for the length of your commute. That kind of concise, inexpensive, in-app reading experience is available in India via Juggernaut, which Chiki Sarkar cofounded in 2015. Juggernaut content is written specifically for reading on a phone, reflects what’s in the news and serves as a platform for new writers. Anyone can submit a poem, essay, story or novel to be considered for publication and sale on the app. “Just as we redefined what a book is and how a reader behaves, we’re rethinking who an author is,” Sarkar says. “By being everywhere, by being accessible and relevant, I hope to make reading a daily habit — as easy and effortless as checking your email, booking a ticket online or ordering your groceries.”

Spanglish beats. During a musical interlude, singer-songwriter Gaby Moreno brings her soothing and melodic voice to the TED stage. Born and raised in Guatemala, she sings in both English and Spanish, a unique genre she calls “Spanglish folk blues.” Moreno plays two songs, the soulful “O, Me” and mesmerizing “Sálvese Quien Pueda,” leaving the audience in just the right vibe to finish off the evening.

How to learn a language in months, not years. Lýdia Machová loves languages so much that she learns a new one every two years. She’s currently studying her eighth one. Machová is a polyglot — someone who can speak many languages fluently — and part of a large community of people from around the world who are just as passionate as she is about living a linguistically rich life. Each polyglot has their own way of absorbing the rules of conversation, vocabulary and syntax, she says — whether it’s watching episodes of Friends in German or making dinner with an Italian cookbook — but they all share the same four principles. The most important one, she says, is enjoyment. If you can infuse each step of the language-learning process with joy, the rest of the principles should follow easily: creating personalized methods of memorization, incorporating learning into your daily life, and cultivating a large dose of patience — because no language can be fully learned in a day. “If you’ve tried to learn a language and you gave up, thinking it’s too difficult, or you don’t have the language talent — give it another try,” Machová says. “Maybe you’re just one enjoyable method away from learning a language fluently.”

What does it mean to be civil? Author Teresa Bejan thinks that civility is BS — or, at least the way we talk about it is. In the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be diverse and tolerant, disagreements occur often, and in our divided political and social landscape, they can quickly become heated. Calls for civility during high-stakes disagreements can actually serve to silence, berate and dismiss opposing views, Bejan says. Through her research, she found that bringing the idea of civility — or the lack of it — into arguments dates as far back as the 16th century, when theologian Martin Luther called the Pope the “Anti-Christ.” Luther’s opponents spat back insults like “heretic,” “Protestant” and, yes, “uncivil.” The problem with civility talk, she says, is its concern with the manner of discussion rather than the ideas being discussed; accusing someone of incivility during an argument distracts from the dialogue entirely. Bejan suggests that instead we try “mere civility,” which she defines as “being able to disagree fundamentally with others, but doing so without destroying the possibility of a common life tomorrow with the people who are standing in our way today.”