In which John Green teaches you about the Gilded Age and its politics. What, you may ask, is the Gilded Age? The term comes from a book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner titled, "The Gilded Age." You may see a pattern...

Cities are becoming increasingly privatized: commercial real estate dominates the streets, carving up open space that once belonged to the public and selling it as a commodity to the highest bidder. Architect Elizabeth Diller explores...

Our kids are our future, and it's crucial they believe it themselves. That's why Nadia Lopez opened an academic oasis in Brownsville, Brooklyn, one of the most underserved and violent neighborhoods in New York -- because she believes in...

While children are only a small minority of those who test positive for COVID-19, we’re starting to see evidence of a rare, but serious, complication in children that resembles a condition known as Kawasaki disease. Here’s what doctors...

Beginning around 1377, medieval England was shaken by a power struggle between two noble families, which spanned generations and involved a massive cast of characters, complex motives and shifting loyalties. Sound familiar? Alex Gendler...

Bees don’t just flit randomly from flower to flower. Research has taught us that bees are more complicated than that. And they may actually have a grasp of some pretty abstract concepts, like... time!

every artist has a name, and every artist has a story. Laolu Senbanjo's story started in Nigeria, where he was surrounded by the culture and mythology of the Yoruba, and brought him to law school, to New York and eventually to work on...

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so...

What do beavers, termites, and prairie dogs have in common? They all change their environments! Last time we talked about how humans change their environments, but humans are animals and all animals change their environments just by...

Airplanes are one of the quickest ways to get anywhere, but commercial jets haven't gotten much fast since the 1950's. Why is that?

iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum -- and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves...

Seeing their meat as a protein source and their poop as the perfect fertilizer, humans brought pigeons into captivity as far back as 10,000 years ago. As we carried pigeons around the world, they formed the wild urban flocks we're...

Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments of his life that made him happy -- and notes how many of these moments have to do with good design.

When someone asks you where you're from … do you sometimes not know how to answer? Writer Taiye Selasi speaks on behalf of "multi-local" people, who feel at home in the town where they grew up, the city they live now and maybe another...

In "THE 99," Naif Al-Mutawa's new generation of comic book heroes fight more than crime -- they smash stereotypes and battle extremism. Named after the 99 attributes of Allah, his characters reinforce positive messages of Islam and cross...

Jer Thorp creates beautiful data visualizations to put abstract data into a human context. At TEDxVancouver, he shares his moving projects, from graphing an entire year's news cycle, to mapping the way people share articles across the...

Life doesn't go from A to B -- it's messy, says sailing legend Tracy Edwards. In this inspiring talk, she tells how she went from teenage misfit to skipper of the first all-female crew in the toughest race on the seas -- and how she now...

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

Technologist and futurist Bill Joy talks about several big worries for humanity -- and several big hopes in the fields of health, education and future tech.

The subject of race can be very touchy. As finance executive Mellody Hobson says, it's a "conversational third rail." But, she says, that's exactly why we need to start talking about it. In this engaging, persuasive talk, Hobson makes...

"Architecture is not about math or zoning -- it's about visceral emotions," says Marc Kushner. In a sweeping — often funny — talk, he zooms through the past thirty years of architecture to show how the public, once disconnected, have...

A long time ago in New York City, Steve Addis stood on a corner holding his 1-year-old daughter in his arms; his wife snapped a photo. The image has inspired an annual father-daughter ritual, where Addis and his daughter pose for the...

There's a creepy transformation taking over our cities, says architecture critic Justin Davidson. From Houston, Texas to Guangzhou, China, shiny towers of concrete and steel covered with glass are cropping up like an invasive species....

Imagine being able to see artwork in the greatest museums around the world without leaving your chair. Driven by his passion for art, Amit Sood tells the story of how he developed Art Project to let people do just that.