With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the...

There are over 170,000 words currently in use in the English language. Yet every year, about a thousand new words are added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Where do they come from, and how do they make it into our everyday lives?...

You may have heard that using baby talk is bad for children’s language development, but research seems to show the exact opposite.

The useful glare-blocking properties of polarized sunglasses are well-known to just about anyone who goes outside. What isn't so well-known is how they reduce glare in the first place. That answer is deceptively complicated!

Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight,...

How do you get what you want, using just your words? Aristotle set out to answer exactly that question over two thousand years ago with a treatise on rhetoric. Camille A. Langston describes the fundamentals of deliberative rhetoric and...

In which John Green examines JD Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye. John pulls out the old school literary criticism by examining the text itself rather than paying attention to the biographical or historical context of the novel...

Everyone is familiar with Twitter, the uber-popular micro-blogging site, which limits the user to 140 characters. The tweet is perfect for sharing your favorite links and updating the world about your life, but it might also be the...

Lakshmi Pratury remembers the lost art of letter-writing and shares a series of notes her father wrote to her before he died. Her short but heartfelt talk may inspire you to set pen to paper, too.

You're being watched. That sounded more sinister than I intended, but online, it's true. Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Netflix... the list goes on and on. They're watching what you do, what you shop for, what you watch... all of it. And...

Democracy thrives on civil debate, Michael Sandel says -- but we're shamefully out of practice. He leads a fun refresher, with TEDsters sparring over a recent Supreme Court case (PGA Tour Inc. v. Martin) whose outcome reveals the...

How much energy and brain power do we devote to learning how to spell? Language evolves over time, and with it the way we spell -- is it worth it to spend so much time memorizing rules that are filled with endless exceptions? Literary...

Modifiers are words, phrases, and clauses that add information about other parts of a sentence-which is usually helpful. But when modifiers aren't linked clearly enough to the words they're actually referring to, they can create...

Writing research papers is an essential skill in your career as a student, and this week we're going to help you do that like a pro. From figuring out where to begin, to finding the best systems, to breaking out of the research recursion...

Neuroscientist uri Hasson researches the basis of human communication, and experiments from his lab reveal that even across different languages, our brains show similar activity, or become "aligned," when we hear the same idea or story....

You need social skills to have a conversation in real life -- but they're quite different from the skills you need to write good dialogue. Educator Nadia Kalman suggests a few "anti-social skills," like eavesdropping and muttering to...

Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English. He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English -- "the world's second language" -- by the thousands.

English is fast becoming the world's universal language, and instant translation technology is improving every year. So why bother learning a foreign language? Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter shares four alluring benefits...

In which John Green teaches you about the poetry of Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes was a poet and playwright in the first half of the 20th century, and he was involved in the Harlem Renaissance, which was a cultural movement among...

With candor and cunning, sex historian Kate Lister chronicles the curious journey of an ancient, honest word with innocent origins and a now-scandalous connotation in this uproarious love letter to etymology, queens, cows and all...

Whether she's describing bickering families, quiet declarations of love, or juicy gossip, Jane Austen's writing often feels as though it was written just for you. Her dry wit and cheeky playfulness informs her heroines, whose...

Who is telling a story, and from what perspective, are some of the most important choices an author makes. Told from a different point of view, a story can transform completely. Third person, first person, and second person perspectives...

Me, myself, and I. You may be tempted to use these words interchangeably, because they all refer to the same thing. But in fact, each one has a specific role in a sentence: 'I' is a subject pronoun, 'me' is an object pronoun, and...

For those of you looking to go out and actually do your holiday shopping in a store, you might want to be wary of the tricks businesses may use to encourage more spending.