Can We Reason Our Way to a Better Morality?
In a 2012 TED talk, NYU professor Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, sat down with her husband Harvard professor Steven Pinker for an interesting (and polarizing) conversation: Does …
TED
A Visual History of Human Knowledge
Infographics expert Manuel Lima, who brought us the amazing The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, has a TED talk on how knowledge grows, which ends up being a fascinating history of …
Emilie Wapnick: Why Some of us Don’t Have One True Calling
What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, if you’re not sure you want to do just one thing for the rest of your life, you’re not alone. In this illuminating talk, writer and artist …
Brené Brown on The Difference Between Guilt and Shame
Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She’s a researcher-storyteller and author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, …
Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie, author of Americanah, one of The New York Times’s ten best books of the year, tells the story of …
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman is the founding father of modern behavioral economics. His work has influenced how we see thinking, decisions, risk, and even …
Ruth Chang: How to Make Hard Choices
Ruth Chang is a philosopher at Rutgers University with an interesting background. After graduating with a J.D. from Harvard Law School and dipping her toe into the legal world, she went off to Oxford …
Dan Gilbert: Why do we make decisions our future selves regret?
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” In the 7-minute TED talk (below), Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert illuminates some recent research on a …
Stephen Cave: The Four Stories we tell Ourselves About Death
In a great interview with NPR, Philosopher Stephen Cave delves into the simple question: Why are human beings afraid to die? In answering Cave, the author of Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and …
TED Bookstore 2013
If you missed out on attending the famous TED conference this year — you’re not alone. But now you can queue up some of the books that were available at the TED Bookstore for your spring reading …
3 Ways You’re Wrong in a Disagreement (Even if You’re Right)
Kathryn Schulz, the illuminating author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, gave an excellent talk at TED talk on being wrong. There is a moment in her talk when she summarizes what we …