TED Global Issues

Alice Bows-Larkin: Climate change is happening. Here's how we adapt

Imagine the hottest day you've ever experienced. Now imagine it's six, 10 or 12 degrees hotter. According to climate researcher Alice Bows-Larkin, that's the type of future in store for us if we don't significantly cut our greenhouse gas emissions now. She suggests that it's time we do things differently—a…

9 Oct 2015 14 min

Frances Larson: Why public beheadings get millions of views

In a disturbing — but fascinating — walk through history, Frances Larson examines humanity's strange relationship with public executions … and specifically beheadings. As she shows us, they have always drawn a crowd, first in the public square and now on YouTube. What makes them horrific and compelling in equal…

8 Oct 2015 16 min

Rich Benjamin: My road trip through the whitest towns in America

As America becomes more and more multicultural, Rich Benjamin noticed a phenomenon: Some communities were actually getting less diverse. So he got out a map, found the whitest towns in the USA — and moved in. In this funny, honest, human talk, he shares what he learned as a black…

18 Aug 2015 13 min

Benedetta Berti: The surprising way groups like ISIS stay in power

SIS, Hezbollah, Hamas. These three very different groups are known for violence — but that’s only a portion of what they do, says policy analyst Benedetti Berti. They also attempt to win over populations with social work: setting up schools and hospitals, offering safety and security, and filling the gaps…

11 Aug 2015 5 min

Alaa Murabit: What my religion really says about women

Alaa Murabit's family moved from Canada to Libya when she was 15. Before, she’d felt equal to her brothers, but in this new environment she sensed big prohibitions on what she could accomplish. As a proud Muslim woman, she wondered: was this really religious doctrine? With humor, passion and a…

21 Jul 2015 12 min

Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion

Abortion is extremely common. In America, for example, one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime, yet the strong emotions sparked by the topic — and the highly politicized rhetoric around it — leave little room for thoughtful, open debate. In this personal, thoughtful talk, Aspen Baker…

15 Jul 2015 10 min

Memory Banda: A warrior’s cry against child marriage

Memory Banda’s life took a divergent path from her sister’s. When her sister reached puberty, she was sent to a traditional “initiation camp” that teaches girls “how to sexually please a man.” She got pregnant there — at age 11. Banda, however, refused to go. Instead, she organized others and…

13 Jul 2015 12 min

Johann Hari: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

What really causes addiction — to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do —…

10 Jul 2015 14 min

Jimmy Carter: Mistreatment of women and human rights abuse

Jimmy Carter: Why I believe the mistreatment of women is the number one human rights abuse. With his signature resolve, former US President Jimmy Carter dives into three unexpected reasons why the mistreatment of women and girls continues in so many manifestations in so many parts of the world, both…

30 Jun 2015 16 min

Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?

Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world — and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things…

26 Jun 2015 17 min

Trevor Aaronson: How this FBI strategy is actually creating US-based terrorists

There's an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI. How? Why? In an eye-opening talk, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson reveals a disturbing FBI practice that breeds terrorist plots by exploiting Muslim-Americans with mental health problems.

9 Jun 2015 9 min

Yassmin Abdel-Magied: What does my headscarf mean to you?

Unconscious bias is a prevalent factor driving culture, causing us all to make assumptions based on our own upbringings and influences. Such implicit prejudice affects everything, and it's time for us to be more thoughtful, smarter, better. In this funny, honest talk, Yassmin Abdel-Magied uses a surprising way to challenge…

29 May 2015 14 min

Jeffrey Brown: How we cut youth violence in Boston by 79 percent

An architect of the "Boston miracle," Rev. Jeffrey Brown started out as a bewildered young pastor watching his Boston neighborhood fall apart around him, as drugs and gang violence took hold of the kids on the streets. The first step to recovery: Listen to those kids, don't just preach to…

27 May 2015 18 min

Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights

Chimpanzees are people too, you know. Ok, not exactly. But lawyer Steven Wise has spent the last 30 years working to change these animals' status from "things" to "persons." It's not a matter of legal semantics; as he describes in this fascinating talk, recognizing that animals like chimps have extraordinary…

22 May 2015 14 min

Pamela Ronald: The case for engineering our food

Pamela Ronald studies the genes that make plants more resistant to disease and stress. In an eye-opening talk, she describes her decade-long quest to help create a variety of rice that can survive prolonged flooding. She shows how the genetic improvement of seeds saved the Hawaiian papaya crop in the…

5 May 2015 17 min

Alice Goffman: How we're priming some kids for college — and others for prison

In the United States, two institutions guide teenagers on the journey to adulthood: college and prison. Sociologist Alice Goffman spent six years in a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood and saw first-hand how teenagers of African-American and Latino backgrounds are funneled down the path to prison — sometimes starting with relatively minor…

4 May 2015 16 min

Gary Haugen: The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now

Collective compassion has meant an overall decrease in global poverty since the 1980s, says civil rights lawyer Gary Haugen. Yet for all the world's aid money, there's a pervasive hidden problem keeping poverty alive. Haugen reveals the dark underlying cause we must recognize and act on now.

21 Apr 2015 22 min

Barat Ali Batoor: My desperate journey with a human smuggler

Photojournalist Barat Ali Batoor was living in Afghanistan — until his risky work forced him to leave the country. But for Batoor, a member of a displaced ethnic group called the Hazara, moving home to Pakistan proved dangerous too. And finding a safer place wasn't as simple as buying a…

13 Apr 2015 10 min

Dan Ariely: How equal do we want the world to be? You'd be surprised

The news of society's growing inequality makes all of us uneasy. But why? Dan Ariely reveals some new, surprising research on what we think is fair, as far as how wealth is distributed over societies ... then shows how it stacks up to the real stats.

9 Apr 2015 8 min

Kevin Rudd: Are China and the US doomed to conflict?

The former prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd is also a longtime student of China, with a unique vantage point to watch its power rise in the past few decades. He asks whether the growing ambition of China will inevitably lead to conflict with other major powers — and suggests…

8 Apr 2015 20 min