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In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, which was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean in 1820, novelist Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles) shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.
In this TED Talk video, poet Lemon Andersen performs “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines, and then discusses the influences and experiences that inspired his artistic journey and the musicality on his poetry.
What happens when a dream you've held since childhood doesn't come true? As Lisa Bu adjusted to a new life in the United States, she turned to books to expand her mind and create a new path for herself. She shares her unique approach to reading in this talk about the magic of books from TEDTalks.
Poet Shane Koyczan delivers a performance of "To This Day," his spoken-word poem about bullying that went viral as a video project with eighty different animators earlier this year.
The associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers of books by Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, and many others (as well as an issue of Poets & Writers Magazine), gave a hilarious talk at a recent TED conference. Check it out.
At one of last year's TED conferences, writer A. J. Jacobs spoke about his long, three-tiered self-improvement project that has resulted in three books, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004), The Year of Biblical Thinking: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007), and Drop-Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012).
"Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories." At the TED conference two years ago, novelist Chimamanda Adichie warned that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
She may be done giving public talks about Eat, Pray, Love, but this clip from 2009 is worth another look. In it Gilbert offers a refreshing way to think about creativity. "Somehow we've completely internalized and accepted, collectively, this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will ultimately lead to anguish," she says. "Are you guys all cool with that idea?"
