The year was 1776. In Bavaria, new ideals of rationalism, religious freedom and universal human rights competed with the Catholic church's heavy influence over public affairs. Adam Weishaupt, a law professor frustrated with the Church's...

Africa, the Middle East, and South America have their own vibrant film communities and filmmakers. From social and political commentary to experimental films, these regions have made some very important pieces of cinema over the last...

Hank explores different ways of understanding identity – including the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and essential and accidental properties. In what ways does affect identity? In what ways does it not? What does it mean for a thing to...

Ziyah Gafić photographs everyday objects—watches, shoes, glasses. But these images are deceptively simple; the items in them have been exhumed from the mass graves of the Bosnian War. Gafić, a TED Fellow and Sarajevo native, is...

How exactly does gender work? It's not just about our chromosomes, says biologist Karissa Sanbonmatsu. In a visionary talk, she shares new discoveries from epigenetics, the emerging study of how DNA activity can permanently change based...

Jarreth Merz, a Swiss-Ghanaian filmmaker, came to Ghana in 2008 to film the national elections. What he saw there taught him new lessons about democracy -- and about himself.

Still invisible and often an afterthought, indigenous peoples are uniting to protect the world's water, lands and history -- while trying to heal from genocide and ongoing inequality. Tribal attorney and Couchiching First Nation citizen...

Black history in the US is rich, profound -- and at risk of being lost forever, if not for the monumental efforts of Julieanna L. Richardson. As the founder of The HistoryMakers -- the largest national archive of African American...

Who deserves to be in a museum? For too long, the answer has been "the extraordinary" -- those aspirational historymakers who inspire us with their successes. But those stories are limiting, says museum curator Ariana Curtis. In a...

Rebeca Hwang has spent a lifetime juggling identities -- Korean heritage, Argentinian upbringing, education in the United States -- and for a long time she had difficulty finding a place in the world to call home. Yet along with these...

The healthcare industry in America is so focused on pathology, surgery and pharmacology -- on what doctors "do" to patients -- that it often overlooks the values of the human beings it's supposed to care for. Palliative care physician...

Can the way you speak and write today predict your future mental state, even the onset of psychosis? In this fascinating talk, neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reflects on ancient Greece and the origins of introspection to investigate how...

Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. From our fear of women's bodies to our sheepishness around the word "nipple," our ideas about sex need an upgrade,...

J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes...

Many people like to talk about how important voting is, how it's your civic duty and responsibility as an adult. eric Liu agrees with all that, but he also thinks it's time to bring joy back to the ballot box. The former political...

For more than 1,000 years, Khmer dancers in Cambodia have been seen as living bridges between heaven and earth. In this graceful dance-talk hybrid, artist Prumsodun Ok -- founder of Cambodia's first all-male and gay-identified dance...

How can we bridge the gap between left and right to have a wiser, more connected political conversation? Journalist Gretchen Carlson and op-ed columnist David Brooks share insights on the tensions at the heart of American politics today...

Amanda Williams shares her lifelong fascination with the complexity of color: from her experiences with race and redlining to her discovery of color theory to her work as a visual artist. Journey with Williams to Chicago's South Side and...

We are embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are, and Brexit grew out of a deep, unexamined divide between those that fear globalization and those that embrace it, says social scientist Alexander Betts. How do we now...

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...

At 16, Rana Abdelhamid started teaching self-defense to women and girls in her neighborhood. Almost 10 years later, these community classes have grown into Malikah: a global grassroots network creating safety, power and solidarity for...

TeD Fellow Negin Farsad weaves comedy and social commentary to cleverly undercut stereotypes of her culture. In this uproarious talk/stand-up hybrid, Farsad speaks on her documentary, The Muslims Are Coming!, narrates her fight with the...

Artist Titus Kaphar makes paintings and sculptures that wrestle with the struggles of the past while speaking to the diversity and advances of the present. In an unforgettable live workshop, Kaphar takes a brush full of white paint to a...