In a world where design trends are quietly converging — same color palettes, same typography, same illustration styles — how do you make work that actually looks different? Designer and TED Fellow Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz distills…
Covering global war stories can be hard and thankless — but it’s critical work if the rest of us are to understand what’s really going on in the world. For nearly two decades, journalist Jane…
For the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits conversations with renowned poets Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Alexander, Sarah Kay, and Amber Tamblyn. These excerpts reflect on language, identity, memory, and the lived experience that…
To calm the storm inside your mind, you must first understand it. Singer and actress Rhonda Ross shares her theory of “emotional sovereignty” — the idea that your feelings aren’t shaped just by your circumstances,…
Author David Larbi recites a poem about the journey toward joy, reminding us of all the ways it can be found: having a conversation with a stranger, tasting the perfect bite of food or enjoying…
What are you wearing, and why? This is the question that writer and TED Fellow Mitchell S. Jackson asks as he unpacks the six eras of NBA style. Tracing an arc from Bill Russell to…
What can happy rats teach us about human joy? Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert describes how her team trained rats to drive tiny cars to earn treats — and noticed something surprising about how effort and…
When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: “zemblanity,” or bad luck by design. Drawing on more than a decade of scientific research, he…
When Doreen Orishaba helped build Africa’s first electric car in 2011, skeptics dismissed it as a “toy for the Western world.” Now she’s running dozens of electric buses across Kenya and Rwanda, moving thousands of…
Margaret Atwood is best known as the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, and she’s won a slew of awards for her novels, poetry collections, and children’s books. Now, at the age of 86, she’s written…
