TED has a well-deserved reputation not only as a home for big ideas and great networking, but as an exceptional production. Everything from the stage lighting to the program guide is carefully crafted to optimize the experience they want to provide attendees. While much of the magic is in the arrangement of elements, there are some strategies that they’ve employed over the years that any conference or event planner can learn from. READ MORE
Just after September 11th, Suleiman Bakhit got a nervous call from his father. “Change your name,” he urged. “Say you’re from Mexico.” Suleiman was a Jordanian studying at the University of Minnesota and unfortunately, his father’s worry was justified. A few days later, he was attacked on the street for looking Arab. That night began what a 10 year journey in which Suleiman would transform from a masters student to the CEO and lead creative force behind a growing Arab youth media empire. READ MORE
The social networking revolution took the offline abstraction of our social graph – the set of people we know – and created a representation of it online. That representation changed the way we use the internet, and moreover, changed how the internet interacts with and influences our offline lives. READ MORE
In American political life “the Culture War” refers to the conflict between conservative traditionalism and liberal progressivism that began in the 1960s. The Culture War transformed political discourse into an exercise of picking sides, and cleaved the Baby Boomer generation into two easily identifiable and highly calcified political categories. When political writer Andrew Sullivan endorsed Barack Obama in The Atlantic Magazine in 2008, he did so because he believed that Obama was the one candidate that could transcend that conflict: READ MORE
Our collective imagination of the European Middle Ages conjures an age of darkness, disease, war, feudalism and feuding. The true story is much more complicated. Indeed, the Medieval era was a necessary period of challenge and experimentation – a period in which political systems evolved and in which understanding of the natural world struggled move from mysticism to science. It was an era that, although challenging, prepared the Western World for Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment. The world of social entrepreneurship is, in many ways, in its own Middle Ages. READ MORE
