Somehow, beginning her TED Talk “How I Made Friends With Reality” by announcing she has stage four cancer, yet making the entire crowd laugh, the inimitable and charming Emily Levine immediately hooks her audience. The writer/philosopher/comedian discusses how she avoided reality for a long time, only to find out—through her diagnosis and coping mechanisms—that she and reality were always on great terms. By figuring that …
In a charming and humorous talk from TED 2018, maker and robotics enthusiast Simone Giertz does more than share her wacky and “useless” inventions; she explores the ways in which failure and performance anxiety can be embraced and overcome. While showcasing her “shitty inventions” (such as a googly-eye shirt, toothbrush helmet and more) Giertz explains the importance of making “useless” things, and how the outcome …
With 150 kiosk machines worldwide, including one at Francis Ford Coppola’s Cafe Zoetrope in San Francisco, French community publisher Short Edition serves short stories for free. There are about 30 in the US, including some on university campuses and transportation hubs, and each delivers a fiction story, drawn from over 100,000 approved original submissions. Users can select a story for young readers and everybody else …
