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Mirroring the conditions for life on Mars, a ride-sharing app for 3-D-printed rockets, charting new worlds with virtual reality: these are a few of the mind-bending topics on deck at this year’s TED Conference in Vancouver this April. The list of speakers, first detailed here, highlights the radical shape of things to come.
Although the event is forward looking, speakers will also grapple with the darker realities of the Trump era. There’s Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian journalist who first introduced the world to the insidious Mercer family. There will be multiple talks by cyber-security professionals, including Merle Maigre, the former director of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. Iliza Shlesinger, who’s had four Netflix specials in just five years, will do a proper stand-up special, but other comedians will take a more serious route: Ella Al-Shamahi will address hominin history and the Middle East, with a specific focus on Yemen, and Hannah Gadsby, whose 2018 alt-comedy special Nanette rocketed her to international stardom, will deliver a talk about her autism diagnosis, as well as the onslaught of attention that followed the release of her special on Netflix.
Jacqueline Woodson, the novelist who wrote a well-received profile of Lena Waithe for Vanity Fair, will give a talk. President Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone will present, as will actress and activist America Ferrera, a veteran of Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit. The Oscar-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy will give a TED talk, as will Masha Gessen, the 2018 Hitchens Prize–winning writer, and a contributor to both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In a break from the conference’s signature format, Twitter co-founder and C.E.O. Jack Dorsey will be interviewed onstage by the head of TED, Chris Anderson.
TED, which has been in the conference industry since 1984, has been at the vanguard of an events business that has become a staple for media organizations seeking new sources of revenue in an era of declining advertising and print subscriptions. It has also become a magnet for journalists excited by the prospect of telling stories in new formats. Its curator, Helen Walters, is a Businessweek transplant. The curator of the conference’s scientific talks, David Biello, was an editor at Scientific American. “I was worried about leaving journalism,” Walters told me. “A long-standing passion of mine as a journalist was . . . actually talking about what matters.” That drive is echoed in TED’s lineup. “What is really unique about TED is that diversity of ideas,” Walters said. “You’ll have a designer or an architect talking, followed by a geneticist, followed by an award-winning novelist, followed by a C.E.O. I think that’s part of the kind of unidentifiable magic of it, and it’s part of why we can’t really predict what’s going to happen.” It is precisely this unidentifiable magic—the vast array of topics, each obsessively detailed yet simply articulated—that makes TED a standout in a now-crowded events marketplace. Walters refers to the conference as a “broad church”—a place to commune with a higher force.
This sense of wonderment is reflected in this year’s theme: “Bigger Than Us.” “We start with an overall theme,” explained Biello, “and then find ideas and speakers that come at that theme from all different kinds of angles.” Of course, a certain amount of vetting is involved. Biello and his fellow curators, including technology curator Alex Moura, are in charge of making sure that, in an era plagued by misinformation and larger-than-life scams, the conference doesn’t host an Elizabeth Holmes or a Billy McFarland. The curators work with TED’s robust team of fact-checkers to vet all the facts in any given talk. “The key here is to find the right balance between work that is at the edge of what is technologically possible, while also being vetted and accepted by a broader group of researchers,” Biello said. “This is not always going to be perfect, so a last line of defense is the ‘sound’ test: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
The conference industry has become a lucrative business in recent years, but TED is also paying it forward. A hand-selected group of TED Fellows, an internal program described as “a global network of visionaries who collaborate across disciplines to create positive change around the world,” will present their work at the conference. And the seven recipients of this year’s grant from “the Audacious Project”—a nonprofit collaboration between TED, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, among others—will be announced onstage. These up-and-coming innovators will split a pot of grant money, each with the goal of turning their ambitious plans into reality. The Audacious Project pot is currently up to $441 million and counting.
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
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