The Devil has come to town. But don't worry– all he wants to do is stage a magic show. This absurd premise forms the central plot of Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, "The Master and Margarita." Its blend of political satire, historical...

Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, and it’s all good news.

As his career grew, David Byrne went from playing CBGB to Carnegie Hall. He asks: Does the venue make the music? From outdoor drumming to Wagnerian operas to arena rock, he explores how context has pushed musical innovation.

Anna Komnene, daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexios, spent the last decade of her life creating a 500-page history of her father's reign called "The Alexiad." As a princess writing about her own family, she had to balance her loyalty to...

There's no actual law against women driving in Saudi Arabia. But it's forbidden. Two years ago, Manal al-Sharif decided to encourage women to drive by doing so -- and filming herself for YouTube. Hear her story of what happened next.

Meet Todai Robot, an AI project that performed in the top 20 percent of students on the entrance exam for the university of Tokyo -- without actually understanding a thing. While it's not matriculating anytime soon, Todai Robot's success...

"Magic is a great analogy for how we edit reality and form a story -- and then mistake that story for the truth," says psychological illusionist Derren Brown. In a clever talk wrapped around a dazzling mind-reading performance, Brown...

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works,...

Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has inspired millions by bringing together "virtual choirs," singers from many countries spliced together on video. Now, for the first time ever, he creates the experience in real time, as 32 singers...

The modern hard drive is an object that can likely hold more information than your local library. But how does it store so much information in such a small space? Kanawat Senanan details the generations of engineers, material scientists,...

What is a change of basis, and how do you do it?

Natalie Merchant sings from her poetry-inspired album "Leave Your Sleep," which pairs lyrics from poets -- from Gerard Manley Hopkins to a near-forgotten 10-year-old girl in Brooklyn -- with simple melodies and her unmistakable voice....

Gregory Heyworth is a textual scientist; he and his lab work on new ways to read ancient manuscripts and maps using spectral imaging technology. In this fascinating talk, watch as Heyworth shines a light on lost history, deciphering...

What's the best way to get over heartbreak? Rapper and writer Dessa came up with an unconventional approach after a chance viewing of Helen Fisher's TED Talk about the brains of the lovestruck. In a wryly funny talk, she describes how...

A white, puffy dress. Eternal love. A joint tax return. Marriage means something different to everyone and has changed over time and across cultures. Alex Gendler traces the history of getting hitched, providing insights on polygamy,...

How do we search for alien life if it's nothing like the life that we know? Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life -- self-replicating computer programs -- to find a signature, a "biomarker," that is free of...

This week on Crash Course Theater, Mike and Yorick take us to beautiful Spain, and look at its Golden Age. Spain was having kind of a moment in the 16th and 17th centuries. They had this big empire, the culture was really flowering, and...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the wave speed measure the speed of a wave through a medium. The medium determines the speed of the wave. The velocity of the wave is equal to the product of the wavelength and the frequency of...

Hannah Brencher's mother always wrote her letters. So when she felt herself bottom into depression after college, she did what felt natural -- she wrote love letters and left them for strangers to find. The act has become a global...

How to think about implicit differentiation in terms of functions with multiple inputs, and tiny nudges to those inputs.

The task sounds like it should be pretty easy, but the Stroop task is a fantastic, and very well studied, example of how your brain’s automatic processing can trip you up!

Divergence, curl, and their relation to fluid flow and electromagnetism

History is written by the victors, as the saying goes -- but what would it look like if it was written by everyone? Journalist and TED Fellow Mikhail Zygar is on a mission to show us with Project1917, a "social network for dead people"...

Everyone knows the name Charles Darwin, but his lesser known frenemy, Alfred Russel Wallace, was developing a lot of the same ideas around the same time.