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Pastor Rick Warren, author of the best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life, is one of the most influential Christians. Warren's mission is to attack what he calls the five "Global Goliaths" - spiritual emptiness, egocentric leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic disease, and illiteracy and poor education. His Saddleback Church boasts a congregation of 22,000 people and he has become a prominent steward of social justice in recent years, speaking out on...

A globally renowned author and scholar, Jared Diamond takes an approach that goes beyond culture and into the impact it has on the environment. His best-selling and Pulitzer-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel looks at the reasons history turned out the way it did and why European societies conquered the rest of the world instead of the other way around. His latest book, Collapse, asks nearly the opposite: Why do some civilizations fail? In this engaging...

Harvard professor Larry Lessig has become a true hero to artists, authors, scientists, coders, and opiners everywhere as one of the founding authorities on copyright issues. As corporate interests have sought to rein in the forces of Napster and YouTube, Lessig has fought back, appearing recently before the U.S. Supreme Court to extend copyright protection from 50 to 70 years. The net's most celebrated lawyer, Lessig chairs Creative Commons, a nuanced,...

When you're getting medical treatment, or taking part in medical testing, privacy is important; strict laws limit what researchers can see and know about you. But what if your medical data could be used - anonymously - by anyone seeking to test a hypothesis? In this TEDTalk, data commons advocate John Wilbanks questions whether the desire to protect our privacy is slowing research, and if opening up medical data could lead to a wave of health care...

We can't control if we'll die, but we can "occupy death," in the words of Dr. Peter Saul. In this TEDTalk, he calls on us to make clear our preferences for end-of-life care - and suggests two questions for starting the conversation. Over the past 35 years, Saul has been intimately involved in the dying process of more than 4,000 patients and is passionate about improving the ways we die.

We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.

Why don't we get the best out of people? Author/educator Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers instead of creative thinkers. In this TEDTalk, Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that cultivates creativity and acknowledges multiple types of intelligence. An excellent discussion-starter in the areas of teacher education, sociology, public policy, and...

How do fast-paced video games affect the brain? Watch this TEDTalk featuring cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier to hear surprising news about how video games-even action-packed shooter games-can help us learn, focus, and, fascinatingly, multitask.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 TEDTalk, Sir Ken makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning - creating conditions in which kids' natural talents can flourish.

Majora Carter is a visionary voice in city planning who views urban renewal through an environmental lens. The South Bronx native draws a direct connection between ecological, economic, and social degradation, spawning her motto, "Green the ghetto!" Carter managed to bring the South Bronx its first open-waterfront park in 60 years, Hunts Point Riverside Park, and was able to score $1.25 million in federal funds for a greenway. In this emotionally...