First, there was TED. It happened for many years in Monterey, debuted many innovative ideas and products, and it was good. (Expensive, exclusive, but good.) It outgrew Monterey and moved to Long Beach. Then there was TEDGlobal. Then TEDIndia, TEDx, TEDYouth, TED Books, TEDActive. In 2010, in partnership with the Paley Center for Media, TEDWomen came on the scene.
“The time was right to capture an evolving narrative about women and girls in the unique way that the TED format offers,” Paley Center president and CEO Pat Mitchell told Huff Post.
It’s not segregation, Mitchell says, but a platform for the growing roles and voices of women around the world.
Palestinian-American Comedian Maysoon Zayid’s is one of them. Her 2013 TEDWomen talk in San Francisco was called “I got 99 problems… palsy is just one.”
The doctor who delivered her was drunk and almost suffocated her in the womb.
“As a result,” she tells the audience, “I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. Look.” And she stands up for a brief, silent moment during which she uncontrollably twitches. “It’s exhausting. I’m like Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.”
She then goes on to bring us into her life for the next 12 amazing, funny and emotional minutes of the most watched TEDWomen talk ever.
And that’s what TED Talks are about: ideas and inspiration.
You may not get that right away from the TEDWomen talks, themed “Momentum,” happening in Monterey this Thursday and Friday (preliminary events began on Wednesday). That’s because tickets were going for $1,250 and $2,495, and they’re sold out anyway, thanks to high-profile speakers like Jane Fonda, Billie Jean King and Jimmy Carter. (Yes, men are part of it).
“All one can do is hope to be inspired. With so much beauty and truth to be told, one usually is.”
But the talks may eventually make their way online and into our conciousness, though even the TEDWomen curator doesn’t know which ones will get posted.
In the meantime, a couple of the speakers provided sneak peeks into what they’re bringing to the conference stage.
Marlene Zuk studies behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences and, specifically, how male-female differences evolved. And just how does she do this?
By studying insects. Insects getting it on.
For instance, she says by email: “Male crickets sing to attract females, but in some species, including the ones I study, the song also attracts a parasitic fly. The fly deposits its young on the cricket, and they burrow inside the cricket’s body, eating it from the inside out while he’s still alive. Obviously, that means that singing for a cricket is both good, because it helps the cricket mate, and bad, because it makes him risk death by parasite. What happens when evolution produces two opposing pressures? My research tries to answer that question.”
Like, maybe, when schoolgirls hide their intelligence in hopes of attracting a boy. Or examples of male-female relationships in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
“Insects have a lot to teach us,” Zuk continues, “not because they are similar to humans, but precisely because they are so different. They make us rethink our assumptions about our own behavior, and especially about what ‘natural’ male and female sex roles are like.”
Her talk seems destined to satisfy the more scientifically inclined parts of the mind. Other talks seek to court emotions.
Singer, composer and cultural activist Somi moved from New York to live in Lagos for 18 months, the experience of which she poured into her 2014 album The Lagos Music Salon, featuring Common, Angelique Kidjo and Ambrose Akinmusire. She’s being compared to Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba (about whom she is composing a jazz opera).
“My process is very organic and I simply try to privilege cultural immersion and nuance,” she writes by email. “All one can do is hope to be inspired. With so much beauty and truth to be told, one usually is.”
She’s been to the TED dance before, as a TED Global Fellow.
“It has provided me with immeasurable professional support and visibility within a deep network of intelligent and socially-engaged people.
“That community relentlessly challenges me to think, create and grow more expansively as an artist and a human being; I’m thankful for that.”
This time around she says, “I just plan to share/sing from an honest place and hopefully inspire someone to do the same.”
And she hopes to, in turn, be inspired herself.
The TED track record has her optimistic. “I’ve yet to be disappointed,” she says.
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