I wasn’t sure where to put Shane Koyczan’s TED Talk performance of his spoken-word poem “To This Day.” It’s about bullying, and the lasting impact that the harsh words children speak to each other can have. That’s something I experienced as a kid, both as a receiver and giver. And both – being called names and calling others name – shape some of the memories of my youth I would most like to forget. So perhaps, I thought, I should put it under “parenting,” inviting parents and all those who care for children to take these taunts and slanders more seriously so that we may children our to honor each other and to be resilient...

Eric Whitacre is known for his breathtaking compositions of choral work. He has published more than four-dozen pieces and recorded several albums. More recently, he’s become known as the guy who puts together virtual choirs. What is a virtual choir, you ask. Well, his one first involved inviting 185 voices from a dozen countries to sing and record their various parts in their living rooms, door rooms, or wherever, and send them to him. Whitacre then combined all of these recordings into a single “virtual choir.” The finished piece became an instant You-Tube sensation in 2010. A year later, he gathered more than 2000 voices from 85...

One of the first questions I ask when I think about donating to a particular charity is what their overhead is – that is, how much money the spend on personnel and marketing and everything else it takes to administer their relief efforts. This kind of information is readily available and I use it to determine a sense of the charity’s efficiency – the lower the overhead, the more money goes directly to the recipients of the aid I and others give. Of course I assume the reverse is true as well: the higher the overhead the more wasteful the charity is and less deserving of my support. In this provocative TED Talk based on his book...

I’m not sure what you’ll think of Amanda Palmer. She is, well, different, perhaps particularly from the kinds of folks that usually show up at our churches. (Although perhaps for that very reason we should listen to what she has to say!) She’s a former street performer turned alternative rock icon. She’s known for pushing boundaries…in her art, her appearance, her lifestyle. She’s bold, brash, unconventional, and at times irreverent. But I think she’s also onto something. Something important, something beautiful, something so deeply human that it is also and simultaneously something divine. She is onto the art of being in...

Which setting do you think is more likely to produce a good idea? A quiet room in the library, the auditorium where a prestigious lecturer holds the floor, or a crowded coffee house in the late afternoon? If you guessed the library, you’re to be forgiven for imaging that the good ideas are solitary achievements. If you imagined it was the lecturer, you can be excused for thinking we get our best ideas from experts. But if you instead suspected that it might be the crowded coffee house, then you already know something essential about creativity. It is largely about connection and conversation. Creativity, that is, emerges not from...