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Trending Speakers 

Speakers presenting at the cutting edge of politics, social justice, the arts, science, and more.

 

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Aarti Shahani

Award-winning Journalist | NPR Silicon Valley Correspondent

 At NPR, Aarti Shahani is no stranger to covering groundbreaking stories. But it’s her own story that makes her work all the more compelling. In talks, she shares her experiences as the daughter of Indian immigrants and explores the obstacles marginalized groups face in America today: and how we can work together to dismantle them.
Andrew Marantz

New Yorker Staff Writer | Author of Antisocial

Social media has hijacked the global conversation. We face an informational crisis that is radicalizing youth, sowing confusion, and shaking democracy to its core. For his book, Antisocial, Andrew Marantz spent four years with the two groups who increasingly control the internet: the founders of social media platforms, and the conspiracists, trolls, and white supremacists who use them to advance their toxic agendas. With clarity, courage, and humor, Marantz explains how we got into this mess—and how we can get out.
David Wallace-Wells

Author of the Instant New York Times Bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth

In his critically-hailed instant New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells tells the epic story of our time. In urgent talks, he asks key questions—how will the map of global power shift as coastlines are redrawn?—and reminds us that everything is within our control, so long as we resist complacency.
 
Gabby Rivera

Author of Juliet Takes a Breath and the Marvel Comic Series America

Gabby Rivera is an outgoing, outspoken creator invested in fostering better dialogue, inspiring radical creativity, and improving our most vulnerable communities. The author of Juliet Takes a Breath, she’s also the writer of the Marvel series America—featuring the first queer, Latinx teen-girl superhero, ever—that’s catching headlines from The New York Times, CNN, Vogue, and beyond.
 
Jayson Greene

Author of Once More We Saw Stars, a Memoir

How do you overcome unimaginable grief to find meaning again? In one of 2019’s hottest memoirs, Once More We Saw Stars, Jayson Greene reckons with tragedy—the accidental death of his two-year-old daughter—and offers a testament of his family’s unwavering optimism in the face of loss. In profound talks based on this “intensely moving, life-affirming story” (Rolling Stone), Greene, speaks about grief, resilience, love, and above all, hope. 
Chuck Klosterman

Renowned Cultural Critic | Author of Ten Books, Including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

 Pop culture, in all its distracting glitz, isn’t just entertainment. It is culture—American culture. And our most insightful guide is Chuck Klosterman. In his bestselling, culture-defining books, he’s pinned down modern America like no one else. And in fun, funny talks, he not only cuts to the bone of our media-saturated moment, but makes it the site of our shared, unlikely commonality.
Jeff Chang

Social Historian | Author of We Gon’ Be Alright and Can't Stop Won't Stop | VP of Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward

“Culture moves before politics,” says Jeff Chang, who writes on art, multiculturalism, and racial progress in post-civil rights America with the sweeping authority of the best social historians. In We Gon’ Be Alright—his acclaimed essay collection, adapted into a digital series—he explores the meaning of diversity in an era of racial and economic resegregation: telling a lively and tumultuous narrative of modern American life. 
Emily Bazelon

Author of New York Times Bestselling Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

Emily Bazelon sheds vital light on the enormous and oft-misused power of the American judicial system in shaping our society. Her crucial research—as explored in both her talks and new book, Charged—provide a bracing investigation of a criminal justice system with unchecked power, and the remarkable efforts being made to address and reform the national crisis that mass incarceration represents.  
 
Wajahat Ali

New York Times Contributing Op-Ed Writer, TED Speaker, CNN Contributor

Wajahat Ali speaks on the multifaceted American experience, covering our growing need for cultural unity, racial diversity and inclusion. In hilarious, politically up-to-the-minute talks, Ali shows how to learn from, and join with what he calls “the multicultural coalition of the willing”—the emergent generation poised for social change. 
 
Nina Tandon

CEO and Co-Founder of EpiBone, TED Senior Fellow

Nina Tandon is at the cutting edge of science where sci-fi meets reality. She works on growing artificial hearts and bones that can be put into the body, and studies the new frontier of biotech: homes, textiles, and videogames made of cells. Tandon speaks on the future of healthcare and technology.
 
Jamil Zaki

Director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab | Author of The War for Kindness

Most people think empathy is a trait—you have it or you don’t. Meaning, if you find empathy too hard, there’s nothing you can do. But empathy is a skill that anyone can get better at, says Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychologist and one of America’s pre-eminent speakers on empathy. Zaki offers an exciting new take on empathy: how to make our workplaces, our homes, our world, more empathetic.