The TEDGlobal 2012 conference kicked off this week in Edinburgh, Scotland, with “Radical Openness” being its main theme. How do we learn from one another and relate to one another in an interconnected world? And how do ideas spread, as TED would say, in our global community? Those are the basic questions at hand.

Late last week, The National Journal published a story called The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You, along with a related story explaining the controversy, which boils down to this:
TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.

A quick fyi for TED heads. In early 2011 we mentioned that someone put together a handy online spreadsheet that lists 1377 TED Talks, with handy links to each individual video. It’s worth mentioning the spreadsheet again because this evolving Google doc has now grown beyond 1200 talks.

Since it began posting videos six years ago of its now-famous talks, TED has established itself and its “ideas worth spreading” as a forum for cutting-edge thinking about everything under the sun. Pioneers in social networking, neurology, art—you name it, the pithiest speakers of our day find an audience at TED’s two annual conferences.

Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers for many famous books.

The first time I saw Billy Collins speak, he appeared at my college convocation, toward the end of his years as United States Poet Laureate.

Yesterday we featured a video of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” being played on a pair of Tesla coils. Today we keep the music going with something perhaps even more amazing: a swarm of autonomous flying robots playing the theme from the James Bond movies.

Do you count yourself in that group of cinephiles who have spent years and years patiently waiting for Ridley Scott to get back in the saddle? We thrilled to Alien, where primal closed-in panic collided with a cast furrowed by seemingly unmarketable space-weariness, and to Blade Runner, whose pervasive uncleanliness and lingering ambiguity similar

Earlier this month, Harvard students made their way to the Sanders Theatre for the 2012 edition of Harvard Thinks Big. It’s a TED-style event which gets pitched like this: “8 all-star professors. 8 big ideas. All ten minutes each.” You get the gist.

Canadian “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman first garnered popular attention with a well-received, well-reviewed rap adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (To get a sense of the project, check out this brief scene from “The Pardoner’s Tale.