Moving forward: Notes from Session 6 of TEDWomen 2018

Ariana Curtis is a museum curator who imagines how museums can honor the lives of people both extraordinary and everyday, prominent and hidden. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 30, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED

After three days of astonishing speakers and bold ideas, you may be asking yourself: Where do we go now? The answer: forward.

The final session of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, featured a dynamic lineup of forward thinkers: Ariana Curtis, Galit Ariel, Majd Mashharawi, Soraya Chemaly, Katharine Hayhoe, Cecile Richards, Kakenya Ntaiya, Farida Nabourema and surprise speaker Stacey Abrams. All together, they helped us look at how things are now — and imagine how they could be.

The stories of everyday women are essential, too. Public representations of women are too often enveloped in the language of the extraordinary, says museum curator Ariana Curtis. The stories of extraordinary women are seductive, but they are limited — by definition, to be extraordinary is to be non-representative, atypical. Curtis is dedicated to women’s history that reflects both the remarkable and the quotidian. “If we can collectively apply the radical notion that women are people, it becomes easier to show women as people are — familiar, diverse, present,” she says. As the Curator of the Smithsonian Latino Center, she’s empowered to change the current narrative where, she says, “respectability politics and idealized femininity influence how we display women and which women we choose to display.” This in turn leads to the exclusion “of the everyday, the regular, the underrepresented and usually the non-white.” As she says: “I will continue to collect from extraordinary history-makers. Their stories are important. But what drives me to show up today and every day is the simple passion to write our names in history, display them publicly for millions to see, and,” as she quotes poet Sonia Sanchez, to “walk in the ever-present light that is women.”

Exploring new worlds, right here on Earth. Technologist Galit Ariel believes that space is humanity’s final frontier — but she’s not talking about the dark, cold expanse between the planets and stars. She’s talking about the mind-blowing, space-bending technology known as augmented reality or AR. “While similar immersive technologies such as virtual reality aspire to transport you into a completely parallel world, augmented reality adds a digital layer directly onto or within our existing physical environment,” she says. AR can map, understand and react to physical spaces; imagine your entire living room transformed into a lush jungle, for instance, as a jaguar hunts for prey between your sofa and the door. Since our bodies and minds are wired for rich physical interactions, Ariel says, it’s crucial that we create technologies that help us be more present and connected to the world — instead of inside our phones. “Technology will no longer be something that happens elsewhere, but a powerful tool to explore and extend the world, society and ourselves,” she says. In the near future, expect to see more and better platforms — things like wearables and maybe even devices directly embedded into our bodies (Black Mirror, anyone?). “Amazing journeys await us right here on planet Earth,” Ariel says. “Bon voyage.”

After more than 150 failed experiments, Majd Mashharawi helped create a building block out of the ashes and rubble of demolished houses in Gaza. Now she’s helping bring solar energy to the area too. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 30, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Rebuilding Gaza, one brick and one solar cell at a time. “For more than ten years, I and two million people back home have been living in darkness, locked between two borders that are nearly impossible to leave,” says Majd Mashharawi. She lives in Gaza, and she reflects on growing up with “a whole lot of nothing” in the conflict-ridden region — and deciding that she would create something from that nothing. She gravitated toward two urgent needs: for building materials and for electric power, both in short supply in Gaza. After months of research and more than 150 failed experiments, Mashharawi has created a building block that’s made out of the ashes and rubble of demolished houses. The block is light, cheap and strong, and with it, Mashharawi launched the Gaza-based startup GreenCake — which has trained both women and men graduates in manufacturing. “This block is not just a building block,” she says. “It changed the stereotype about women in Gaza, which stated: ‘This type of work is just for men.'” Now Mashharawi has turned her attention to electricity, helping to create a smart solar kit for energy and light. With a business model centered on sharing the solar units among several families, the device is catching on — returning electric power to the hands of people, one solar cell at a time.

Changing the cultural conversation about women and anger. Even though we live in an age where unisex bathrooms and unisex clothing exist, some emotions still get assigned to a single sex. “In culture after culture, anger is reserved as the moral property of boys and men,” says journalist Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. In contrast, angry women are seen as unhinged, irrational or shrill, and they’re often mocked, penalized or punished if they let out their rage (with women of color facing the most severe consequences). Instructions to use one’s “nice” voice and keep smiling start early on, says Chemaly: “As a girl, I learnt that anger is better left entirely unvoiced.” Instead, it emerges in the form of tears, headaches, stomach-churning discontent or teeth-grinding frustration. Turning anger into a no-go zone for women is not only damaging to psyches and bodies, it also prevents real gender equity, Chemaly says: “Societies that don’t respect women’s anger don’t respect women.” As she notes of anger, “If it’s poison, it is also the antidote. We have an anger of hope.” She calls for people of all genders to accept — and not reject — women’s rage, and for women to turn their rage into a seismic force for compassion, justice, accountability and creativity. (Read an excerpt from her book on TED Ideas.)

The best way to make progress on climate change? Keeping talking about it, says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. “To care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a liberal or a political activist,” she says at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 30, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Let’s talk about climate change — from the heart. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech University, which is in Lubbock, Texas, a place once named the second most conservative town in America. When it comes to talking about climate change there, people immediately see it as political. And that’s not specific to Texas, Hayhoe says — across the US, climate change is viewed as a partisan issue. But in her mind, “to care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a liberal or a political activist,” she says. “We just have to be a human who wants this planet to be a safe home for all of us.” So, how can we speak about climate change without making it political? Hayhoe suggests an approach less focused on the science and more focused on the heart — by starting the conversation from a place of agreement and mutual respect, and then connecting the dots to why climate change matters personally to you. For instance, maybe climate change affects the places you live, your grandchildren or your favorite outdoor hobbies. It’s not a good idea to paralyze people with fear, Hayhoe says. After all, solutions aren’t that far out of reach. Even in Hayhoe’s home state of Texas, almost 20 percent of the state’s electricity comes from renewable sources. “Working together, we can fix it,” she says. “We can’t give in to despair. We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act — and that hope begins with a conversation, today.”

The next political revolution: women. The former president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards has been fighting for women’s rights her entire life. On the TEDWomen stage, she has an urgent message — if women are not at the table, then they are on the menu. What does this mean? Well, though women have made great strides in the last 100 years, they still lack real political power. She offers another way of looking at things: “If half of Congress could get pregnant, we would finally quit fighting about birth control and Planned Parenthood.” So just how do women go about building this political revolution? Richards says that it’s already started and proven by events like the 2017 Women’s March in DC and the unprecedented amount of women who ran for office and won in the 2018 US elections. Now we need to build a sustained global movement for women’s equality — one that’s intersectional and inter-generational. We can do this without waiting for instructions or permission to make a difference, she says, by being vocal about what we stand for, realizing nobody is free until everybody’s free and voting in every election. “One of us can be ignored, two of us can be dismissed — but together, we’re a movement,” she says. “And we’re unstoppable.”

How one girl’s dream transformed a community. Kakenya Ntaiya dreamed of getting an education. But in her village of Enoosaen, Kenya, Maasai girls were expected to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) at puberty, get married and give up school. So Ntaiya negotiated with her father: she would undergo FGM, but in return, she would stay in school. Eventually, she left for college in the United States, vowing to return to repay her community for their support. Ntaiya returned, founded the education NGO Kakenya’s Dream, and built the Kakenya Center for Excellence, a school where girls can live and study safely. Believing that empowering a community must extend beyond the girls themselves, Ntaiya works with parents, grandmothers and community leaders to make sure they know how well their girls are doing. And realizing that nothing will truly change if boys grow up “with the same mindset as their fathers before them,” she helped launch a program to teach children about gender equality, health and human rights. Kakenya’s Dream shows that “it truly does take a village to make this kind of a dream come true.”

Everything you know about autocracy is wrong . There’s a certain naiveté in the way the press covers dictatorship, activist Farida Nabourema tells us. During interviews about her struggle against Togolese dictator Faure Gnassingbé, her interviewers often emphasize his abuses, “because they believe that will gain attention and sympathy” for activists. “But in reality, it serves the purpose of dictators — it helps them advertise their cruelty,” and consolidates their grip on power. Instead, why not focus on “the stories of resistance, the stories of defiance, the stories of resilience,” and inspire people to fight back? That naiveté extends to citizens of democratic countries, who often assume that oppressed countries are less “morally advanced,” that the world is moving towards freedom, and that very soon, dictatorships will disappear. The reality is much different, Nabourema warns us. “No country is actually destined to be oppressed, but at the same time, no country or no people are immune to oppression or dictatorship.” Any country with a large concentration of power, a reliance on propaganda, excessive militarization, and a disdain for human rights risks falling into autocracy — and we should all be vigilant.

After a highly contested 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams offers insights on how to move forward — and some hints at what her future might hold. She was the surprise final speaker at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 30, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Be aggressive about your ambition. Stacey Abrams‘s 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she’s the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on how to move forward through setbacks — and some hints at what her future might be. Read a full recap of her talk here.

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/moving-forward-notes-from-session-6-of-tedwomen-2018/
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Be aggressive about your ambition: Stacey Abrams speaks at TEDWomen 2018

“I am moving forward knowing what is in my past. I know the obstacles they have for me. I’m fairly certain they’re energizing and creating new obstacles now,” says Stacey Abrams. “They’ve got four years to figure it out. Maybe two.” She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, November 30, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Stacey Abrams’s 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she’s the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on how to move forward through setbacks — and some hints at what her future might be.

Back when Abrams was 17 and the valedictorian of her high school, she was invited to meet the governor of Georgia with her parents. They took the bus, and as they walked up past the lines of other students’ arriving cars, the guard outside stopped them. Judging them by the bus they’d arrived on, he told her and her parents that they didn’t belong there that day. Abrams doesn’t remember actually meeting the governor or her fellow valedictorians. “The only clear memory I have from that day was a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me and telling me I don’t belong,” Abrams says. “And so I decided to be the person who got to open the gates.”

It didn’t work out that way this time, Abrams says, and now she’s tasked with figuring out what to do next. “I’m going to do what I’ve always done,” she says. “I’m going to move forward, because going backwards isn’t an option and standing still is not enough.”

We should ask ourselves three questions about everything we do, Abrams says: What do I want? Why do I want it? And how do I get it?

“I know what I want, and that is justice, because poverty is immoral and a stain on our nation,” Abrams says.

Once you know what you want, you have understand why you want it. Make sure you want it not because it’s something you should do, but because it’s something you must do, she says: “It should be something that doesn’t allow you to sleep at night unless you’re dreaming about it.” (And revenge, she says, is not a good reason.)

Finally, understand how you’re going to do it. For Abrams, that meant turning out 1.2 million African American voters in Georgia — more voters than the entire amount who voted on the Democratic side of the ticket in 2014. And it meant tripling the number of Asian and Hispanic Americans who stood up and said: “This is our state, too.”

The obstacles — the debt, the fear, the fatigue — aren’t insurmountable, Abrams says, but there’s more work to be done.

“I am moving forward knowing what is in my past. I know the obstacles they have for me. I’m fairly certain they’re energizing and creating new obstacles now,” Abrams says. “They’ve got four years to figure it out. Maybe two.”

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/be-aggressive-about-your-ambition-stacey-abrams-speaks-at-tedwomen-2018/
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Showing off: Notes from Session 5 of TEDWomen 2018

The term “showing off” gets a bad rap. But for Session 5 of TEDWomen 2018, a lineup of speakers and performers reclaimed the phrase — showing off their talents, skills and whole extraordinary selves. Hosted by TED’s head of conferences, Kelly Stoetzel, and head of curation, Helen Walters, the talks ranged from architecture and the environment to education and grief, taking on the fundamental challenges that we face as humans. The session featured Ane Brun, Kotchakorn Voraakhom, Kate E. Brandt, Danielle Moss Lee, Carla Harris, Helen Marriage and Nora McInerny.

Multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer Ane Brun kicks off Session 5 with a poised, intimate performance of “It All Starts With One” and “You Light My Fire.” She performs at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

It all starts with a dramatic opening. The session starts with an air of anticipation, thanks to multi-instrumentalist Ane Brun‘s opening number, “It All Starts With One.” This cabaret workout for piano and string quartet is based on “the revolution of dreams” of the Arab Spring, written to celebrate “small victories … that little drop that I, as an individual, can add to the flood of change.” Her intimate follow-up number, “You Light My Fire,” is “a statue in the shape of a song” dedicated to the unacknowledged warriors who fight for women’s rights.

Our sinking cities. At this very moment, 48 major cities across the globe are sinking — cities like New York City, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Bangkok, built on the soft ground alongside their rivers. Landscape architect and TED Fellow Kotchakorn Voraakhom comes from Bangkok herself and was displaced, along with millions of others, by the devastating flood that hit Thailand in 2011. “Our city’s modern infrastructure — especially our notion to fight floods with concrete — has made us extremely vulnerable to climate uncertainty,” she says. In the years since, she’s worked to combine the ingenuity of modern engineering with the reality of rising sea levels to help cities live with climate change. She and her team designed the Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, a big green crack in the heart of Bangkok and the city’s first new public park in more than three decades. The park is not only a site for recreation and beautification; it also helps the city deal with water through some ingenious design. Bangkok is a flat city, so by inclining the whole park, it harnesses the power of gravity to collect every drop of rain — holding and collecting up to a million gallons of water during severe floods. “This park is not about getting rid of flood water,” she says. “It’s about creating a way to live with it.” In a sinking city where every rainfall is a wake-up call, this “amphibious design” provides new hope of making room for water.

“Greening” Google with a circular approach. “What if, like nature, everything was repurposed, reused and reborn for use again?” asks Google’s head of sustainability, Kate E. Brandt, who is in charge of “greening” the tech giant. Every time someone completes a search on Google or uploads a video to YouTube, Google’s data centers are hard at work — filled with servers using a significant amount of energy. And with demand for energy and materials only continuing to grow, Brandt’s work is to figure a sustainable path forward. Her idea? To create a circular economy grounded in three tenets: designing out waste, keeping products and materials in use, and transitioning to renewable energy. In this circular world, all goods would be designed to be easily repaired and remanufactured. She imagines, for instance, that even clothes and shoes could be leased and returned — with old clothes going back to the designer to reuse the materials for a new batch of clothing. “If we each ask ourselves, ‘What can I do to positively impact our economy, our society, our environment?’ — then we will break out of the global challenges that have been created by our take-make-and-waste economy, and we can realize a circular world of abundance,” she says.

Activist Danielle Moss Lee advocates for “the forgotten middle”: those students and coworkers who are often overlooked but who, when motivated and empowered to succeed, can reach their full potential. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, November 29, 2018, Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

Tapping into the forgotten middle. We all know “the forgotten middle” — “they’re the students, coworkers and plain old regular folks who are often overlooked because they’re seen as neither exceptional nor problematic,” says activist and former educator Danielle Moss Lee. But, she says, there is more here. “I think there are some unclaimed winning lottery tickets in the middle,” Lee says. “I think the cure for cancer and the path to world peace might very well reside there.” Lee has spent much of her career trying to help this group reach their full potential. In middle school, she herself was languishing in that strata, until her mother noticed and set her on a different path. Later, in New York City, Lee helped create a program to work with the forgotten middle and identified some of the core elements of a formula to motivate them. These include holding kids to high expectations (instead of asking, “Hey, do you want to go to college?”, ask, “What college would you like to attend?”), giving them “the hidden curriculum” needed to succeed (study skills, leadership development, liberal-arts coursework and adult support), and making them accountable to themselves, each other and their communities (seeing themselves as belonging to a group of young people who came from the same backgrounds and who were all aspiring for more). Lee says, “When I think of my kids, and I think of all the doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers and artists who came from our little nook in New York City, I hate to think what wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t invested in the kids in the middle.”

In our careers, we all need a sponsor. Corporate America insists it is a meritocracy — a place where those who succeed simply “put their heads down and work really hard.” But former Wall Street banker Carla Harris tells us this simple truth: that’s not the case. To really move forward and be recognized for your work, you need someone else to make a case for you — especially in those pivotal decisions that are often made behind closed doors. This person isn’t a mentor, champion or advocate — but a sponsor, someone who is “carrying your paper into the room … pounding the table on your behalf.” Sponsors need three things: a seat at the table, power in the decision-making process and an investment in you and your work. Harris says you can attract a sponsor by utilizing two forms of social capital: performance currency, which you gain when you perform beyond expectations, and relationship currency, which you gain by engaging meaningfully with the people around you. “You can survive a long time in your career without a mentor,” Harris says, “but you are not going to ascend in any organization without a sponsor.”

Designer Helen Marriage creates moving, ephemeral moments that reveal beauty among ruins, reexamine history and whimsically demonstrate what’s possible. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, November 29, 2018, Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

A moment when curiosity triumphs over suspicion, and delight banishes anxiety. Designer Helen Marriage brings people together through larger-than-life art and spectacle. “I want to take you to a different kind of world — a world of the imagination where using this most powerful tool that we have, we can transform our physical surroundings,” she says. With Artichoke, the company she cofounded in 2006, Marriage seeks to create moving, ephemeral moments that reveal beauty among ruins, reexamine history and whimsically demonstrate what’s possible. Why? “In doing so, we can change forever how we feel, and how we feel about the people we share the planet with.” On the TEDWomen stage, Marriage tells the tale of three cities she transformed into spaces of culture and connection. In Salisbury, French actors performed Faust on stilts with handheld pyrotechnics; in London, she conjured magic by shutting down the city streets for four days to tell the story of a little girl and an elephant. And in Derry (also known as Londonderry) — a town still gripped by Northern Ireland’s Protestant/Catholic conflict — she helped address community tribalism in Burning Man fashion, building a wooden temple that housed written hopes, thoughts, loves and losses — then burning it down. Reminiscent of a town ritual that usually deepens rifts, the work brought thousands of people together on both sides to share and experience a deeply profound moment. As she says: “In the end, this is all about love.”

Moving forward doesn’t mean moving on. In a heartbreaking, hilarious talk, writer and podcaster Nora McInerny shares her hard-earned wisdom about life and death. In 2014, soon after losing her second pregnancy and her father, McInerny’s husband Aaron died after three years fighting brain cancer. Since then, McInerny has made a career of talking about life’s hardest moments — not just her own, but also the losses and tragedies that others have experienced. She started the Hot Young Widows Club, a series of small gatherings where men and women can talk about their partners who have died and say the things that other people in their lives aren’t yet willing to hear. “The people who we’ve lost are still so present for us,” she says. Now remarried, McInerny says that we need to change how we think about grief — that it’s possible to grieve and love in the same year and week, even the same breath. She invites us to stop talking about “moving on” after the death of a loved one: “I haven’t moved on from Aaron, I’ve moved forward with him,” she says. And she encourages us to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal.

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/showing-off-notes-from-session-5-of-tedwomen-2018/
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Watch Tarana Burke’s TED Talk: Me Too is a movement, not a moment

An inspiring, honest talk: In 2006, Tarana Burke was consumed by a desire to do something about the sexual violence she saw in her community. She took out a piece of paper, wrote “Me Too” across the top and laid out an action plan for a movement centered on the power of empathy between survivors. More than a decade later, she reflects on what has since become a global movement — and makes a powerful call to dismantle the power and privilege that are building blocks of sexual violence. “We owe future generations nothing less than a world free of sexual violence,” she says. “I believe we can build that world.”

Share this talk: go.ted.com/taranaburke

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/watch-tarana-burkes-ted-talk-me-too-is-a-movement-not-a-moment/
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Are You Undereating? Here Are 6 Common Signs and Symptoms

If this frustrating scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I regularly see these symptoms in my patients—ironically, among those who are most committed to living a healthy lifestyle. The likely culprit surprises them, and it may surprise you too: undereating.

We all know the hazards of overeating. But eating too little on a daily basis has dangers of its own. Studies show it can actually slow your metabolism, put you at risk of muscle loss, and cause a host of other symptoms that make you feel unwell. Fortunately, once you understand the biology of undereating—and recognize the warning signs—it’s fairly simple to find your personal calorie zone so you can lose (or maintain) your weight and feel great too.

You follow your exercise regimen religiously, you focus on healthy foods, and yet you stopped losing weight. What’s the problem? You may be undereating. Here are six signs that you’re not eating enough. #paleo #nutrition #chriskresser

What Happens When You Don’t Eat Enough

Our bodies evolved during an era when food was scarce. As a result, we’re programmed to keep weight on. The brain can’t distinguish the difference between healthy weight loss and starvation, so when we start losing body fat, it senses trouble and triggers a variety of complex hormonal mechanisms designed to prevent us from losing too much.

In other words, most weight loss efforts ultimately fail not because people lack willpower, but because we’re literally battling the primitive, hardwired biology that’s meant to keep us alive.

Eating too little activates this powerful anti-starvation system—and can sabotage your efforts to lose weight or even maintain a healthy weight in a number of ways. For instance, when you start shedding pounds with most traditional diets, your metabolism slows. That’s partly because your body becomes smaller, and smaller bodies burn fewer calories. But it turns out that many people experience an additional metabolic hit that can’t be chalked up to reduced body size. (1) In fact, the number of calories you burn during the day can drop by as much as 40 percent—so even though you’re eating less, you might hit a weight-loss plateau or start gaining. (2)

Eating too little can also lead to muscle loss, which not only decreases your strength and fitness but also contributes to the decline in metabolism because muscle is the tissue that utilizes the most calories. (3) As soon as the quantity and quality of that vibrant sinew drops, your ability to burn off the food you consume declines—and you store the excess calories as fat. Meanwhile, undereating also causes your body to start churning out more of the hormones that drive hunger and diminishes those involved in satiety. (4)

The result: you not only feel hungrier, but also crave high-calorie foods—and when you’re eating, it takes longer for the sensation of fullness to set in, making it easier to unconsciously overeat.

Fortunately, this outcome isn’t inevitable. The Paleo diet, which has plenty of healthy protein, fat, and carbs, fills you up naturally, so you can feel satisfied with fewer calories—without crossing the line into undereating. Because the Paleo diet eliminates processed, refined carbs, most people end up eating fewer carbs overall, which can keep your insulin and blood sugar—and your hunger—in check.

Indeed, research shows that, calorie for calorie, the Paleo diet is more satisfying than either the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat diet. (5) And because it contains a healthy amount of nutritious protein, which has all the building blocks your body needs to maintain muscle tissue, it also helps you maintain muscle mass—along with a healthy metabolic rate—when you lose weight. (6)

The Six Key Signs of Undereating

When you’re trying to lose weight and eat healthfully, it can be easy to wind up restricting your food intake too much. Here are the most common red flags of undereating.

1. You Don’t Have Energy

Calories are fuel—the source of energy that keeps everything from your brain to your muscles functioning optimally. When you don’t eat enough, the level of glucose (the sugar your body uses for energy) in your blood plummets—and your energy takes a dive too.

2. You’re Experiencing Mood Swings

Eating too little can make you cranky—more likely to snap at your spouse or get infuriated at the slow driver in front of you. And there’s a good reason. Serotonin, the brain chemical linked to both mood and appetite, is affected by hunger and may play an important role in the sensation of being “hangry.” (7) When blood glucose drops, every organ in your body is starved for fuel, including your brain—and one of the first noticeable effects is a reduction in self-control.

3. You’re Not Sleeping Well

If you’ve ever gone to bed hungry, you know it can be tough to fall asleep. But eating too little can make it difficult to stay asleep, too. Studies have linked undereating with a reduction in deep sleep—the sleep during which your body is making critical repairs to muscle tissue and other organs—as well as poor sleep quality. (8) The good news: higher-protein diets, including the Paleo diet, may help.

In a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 44 overweight or obese people were put on one of two calorie-restricted diets: one featuring normal amounts of protein, the other high levels of protein. Every month for four months, participants completed a standard sleep-quality questionnaire. At the three- and four-month follow-up, the dieters who ate more protein (1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight) reported improved sleep compared to those in the lower-protein group, who consumed about half the amount of protein. (9)

4. You Feel Cold—All the Time

Calorie restriction decreases your core body temperature. Feeling cold 24/7 isn’t comfortable, and it might be a warning sign that your thyroid hormones have gone awry. Studies show that the drop in body temperature appears to come at least in part from a decrease in T3, a thyroid hormone that helps maintain healthy body temperature. (10) Since low thyroid is linked to low energy, low mood, and diminished health, the impact of feeling constantly cold is far reaching.

5. You’re Losing Your Hair

If you’re seeing more hair in your brush or comb, it could very well be due to inadequate calorie consumption. Hair loss is a sign of both eating too little overall and getting too little protein—so following a Paleo diet, which is chock full of nutritious protein, may help. (11)

6. You’re Daydreaming about Food

Studies show that weight loss triggers cravings for high-calorie foods—and even after 62 weeks, one study found, participants’ levels of hunger and their desire to eat were higher than before they lost weight. (12) Likewise, in one of the earliest, most well-known studies of starvation, conducted in the 1950s, researchers found that when your body is undernourished, it’s natural to become preoccupied with thoughts of food. (13)

The lesson: If you can’t stop thinking about your next meal, you probably need to eat more.

How Many Calories Do You Need?

Most estimates of caloric need are just that: estimates. But if you want to avoid both undereating and overeating, it can help to get a little more specific by taking your individual body type and lifestyle into account. Enter the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, a formula that has been shown to be the most accurate way of estimating your bottom-line caloric needs: the number of calories your body burns at rest.

Yes, you’ll need to do a little math, but we’ll keep it simple. Here’s the step-by-step approach to determining the bare minimum number of calories your body needs to function. (You’ll need your weight and height in metric units for this. Use this conversion calculator.)

For Men

1. Multiply your weight in kilograms by 10.
2. Multiply your height in centimeters by 6.25 and add that to the number above.
3. Multiply your age by 5 and add an additional 5. Subtract that number from the number above.

Here’s how it looks in an equation:

(10 x weight (kg)) + (6.25 x height (cm)) - (5 x age (years) + 5)

For Women

1. Multiply your weight in kilograms by 10.
2. Multiply your height in centimeters by 6.25 and add that to the number above.
3. Multiply your age by 5 and subtract 161. Then subtract that number from the number above.

Here’s how it looks in an equation:

(10 x weight (kg)) + (6.25 x height (cm)) - (5 x age (years) -161)

Once you’ve determined your baseline caloric needs, remember that number. That’s your bottom line. Your calorie consumption should not drop below it.

Now, to find your high number—the number of calories your body needs to maintain your current weight—use this calculator at from the United States Department of Agriculture, which takes into account your age, height, and activity level.

If you want to lose weight at a healthy rate—and feel well while you do it—your calorie consumption should be somewhere between the number of calories you burn at rest (your bare minimum number) and the number you require to maintain your current weight. That’s your ideal calorie range. If you’re having trouble finding a healthy balance that allows you to lose weight and avoid the common symptoms of undereating, reach out to a Functional Medicine practitioner or health coach for guidance. They can review your overall diet and help you identify trouble areas.

After working with hundreds of patients in my practice, the California Center for Functional Medicine, I’ve found that the Paleo diet is so satisfying that it makes it easier to stay in your safe calorie-consumption zone and still lose weight. It’s one of the few approaches I’ve found that allows you to eat less without really trying—and without suffering the consequences of eating too little.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you experienced symptoms when you’ve tried to lose weight? If so, what were they? What weight-loss strategies help you avoid the doldrums of undereating? Share your experiences in the comments section below so we can get a dialogue going about this all-too-common problem.

The post Are You Undereating? Here Are 6 Common Signs and Symptoms appeared first on Chris Kresser.

from Chris Kresser https://chriskresser.com/are-you-undereating-here-are-6-common-signs-and-symptoms/
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8 Benefits of Sardines (& How to Make Them Taste Great)

Let me guess, you are one of two kinds of people when it comes to sardines: You love them and eat them regularly Or you can’t stand them and don’t even know why you are reading a post about them. Statistically, it’s likely you are in the latter group, as 73% of people claim to...

Continue reading 8 Benefits of Sardines (& How to Make Them Taste Great)...

from Wellness Mama® https://wellnessmama.com/252465/sardines-benefits/
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Family Friday (vol. 88): Holiday Spirit!

A woman from my book club typically hosts our December book club…but she declined hosting this year as she’s preparing to move. For the holidays, we opt for someone’s home over a restaurant and include an ornament exchange. If we get to talking about the book, it’s a bonus. Last year’s was so much fun and the hostess has THE perfect house for entertaining. I live in a lovely home and I’m not complaining, but it’s a home-y home, not a home that’s perfectly suited for entertaining. Plus, we still have the GAPING hole in our kitchen ceiling that is more than likely not going to be repaired by December 12th.

But I offered up our home and it really got me in the holiday spirit. I’ve got my ornament purchased for our exchange and I’m furiously searching Pinterest for the best of the best cocktails and desserts to serve. No one is going to care that our house isn’t perfect for entertaining or the fact that our Christmas tree is two-toned LED bulbs (blue on bottom, white on top) and the tree legs are on TOP of the tree skirt (oh, husband…). It’s all laughable and fun. Plus, I never entertain ANYONE outside of our immediate family. They’ll all understand the marker stains on the carpet – we’re moms!

Anyway, I’m about 90% done with holiday shopping and packages are arriving in rapid succession on our front porch. I have no idea what I’m going to do when I actually have to be a SNEAKY Santa because right now, everything holiday wrapping and to-be-wrapped is sitting in my front entry way….which will need to be removed before book club in a few weeks. I got this.

Work has been busy and my Christmas cards are staring at me unaddressed (but our nanny put all the envelope liners in – LOVE HER TO PIECES!!), but IT’S ALL GOOD. We even left to go swimming at 7pm last night. WHO ARE WE?! And, it was all Mark’s idea. He’s totally trying to be the cool dad. And it’s totally working.

Shea is attending her first ever birthday party this weekend (mom has politely declined every past invite from her schoolmates successfully up until this point). The Hotwheels and dinosaur coloring book are all wrapped and ready to go. She’s pretty into the whole birthday ordeal and as a naive mom, I’ll be interested to see how it goes. I was hoping we could make it another year without a birthday party that included friends and invites and that whole mess, but she can’t wait for her birthday party when she turns FIVE. Not possible.

I’m going push away all of those emotions until at least the middle of 2019.

We’ve canceled our trip to Cancun over New Years. Of course we’re disappointed but we’re more than okay with it – my father-in-law is alive! (If you missed the mention of his accident where he broke BOTH ankles, that story is here). We’ve got our 10-year anniversary trip in the spring to look forward to and honestly, being home or with family for the holidays sounds just like what we need. There’s always vitamin D supplements to make it through winter

Shea is being treated for “mild bronchitis” – ’tis the season! And Piper is turning into a little miss thang before my very eyes. Her language is exploding and she soaks up every moment of being the baby. Potty training is slow going – very capable, sometimes willing, but far away from any actual progress. Oh well.

We’ve been to Champaign and took the girls on a long walk around the campus of the University of Illinois where Mark and I met. We took Shea to a volleyball game (she learned how to cheer for the right team and she’d say, “RIGHT TEAM, MOM….RIGHT TEAM!!”) and Mark and I went to the men’s basketball game at Notre Dame this past week (heartbreaker). We’re hoping for a stronger basketball season than football – shouldn’t be too difficult to improve upon (#facepalm). Shea has a lot of questions about “who was a baby first” (Shea and Piper or Mommy and Daddy) and of course, whoever is the tallest is the oldest. Good thing I’m staying forever young

The girls are on a countdown to Saturday when December 1 is here and they can open the first little door on the advent calendar. I hope they’re not disappointed with the 1 M&M they’ll each find DREAM BIG, GIRLS! Hard to believe that December is nearly here…but the snow is covering the ground and we’re decorated and ready to go! Our community has lots of fun holiday time activities and we plan to take full advantage. The next few weekends will be busy and fun!

Be well,

from Prevention RD https://preventionrd.com/2018/11/family-friday-vol-88-holiday-spirit/
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Quinoa Tabouli Recipe

Need a simple and delicious side dish? This Quinoa Tabouli Recipe is great for lunch, dinner, and everything in between. It is one of our favorite vegan salad recipes made with fresh ingredients! Make it for meal prep this week! Why Tabouli Salad? I have always been an adventurous eater. ...

The post Quinoa Tabouli Recipe appeared first on Fit Foodie Finds.

from Fit Foodie Finds https://fitfoodiefinds.com/quinoa-tabouli-recipe/
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Gathering together: Notes from Session 4 of TED2018

In a searching session of talks hosted by curator and photographer Deborah Willis and her son, artist Hank Willis Thomas (who spoke together at TEDWomen 2017), 12 speakers explored conflict, love, the environment and activism, and more. The session featured duet talks from Paula Stone Williams and Jonathan Williams, Neha Madhira and Haley Stack, Aja Monet and phillip agnew, Beth Mortimer and Tarje Nissen-Meyer, and William Barber and Liz Theoharis, as well as solo talks from Jan Rader and Yvonne Van Amerongen.

Paula Stone Williams and her son Jonathan Williams share their story of personal reckoning. “I could not ask my father to be anything other than her true self,” Jonathan says. They speak at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, November 29, 2018, Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

A story of redemption. Paula Stone Williams and her son Jonathan Williams know that the truth will set you free — but only after it upends your carefully constructed narrative. In a moving, deeply personal talk, they share the story of Paula’s transition from male to female. Her devotion to authenticity caused her to leave her comfort zone as a nationally known religious leader. In the process, Paula lost all of her jobs, most of her friends and was rejected by her church. “I always taught the kids that when the going gets tough, you have to take the road less traveled — the narrow path — but I had no idea how hard it would become,” she says. Jonathan faced a personal reckoning himself, questioning his childhood memories and asking himself: “Had my father even ever existed?” After a long process of reconciliation, Jonathan ultimately shifted his personal and professional outlook, turning his church into an advocate for the LGBTQ community. “I could not ask my father to be anything other than her true self,” he says. Nowadays, Jonathan’s kids lovingly refer to Paula with a new team of endearment: “GramPaula.”

How empathy can catalyze change in the opioid crisis. Compassion and education can save lives in the opioid epidemic, says Huntington, West Virginia, fire chief Jan Rader. As she saw rising levels of drug overdoses and deaths in her city, Rader realized that, unlike rescuing someone from a fire, helping someone suffering from substance abuse disorder requires interwoven, empathy-based solutions — and she realized that first responders have an important role to play in the overdose epidemic. So she developed programs like Quick Response Team, a 72-hour post-overdose response team of recovery coaches and paramedics, and ProAct, a specialty addiction clinic. Rader also established self-care initiatives for her team of first responders, like yoga classes and on-duty massages, to help alleviate PTSD and compassion fatigue. These programs have already had a remarkable impact — Rader reports that overdoses are down 40 percent and deaths are down 50 percent. Stigma remains one of the biggest barriers in tackling the opioid crises, but when a community comes together, change can happen. “In Huntington, we are showing the rest of the country … that there is hope in this epidemic,” Rader says.

When is a free press not really free? The freedom to publish critical journalism is more important than ever. Neha Madhira and Haley Stack remind us that this should apply “to everyone, no matter where you live or how old you are.” Madhira and Stack — who work at the Eagle Nation Online, a high school newspaper in Texas — learned the hard way that student journalists “don’t have the same First Amendment rights” everyone else had. In 2017, their principal pulled three stories, on topics like a book that was removed from a class reading list, and the school’s response to National Walkout Day. He instituted “prior review” and “prior restraint” policies on all stories, banned editorials, and fired the paper’s advisor. They had no choice but to fight. Madhira says, “How were we supposed to write our paper… if we couldn’t keep writing the relevant stories that were impacting our student body?” They received an outpouring of support from around the country, which eventually persuaded the principal to overturn his policy. But this all could happen again — which is why they now lobby for New Voices, a law which would extend First Amendment protections to student journalism, and which has now passed in 14 states. Madhira and Stack hope it will pass nationwide.

Aja Monet and phillip agnew blend art and community organizing into a way to change their community. They speak at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

Art as organizing. Activists and artists Aja Monet and phillip agnew connected the way many young couples meet today — on Instagram. What started on social media quickly turned into a powerful partnership they call “Love Riott.” Together, they founded Smoke Signals Studio, a space for community-based art and music in Little Haiti, Miami. As they describe it, Smoke Signals is a place “to be loved, to be heard and to be held.” It’s a place where art and organizing become the answer to anger and anxiety. Both Monet and agnew have dedicated their lives to merging arts and culture with community organizing — Monet with the Community Justice Project and agnew with the Dream Defenders. “Great art is not a monologue. Great art is a dialogue between the artist and the people,” Monet says.

Using seismology to study elephants, biologist Beth Mortimer and geophysicist Tarje Nissen-Meyer are helping to fight poaching and protect wildlife. They spoke at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

The enigmatic language of elephants. To study the language of elephants, one needs a seismometer — a device that measures earthquakes — which is how biologist Beth Mortimer and geophysicist Tarje Nissen-Meyer came to work together. Elephants communicate simultaneously through the land and air over long distances using infrasonic vocalizations, meaning that they make sounds deeper than the human ear can detect. “These vocalizations are as loud as 117 decibels, which is about the same volume as a Coachella rock concert,” says Nissen-Meyer. By using seismology to study wildlife, the pair is developing a noninvasive, real-time and low-cost study method that is practical in developing countries to help them fight poaching. Eventually, they’d like to go beyond elephants, and they have plans to continue eavesdropping on the silent discos of the animal kingdom, keeping an ear to the ground to help protect the world’s most vulnerable societies, precious landscapes and iconic animals.

Living a good life with dementia. How would you prefer to spend the last years of your life: in a sterile, hospital-like institution or in a comfortable home that has a supermarket, pub, theater and park within easy walking distance? The answer seems obvious now, but when the Hogeweyk dementia care center was founded by Yvonne Van Amerongen 25 years ago, it was seen as a risky break from traditional dementia care. Located near Amsterdam, Hogeweyk is a gated community consisting of 27 homes with more than 150 residents who have dementia, all overseen 24/7 by well-trained professional and volunteer staff. (The current physical village opened in 2009.) People live in groups according to shared lifestyles. One home, where Van Amerongen’s mother now lives, contains travel, music and art enthusiasts. Surprisingly, it runs on the same public funds given to other nursing homes in the Netherlands — success, Van Amerongen says, comes from making careful spending decisions. As she puts it, “Red curtains are as expensive as gray ones.” The village has attracted international visitors eager to study the model, and direct offshoots are under construction in Canada and Australia. Whether people have dementia or not, Van Amerongen says, “Everyone wants fun in life and meaning in life.”

“This is a moral uprising … a new and unsettling force of people who are repairing the breach, who refuse to give up, and refuse to settle and surrender to suffering,” says Reverend William Barber, right. Together with Reverend Liz Theoharis, at left, he speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, November 29, 2018, Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

America’s fusion is our story. Reverends William Barber and Liz Theoharis have traveled from the Bronx to the border, from the deep South to the California coast, meeting mothers whose children died because of a lack of healthcare, homeless families whose encampments have been attacked by police and communities where there’s raw sewage in people’s yards. Closing session 4 of TEDWomen 2018, the two make a powerful call to end poverty. “America is beset by deepening poverty, ecological devastation, systemic racism and an economy harnessed to seemingly endless war,” Barber says. In a nation that boasts of being the wealthiest country in world, 51 percent of children live in food-insecure homes, and 250,000 people die every year of poverty and low wealth. “If we have a different moral imagination, if we have policy shifts guided by moral fusion, we can choose a better way,” Theoharis says. This past spring, Barber and Theoharis helped organize the largest, most expansive simultaneous wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 21st century and perhaps in history, re-inaugurating the Poor People’s Campaign started by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The campaign is changing the narrative around poor people, refuting the idea that it’s not possible for everyone to survive and thrive. Barber and Theoharis are organizing hearings, holding community BBQs, going door to door registering people for a movement, holding freedom schools and developing public policies that will improve people’s lives. “This is a moral uprising … a new and unsettling force of people who are repairing the breach, who refuse to give up, and refuse to settle and surrender to suffering,” Barber says.

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/gathering-together-notes-from-session-4-of-ted2018/
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Sweet Potato Vegan Buddha Bowl Recipe

If you are looking for a delicious and healthy recipe to make for dinner tonight, try this sweet potato vegan buddha bowl recipe. This buddha bowl recipe is ready in under an hour and is packed with veggies, whole grains, and tasty tahini. It is perfect for a meatless dinner ...

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from Fit Foodie Finds https://fitfoodiefinds.com/sweet-potato-vegan-buddha-bowl-recipe/
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Christmas Gluten Free Sugar Cookie Cut Oats

These amazing gluten free sugar cookies are actually healthy and made with an almond flour and coconut flour. So the next time you want to make Santa a batch of cut out sugar cookies that are a little healthier, make these ones!  It’s official. You can turn on the CHRISTMAS ...

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from Fit Foodie Finds https://fitfoodiefinds.com/video-how-to-make-healthy-holiday-sugar-cookies-grain-free-gluten-free/
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The Best Avocado Spread

Avocados, avocados, avocados. So trendy, right? We are just as in love with avocados as the rest of the world and we don’t care who knows it! This avocado spread is one of our favorite recipes. It goes with just about everything and is a healthy snack that is keto, ...

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from Fit Foodie Finds https://fitfoodiefinds.com/cilantro-lime-avocado-spread/
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Breaking out: Notes from Session 3 of TEDWomen 2018

“I have seen a world where women are denied, and I have also seen what can happen when you invest in the potential of half of your population,” says activist Shad Begum. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

In session 3 of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by social justice documentarian Jess Search, a lineup of speakers and performers — Eldra Jackson, Shad Begum, Emily Quinn, Shohini Ghose, Climbing PoeTree, Maeve Higgins and Lindy Lou Isonhood — explored toxic masculinity, quantum computing, immigration, the death penalty and much more.

Eldra Jackson III shares his work breaking the cycle of emotional illiteracy that allows men to victimize others. He speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Callie Giovanna / TED)

An empathetic cure for toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is a disease that victimizes both its targets and its perpetrators, says educator Eldra Jackson III. Growing up, he had a “chronic case” of it — “so much so that [he] spent 24 years of a life sentence in prison for kidnapping, robbery and attempted murder.” As a teen, Jackson’s heroes were athletes and gangsters. So when sports didn’t work out as a career path, he gravitated toward what seemed the only other option: a life of crime. Jackson landed in jail, “where I didn’t care how I lived or if I died,” he says. He found a cure for this disease through Inner Circle, an organization founded by Patrick Nolan to combat gang violence in the prison yard. Through an exercise called Circle Time — “men sitting with men and cutting through the bullshit and challenging structural ways of thinking” — Jackson learned that “characteristics usually defined as weaknesses are parts of the whole, healthy man.” Today, as a free man, Jackson teaches his own sons what he has learned, and in doing so, he seeks to “eradicate the cycle of emotional illiteracy and groupthink that allows our males to continue to victimize others.”

Strengthening women’s leadership in Pakistan and beyond. Pakistani activist Shad Begum has spent her life working for the right of every woman to live to her full potential. “When women show up, things get better for everyone,” Begum says. “Yet I have found all too often women underestimate their own strength, potential and self-respect.” To counteract this troubling reality, Begum has invested in women’s leadership — first by founding the Association for Behaviour and Knowledge Transformation in 1994 and then by running for public office in Dir, Pakistan, in 2001 — and winning. Her fellow male councilors told her to buy sewing machines for the local women; instead she advocated for what she knew they really wanted: more access to clean drinking water. In the years since, Begum’s seen change happening at the local level as women find their place in the political process. She helped train 300 women and youth candidates for the 2015 local elections: 50 percent of them won and are now sitting in the local councils. And perhaps even more promising: While fewer than one hundred women voted in Dir’s 2013 general elections and 2015 local elections, more than 93,000 women turned out to vote in the 2018 general elections. “I have seen a world where women are denied, and I have also seen what can happen when you invest in the potential of half of your population,” Begum says. Now it’s time to keep making that investment.

“If there are infinite ways for our bodies to look, our minds to think, personalities to act — wouldn’t it make sense that there’s that much variety in biological sex, too?” asks intersex activist Emily Quinn. She speaks at TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, on November 29, 2018, in Palm Springs. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Let’s talk about (biological) sex. We put people in boxes based on their genitalia, says intersex activist Emily Quinn, as if what’s between somebody’s legs tells you anything about that person — their kindness, generosity, humor. As an intersex individual who was born with both a vagina and and testicles, Quinn has been told since she was a child (and still as an adult) that her biology puts her at risk — despite the fact that a surgery to remove her genitals would most likely do more physical and emotional harm than good. Quinn asks: What constitutes a man, a woman? Does lacking or having certain organs disqualify a person from being who they are? Much like gender, biological sex exists on a spectrum and shouldn’t be boiled down to just male and female, she suggests. There are so many other human traits that have more than two options — think: hair color, eye color, complexion, height, even noses. Globally, intersex people aren’t rare or new; they’ve existed throughout every culture in history and represent about 2 percent of the global population — the same percentage as genetic redheads. (For scale, 2 percent is roughly about 150 million people, more than the entire population of Russia.) “If there are infinite ways for our bodies to look, our minds to think, personalities to act — wouldn’t it make sense that there’s that much variety in biological sex, too?” Quinn asks.

The weird world of quantum computing. What if you read about a computer that could “teleport” data across space and time, was physically impossible to hack and could simulate biological systems down to their subatomic particles? You’d probably think you were reading a science-fiction novel — but in fact, these are just a few of the real-life possibilities of quantum computers. Computer scientist Shohini Ghose works with quantum computers that store data not as binary zeros and ones, but as a spectrum of probabilities that a particular bit of information is true or false. And if you find that confusing, “don’t worry — you’re getting it.” The best way of understanding these strange devices is to realize that a quantum computer “is not just a more powerful version of our current computers,” she says — it’s something else entirely, “just like a light bulb is not a more powerful candle.” And like the light bulb, quantum computers will one day illuminate technological horizons we can barely imagine. As Ghose puts it: “The future is fundamentally uncertain, and to me, that is certainly exciting.”

A dazzling performance of poetry and song. Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman of Climbing PoeTree mesmerize the audience with their poems “Being Human” and “Awakening.” In “Being Human,” they explore wonder and imagination, pairing awe-inducing spoken word with a flute and beatboxing performance that defies genres. “We believe creativity is the antidote to destruction,” Penniman says in between pieces. Supported by musicians Claudia Cuentas and Tonya Abernathy, they close out with “Awakening,” combining stunning vocals and ukulele in a powerful tribute to humanity’s fight for truth, justice and freedom.

The “good immigrant” trap. Irish comedian, writer and podcaster Maeve Higgins grew up learning about those who left Ireland, fleeing famine, oppression and seeking a new life. In 2014, she left Ireland herself, moving to Brooklyn on an O1 visa, which is designated for “aliens of extraordinary ability,” or those who have achieved in their fields. Since then, she’s travelled around the US, hearing stories of immigrants who have left their old homes behind in search of a new life. She’s found a pattern in these stories: We divide immigrants into good and bad. While people were celebrating the immigrants of the French national football team during their World Cup win this summer, for instance, migrants were drowning in the Mediterranean, while US politicians shut down the borders their ancestors passed through. This year, the US is on track to accept the fewest refugees in its history, Higgins says. Immigrants are being divided up by what they’re worth — some get O1 visas, while others are shut out. “People should not be considered valuable just because they do something of value to us,” Higgins says. “When we dehumanize another, we dehumanize ourselves. People are valuable because they are people. The moment we forget that, or deny it, terrible things happen.”

A new outlook on the death penalty. Human rights activist Lindy Lou Isonhood comes from a conservative Christian family in a conservative US state — but she’s here to tell us that the death penalty has new opponents. A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, where the death penalty is “an unspoken part of the culture,” Isonhood was selected to be a juror in a murder case, and voted “yes” to giving a man named Bobby Wilcher the death penalty. After the case, the people around her told her to move on, but she couldn’t; it haunted her that she had sentenced a fellow human to die. She became a “silent survivor,” coping with PTSD on her own — until 12 years later, when Wilcher’s execution date was set. Searching for peace, Isonhood visited Wilcher in jail and apologized for her part in his sentencing. Wilcher forgave her, and after he was granted a last-minute stay, the two kept talking; in the months before his eventual execution, they became friends. After his execution, Isonhood sought out her fellow jury members because she had to know: Was she the only one who had been so deeply affected? What she found: “All those years, and I finally realized I was not the only disillusioned juror.” Now she’s found inspiration in her granddaughters, she says: “Because of my experience, they’re now more equipped to stand on their own and think for themselves.” Out of a dark situation, a sense of hope for the next generation.

from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/breaking-out-notes-from-session-3-of-tedwomen-2018/
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