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What happens if you get infected with the coronavirus? Who’s most at risk? How can you protect yourself?

Public health expert Dr. David Heymann, who led the global response to the SARS outbreak in 2003, shares the latest findings about COVID-19 and what the future may hold. Here, he answers the 6 most common questions about the coronavirus:

Question 1: What happens if you get infected with the coronavirus?

DH: This looks like a very mild disease, like a common cold, in the majority of people. There are certain people who get infected and have very serious illness; among them are health workers. It’s a very serious infection in them, as they get a higher dose than normal people, and at the same time, they have no immunity. So in the general population, it’s likely that the dose of virus that you receive when you are infected is much less than the dose that a health worker would receive, health workers having more serious infections. So your infection would be less serious, hopefully. So that leaves the elderly and those with co-morbidities to really be the ones that we have to make sure are taken care of in hospitals.

Question 2: Who are the people who should be most concerned about this?

DH: Well, the most concerned are people who are, first of all, in developing countries and who don’t have access to good medical care and may not have access at all to a hospital, should an epidemic occur in their country. Those people would be at great risk, especially the elderly. Elderly in all populations are at risk, but especially those who can’t get to oxygen. In industrialized countries, it’s the very elderly who have co-morbidities, who have diabetes, who have other diseases, who are at risk. The general population doesn’t appear to be at great risk.

Question 3: What pre-existing medical conditions put people at higher risk?

DH: First of all, pulmonary disease existing as a co-morbidity is also important. In general, the elderly are at greater risk, especially those over 70, because their immune systems are not as effective as they might have once been, and they are more susceptible to infections. In addition, in some instances in China, there’s been a co-infection with influenza and at the same time, there have been some bacterial super-infections on the pneumonias that are occurring.

Question 4: Where can we find up-to-date information?

DH: The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta keeps track and has updates on a regular basis on its website. Also, the World Health Organization in Geneva, which is coordinating many of the activities going on internationally, also has a website with daily updates. It’s our responsibility to get that information as individuals, so we understand and can make sure that we can contribute in our own way to prevention of major spread.

Question 5: What questions about the outbreak remain unanswered?

DH: It’s clear we know how it transmits, we don’t know how easily it transmits in humans, in communities or in unenclosed areas. We know, for example, that in the enclosed area of a cruise ship, it spread very easily. We need to better understand how it will spread once it gets into more open areas where people are exposed to people who might be sick.

Question 6: Is the worst behind us?

DH: I can’t predict with accuracy. So all I can say is that we must all be prepared for the worst-case scenario. And at the same time, learn how we can protect ourselves and protect others should we become a part of that epidemic.

Watch the full Talk:

Math tends to inspire groans, moans and a fair amount of anxiety. But is there any way to make math enjoyable? Or, dare we say … fun? First, we have to heal the generational trauma, says educator and puzzle aficionado Dan Finkel.  We sat down with Finkel to talk about how to fix mathematics education and how his organization, Math 4 Love, aims to help.

The problem: a broken system

What problems were you seeing as a math educator? 

Fundamentally, I was seeing a huge disconnect between the sense of the beauty and the excitement and the dynamism of mathematics that I had known in my life, and what other people got. Most people just have such a negative experience with it. I don’t think we’re going to see math education magically get better. It’s a long-term, slow-to-change problem around a system with a lot of inertia.

“Somehow we found a way to use math to make everyone’s life worse. It’s done damage to whole generations.”

Math is this subject that is one of the most beautiful, powerful, empowering things. It’s part of your inheritance as a human being — like art and music. And it should only make your life better. Instead, somehow, we found a way to use it to make everyone’s life worse. It’s done damage to whole generations. So it feels like it’s this quiet tragedy that plays out, and we need to figure out how to just get in there and interrupt the cycle. There’s so much good and so much joy that’s waiting to be unleashed.

“If you can give students a really positive experience as their foundational experience, that actually sustains them as they go into middle and high school and beyond.”

That’s really the challenge — if I go into a group of teachers and I say “I’m going to share what’s beautiful and wonderful about mathematics”– if you’ve never had that experience, you literally just think I’m talking gibberish.  Because to them, that’s not what math is. Math is the thing that’s made them cry when they were a sixth grader. So that fundamentally is, from my point of view, the largest structural impediment. We need as a culture to give people positive experiences with mathematics.

“There’s no teacher who wants their students to not like math; everybody wants their kids to have a positive experience with it. But, again, if you haven’t had that yourself, what does that even mean?” 

It’s almost like a kind of therapy. And people need a human being with them holding their hand, just for the first time through because it’s so traumatic. That is the difficulty. There’s no teacher who wants their students to not like math; everybody wants their kids to have a positive experience with it. I feel like right now the most anyone can reasonably hope for is one really inspired teacher every 3 to 5 years and that’s enough to keep the spark alive. And what’s sad is that often we don’t even get that.

The solution: make math fun again

Math 4 Love: bring play into education

What was your inspiration to start Math 4 Love?

I started blogging under the name Math 4 Love. It felt like this was a problem that I was ready to take on: trying to communicate what mathematics could be, and what the possibilities for teaching and learning it could be. To give teachers and parents and students a positive experience. And also to provide a kind of pathway towards helping teachers transform what they’re actually doing in the classroom.

There’s three main things we do at Math 4 Love. We work with teachers and run workshops, and go to classrooms and run demo lessons. We write curriculum; we’ve written the summer intervention program that Seattle public schools use for their Summer Staircase program. The idea is, it’s a play-based intervention. You get kids playing with math at a young age. It actually allows them to learn more deeply. We have two math games, one is called Prime Climb, the other is called Tiny Polka Dot. If we can get kids and families to see math as something they can play with, it’s a totally different way to interact.

“Get kids playing with math at a young age. It actually allows them to learn more deeply.”

What do you think it is about games and puzzles that make them such effective teaching tools?

One of the reasons that there’s a problem is people basically say, “Ignore your own common sense. Ignore your way of doing things. I’m going to just show you this method. Don’t worry about why it works, just memorize it, and then you’ll get the right answers.” But mathematics is a way of supercharging your common sense. And that means it needs to start with common sense. The way that you create ownership is often through play. It’s counterintuitive in a way because we have this weird cultural bias about how when you’re playing you’re not learning. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Playing is nature’s way of helping you to learn.

“We have this weird cultural bias about how when you’re playing- you’re not learning. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Playing is nature’s way of helping you learn.”

So when we have games and we have puzzles as something we’re doing in the classroom, we’re extending an invitation saying “Hey, play with this, make it yours. Make this subject belong to you. Make it something that you own.” What teachers, both with our games and also the puzzles, tell me over and over again is “I threw this puzzle out to the kids and I was just blown away by all the stuff that they came up with.” It suddenly unleashes that sense of personal relationship, a playful relationship with a problem, and that generates the engagement and sense of ownership, which is what really does transform students’ relationships with the subject.

“It’s like having the experience of “do I get to be the one who shows you the color yellow?” I get to add this whole dimension to your life. There are just not many places where we get to do that. That’s how teaching math can be.”

Watch Dan Finkel’s TEDx talk here:

In 1972, Matthieu Ricard had a promising career in biochemistry, trying to figure out the secrets of E. coli bacteria. A chance encounter with Buddhism led to an about turn, and Ricard has spent the past 40+ years living in the Himalayas, studying mindfulness and happiness. In this free-wheeling discussion at TED Global in October 2014, Ricard talked with journalist and writer Pico Iyer about some of the things they’ve learned over the years, not least the importance of being conscious about mental health and how to spend time meaningfully. An edited version of the conversation, moderated by TED Radio Hour host Guy Raz, follows. First, Pico Iyer on how he became taken with the idea of staying still:

Guy Raz (left), Pico Iyer (center), and Matthieu Ricard (right) discuss mindfulness and the importance of being still at TED Global 2014. Photo by Duncan Davidson/TED.

Pico Iyer: When I was in my twenties, I had this wonderful 25th-floor office in midtown Manhattan, in Rockefeller Center — and I had a really exhilarating life, I thought, writing on world affairs for Time magazine. And it was so exhilarating, I never had a chance to find out if it was really fulfilling me, or if I was happy in a deeper sense, because I was constantly happy in the most superficial kind of way.

And so I left all that behind. I moved to a single room on the back streets of Kyoto, Japan, and now I’m probably the rare journalist who’s never used a cell phone. I live with my wife in a two-room apartment in Japan; I have no car, no bicycle, no media, no TV I can understand. Essentially, no internet. And I still have to support my loved ones as a travel writer and a journalist. It’s only by keeping a distance from the world that I can begin to see its proportions and begin to try to sift the essential from the fleeting. I feel that so many of us now have the sensation of standing about two inches away from this very crowded, noisy, constantly shifting big screen, and that screen is our lives. It’s only by stepping back that we can see what the screen is communicating.

Matthieu, in 1972 you were a molecular geneticist in France. You had just completed your PhD, and you made a life-changing decision to seek a different path. Can you describe your journey?

Matthieu Ricard: I had a fantastic adolescence. My father was a philosopher and my mother is a painter, so all these people, writers and thinkers were coming to our home. I was a musician myself — I met Stravinsky when I was 16 years old. My uncle was an explorer, and I was in the lab with two winners of the Nobel Prize of medicine. You could not wish for better potential for looking either this way or that way at life.

Then when I was 20, I saw some documentaries on all the great Tibetan masters who had fled the Communist invasion of Tibet. And when I saw those faces I thought, “Wow, here is Socrates, St. Francis of Assisi, alive now. I’m going there!” So I just went. And then at one point I thought, “Well, it’s nice to study the cell division of E. coli, but if I could have a little insight on the mechanism of happiness and suffering …”

So I retired when I was 26, and I’ve done my post-doc in the Himalayas for 45 years.

“It so often happens that somebody says ‘change your life’ and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.” Pico Iyer

Pico, you were working on a book about the Dalai Lama when you first met Matthieu about a decade ago. What struck you about him back then?

PI: What struck me about both Matthieu and the Dalai Lama is they present happiness not as something peculiar to Buddhists or monks, but available to everyone whenever you want. I once went for my annual checkup with my doctor, and he said, “Well, your numbers are all fantastic, but you’re getting on in years so you should spend 30 minutes every day in a health club.” As soon as he said that, I signed up the next day, and I religiously, so to speak, observed that practice.

But when another friend of mine asked me, “Have you ever thought of sitting still for 30 minutes every day?” I said, “Oh no! I don’t have time, especially now I’m on the treadmill for 30 minutes every day.” Not beginning to think that of course the mental health club or just sitting still is much more essential to my well-being, my happiness, and probably even my physical health than the treadmill. And I think it so often happens that somebody says “change your life” and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.

Matthieu, what does the word “stillness” mean to you?

MR: There is outer stillness, which is relatively predominant in this room, except that we’re making a little noise, but there’s also inner stillness. The real question is how can you integrate those two?

There is often this feeling that we put all our hopes and fears outside ourselves. “If I have this or that then everything will be fine. If I don’t have it, I cannot really be happy.” Of course we should improve the condition of the world — I run 140 humanitarian projects so I know what it is to be at the service of others and I rejoice in that — but in the end, we deal with our mind from morning till evening, and it can be our best friend or our worst enemy.

If we don’t deal with the inner condition for well-being, then we are really in trouble. And so that’s what inner stillness is — not that cliche about meditation, that you blank your mind and relax. Stillness is to avoid the chaotic aspect of the mind, and then you can deal with thoughts and emotions, or sometimes you just sit or rest in that pure awareness. That’s a place of immense peace.

PI [to MR]: What do you say when people say, “Here we are in Rio, there are probably three million people here without enough food, or there are crime problems in the street. Isn’t it selfish just to go and investigate the mind or go on retreat or sit still?”

MR: I hear that a lot. And if you were just going there to escape paying tax or seeing nagging people, then of course that would be some type of selfish. But if one of your chief goals is get rid of selfishness, how could you call that selfish? It’s like saying to someone, “Why do you want to build a hospital? That takes years! You should do surgeries right now in the street!” When you build the hospital, making plumbing or doing cement work obviously doesn’t cure anyone, but when the hospital is ready, how much more you can help. I see now, working in the humanitarian world, we start to help people, and we get derailed by conflict of ego, corruption — human shortcomings. So the best thing you could do instead of training to run an NGO or make accounts would be to start to become a better human being so that you can serve others better and not be distracted by trying to make everyone perfect on the way. That’s the job of the Buddha, not your job.

Is stillness a physical act and is it the same thing as quiet?

PI: On my way here I was in that most exalted of places, Los Angeles airport, and I was in the United Airlines lounge, and suddenly I saw a quiet room. It was five feet from where everyone was grabbing pieces of cheese and watching CNN, but I just stepped into that place and it might have been five miles away. It was softly lit, and there were candles, and all I really wanted to do was read or close my eyes but suddenly, quiet was right there. So certainly in that case, the stillness was a kind of active presence. It wasn’t the absence of noise, it was the presence of a kind of quiet that they had laid out.

I think that’s why people like me, who are not part of a religious tradition, will often go on retreat to monasteries, because suddenly you can listen to everything and you’re not endlessly talking and you’re not trying to impress everybody around you, and you’re not being distracted by emails and texts … Suddenly when you start to watch things and start to listen to things, even if you’re a journalist without religion, the world becomes much richer.

Sometimes people assume that going on retreat is a very ascetic thing, but in my small experience, it’s extremely sensuous. Suddenly you’re hearing the birds, you’re seeing, you’re listening to the tolling of bells, you’re seeing detail.

You’re hearing your own heartbeat.

PI: Matthieu, I loved it when I met you here yesterday night, you said you’re on retreat a lot of the time still — sometimes with your 91-year-old mother. In other words, you’re on retreat, but it’s about compassion, and it’s about tending to your loved ones. So my sense is that going on retreat is a waystation to coming back into the world with more to give.

MR: We say that a beggar cannot give a banquet. If I have nothing to give you, I cannot invite you for lunch.

It’s not uncommon for our culture to confuse stillness with being idle, with maybe wasting time. Practically speaking, how can we go to that place, even if just for a few minutes every day?

MR: I hear that all the time too, people saying they’re so busy, how can they possibly take another 20 minutes? It’s just as Pico said about physical fitness before. If people from Nepal come to Paris and they see people jogging early in the morning or going on a bicycle that goes nowhere, they think they are mad. Because they are running in the mountains all day, so they don’t need that. If 15 minutes of stillness change the 23 hours and 45 minutes left in your day, including your sleep and your human relations, it seems to be worthwhile. So to say “I don’t have time” is like going to see a doctor for treatment and then when you hear it saying, “Oh Doctor, it’s impossible!”

“Enlightenment is eliminating mental confusion, eliminating hatred, jealousy, mental toxins, cravings. That’s very simple and straightforward. Whether you can do it or not is another matter.” Matthieu Ricard

So much of our lives plays out in our heads. This process of trying to experience stillness can also be a process of working through anxiety, can’t it? I’m sure I’m not the only person in this room who has woken up at three in the morning in a quiet and still time to find the mind racing. You can’t stop it, and it’s actually not very pleasant.

PI: I go on retreat four times a year — for the last 22 years at a Catholic monastery, though I’m not Catholic. Initially it was like walking into pure radiance and liberation, and I was so excited by that first experience. But inevitably, at some point I was just thrown back on myself — everything I was trying to evade in my day to day life would come up, shadows, demons, bad memories, terrors, but I thought, well, better to face those than to run from them as I would in my normal life. If that happened in my bedroom, I would be able to go and click onto YouTube or turn on a baseball game or do something to run away from that, and I was grateful for the fact that there was no place to hide there.

MR: I remember one time I translated a 1000-page autobiography of a great Tibetan master from the 18th century into French and English. It was a beautiful biography — and then I was giving an interview in France, and someone was presenting the life of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, one of those mystics who had those dark, dark nights, and the interviewer said, “Your autobiography is very inspiring, but it’s kind of dull, because it doesn’t say anything about all those obstacles, about those storms.” And I wondered why this doesn’t happen so much in this kind of practitioner. And I thought maybe it has to do with the view that pervades different spiritual traditions. Look at Mother Teresa’s nagging doubts. If everything is to relate to an absolute deity, whatever you call God or other names in other traditions, then of course, if you have complete confidence that such an entity exists then there will be this incredible richness. If suddenly you think maybe it’s not there, everything sort of collapses.

What’s the difference in Buddhist practice? It’s more like being at the foot of Everest — there is no doubt that the mountain is there, but you might have doubt about being able to climb it. Will I be observant enough or determined enough? In the case of Buddhism there’s no mystery. Enlightenment is eliminating mental confusion, eliminating hatred, jealousy, mental toxins, cravings. That’s very simple and straightforward. Whether you can do it or not is another matter. But you don’t have those big fundamental existential doubts; it’s more like sometimes you feel tired on the way, and you have to reach out your strengths, but I think it’s quite different in a way.

I think that many of us deal with the noise in our minds by seeking out distractions, right? By avoiding those periods of stillness?

PI: Yes. And the distractions are the problem. The more we run from a problem, the more we’re actually running into it.

Pico, there’s a concept you talk about in your book which you describe it as “going nowhere.” Can you tell us about that?

PI: I think it refers to two things: first, sitting still. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Bhutan and Easter Island and Ethiopia and I’ve had extraordinary experiences there, but none has compared with sitting in one place. Second, just what Matthieu and Leonard Cohen and others have done, which is not to feel like you always have to get somewhere. When I was growing up and I was going to overpriced colleges, they were always telling us, “You’ve got to accumulate a wonderful resume, you’ve got to climb this hurdle and this hurdle and this hurdle, become partner, become editor-in-chief, become Supreme Court judge.” And that seems to lead to permanent dissatisfaction, because once you become a Supreme Court judge, you want to become the head of the court in the Hague, or once you get the Pulitzer Prize you want the Nobel Prize, so there’s never any end to that craving. So I think going nowhere in some ways seemed to me a more promising alternative than always trying to get somewhere. And Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman and so many of America’s great writers have always extolled the virtue of sitting where you are.

Many of us remember a beautiful TED Talk by Brother David Steindl-Rast [Want to be happy? Be grateful], and he had a very simple piece of advice for those seeking happiness, which was to express and to feel gratitude on a daily basis. Is finding those places and seeking that stillness and searching for those things that easy? Because it seems like it’s actually hard work.

MR: It’s easy and hard. It’s easy but it takes time. The Dalai Lama often says, “The problem in the West is people want enlightenment to be fast, to be easy, and if possible, cheap.” So by cheap, he doesn’t mean by paying money, but cheap in the sense of “you know, just do it casually, it will work.” But you don’t become a good pianist instantly; we’re not born knowing how to read and write, everything comes through training, and what’s wrong with that? Skills don’t just pop up because you wish to be more compassionate or happier. It needs sustained application. But it’s joy in the form of effort. Everybody who trains to do something, musicians, sportsmen and so on, says there’s a sort of joy in their training, even if it seems to be harsh. So in that sense, it does take time. But why not spend time? We don’t mind spending 15 years on education, why not the same to become a better human being?

PI: William James, who I think is one of America’s great psychologists, said, “The greatest weapon we have against stress is to choose one thought over another.” And of course, stress has been called the single biggest epidemic of the 21st century. But to choose one thought over another has to do with mind training. At the end of the day you can think of all the things that have gone wrong, or you can think of all the many, many things that we take for granted that have gone right. Day after day people ask his Holiness the Dalai Lama how to deal with challenge or loss or whatever. And he says, “see it in a wider perspective and change your mind.”

In that sense, it’s like Shakespeare’s wisdom, “There’s nothing either good or bad that thinking makes it so.” We have more power, I think, than we imagine and more choice to look at any event from any angle.

“Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?” Pico Iyer

Of course, this is not always easy. Pico, do you find yourself sometimes slipping or not giving yourself the space you need and the time you need to go to those places?

PI: I’m permanently slipping! My whole life is slipping. When I landed in Rio on Saturday, I realized that was the 12th airport I’d been to in three and a half days. So yes, I travel much more and I take in more data than I would like, but I do try consciously to maintain some kind of balance and not just surrender to the pull of the modern moment, which is towards being almost drowned in more information than you know what do with. But I think in tiny circular ways — when I go on the treadmill, I try not to turn on the TV. When I’m on a plane, sometimes I try not to watch a movie or read a book, but just sit where I am. Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit? I try to lean to the latter.

In your book, you mention that we are actually working fewer hours in the West, and yet we still seem to have fewer moments to give to ourselves. Is there something about the moment we are living in now that’s different, that’s changed?

PI: Even 20 years ago, I don’t think most of us worried about information overload or multi-tasking in the same way or with the same urgency. And remember, the world is not going to get slower, and devices are not going to uninvent themselves. Ten years from now, we’ll be dealing with things that make texting and Skype look really old-fashioned. And the machines aren’t going to teach us how to keep our sense of balance. That part is up to us. The information revolution came without a manual. The one thing technology can’t teach us is how to make the best use of technology, how to keep our sanity in the face of technology. For that, we can’t go online.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor writes the kind of drop-everything, Africa-based fantasy and sci-fi that she never saw on bookshelves growing up. Here, she talks about the authors that shaped her, her inspirations (traffic! jellyfish!) and her collaboration with Marvel.

Nnedi Okorafor is obsessed with bugs. More specifically grasshoppers, but also cicadas, especially in late summer, when they fill up the dusk with song. “I can remember times when I was five or six years old, where I’d catch a grasshopper and just stare, and let it stare back at me for an hour,” she says. “Even now, the idea that all these tiny, hidden worlds are just dwelling — it’s fascinating, plus it’s beautiful and amazing.”

It’s this sensitivity to the wonders around her that has helped make Okorafor one of the most acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy today. Over the last decade, in more than a dozen books for children, young adults and adults — including the Binti trilogy, Who Fears Death, the Akata series, Lagoon and, more recently, Black Panther comics, including a brand-new standalone on his little sister Shuri — Okorafor has welcomed readers into her own magical hidden worlds. She has received many major awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award, as well as the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.

                    Nnedi Okorafor brings life to Shuri, Black Panther’s little sister, in this new comic book. Image courtesy of Marvel; artwork by Sam Spratt.

But you won’t find extraterrestrial colonies, space-trotting imperialist explorers or invading aliens in Okorafor’s work; she avoids these sci-fi tropes. Instead, her settings tend to be African — speculative versions of Nigeria, Sudan and Namibia — and draw on African mythology, folklore and tradition. Her protagonists are typically young women who are caught between cultures and worlds, navigating remarkable circumstances. They include math prodigy Binti, the first of the Himba people to attend a prestigious intergalactic university; Nigerian-American Sunny, a young albino girl with latent magic abilities; and Onye, a half-breed child born from great violence who is on an epic quest to save her people from extinction.

Okorafor’s own experiences of feeling like an outsider have inspired her fictional creations. She was raised in the Chicago suburb of South Holland, Illinois (it was “very racist, very white,” she says), to Nigerian parents who settled in the US due to the Nigerian civil war. “Growing up, in just about every group that I moved in, I was an outsider,” Okorafor recalls. In South Holland, Okorafor was seen as “too black” to hang out with her white neighbors, but on visits to Nigeria, she was viewed by cousins there as being “too American.” As she says, “This idea of being an outsider was something that I was forced to face at an early age, but there was never a time where I felt like I had to try to be someone else to fit in.”

From an early age, she was an enthusiastic reader — but not of sci-fi. She didn’t connect to classic Western works of the genre by authors like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov. “Those books were very white and male, and they presented worlds where the possibility of someone like me wasn’t even there,” she remembers. “I didn’t have to see myself, but it was important to feel it was possible, at least in one of those books, and it was not.” She read a lot of horror fiction, including Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Clive Barker and Mary Shelley. “They presented a world of not just terror, but great imagination,” Okorafor says. “And those stories were a bit more diverse than the science-fiction stories.”

During family visits to Nigeria in the 1990s and 2000s, Okorafor was fascinated by the harmony between traditional belief systems and brand-new electronic devices. “I started noticing the use and the interplay of technology in Nigerian communities, especially when cell phones came around,” she says. “I saw phones popping up in the most remote places, and they were normalized in really cool ways.” She wondered why stories didn’t depict technology in African nations. In fact, she began to wonder why she wasn’t writing such stories herself.

In college, however, Okorafor found herself discouraged from writing science fiction. “I had professors who were constantly telling me, ‘You’re such a good writer; you want to stay away from all of that weird stuff,’” she remembers. “Eventually I just kind of jumped the rails, because I couldn’t help it.” Okorafor dove headfirst into creating the stories she never found on library shelves growing up — ones with strong female protagonists of color, African locations, speculative technology, aliens and magic, as well as complex and relevant social themes like racial identity and gender violence.

“A lot of people are told to stifle their imaginations, just in order to get by. Science fiction does the exact opposite.”

When writing a novel, Okorafor rarely starts at the beginning. And she’s not a fan of outlines. “They feel confining to me,” she says. She begins projects with a strong sense of character and an explosive scene in which that person jumps to life. “Usually, the scene is so strong that I don’t need to know the context,” she says. After writing it, she thinks, “Is there anything else that I want to write with this character?” But how does she go from building a scene to building an entire world? “I do it by being in the world. My character is in that world, and I’m looking through their eyes. All I have to do is look around.”

Okorafor doesn’t revise until she’s at least halfway finished with a story, although often she won’t do so until a first draft is completed. Yet it’s in her self-editing process that the rich political and social themes of her work can emerge. “I’m already a very political person, and I’m very aware of issues,” she says. “So when I’m writing a story, I don’t have to think about it — it comes. In the editing process, I’ll be, like, ‘Okay, oh, I was doing this, let me tweak that a bit, let me strengthen that a bit. Let me weaponize that a bit.’”

Okorafor’s greatest source of inspiration is something we all have access to: the whole wide world. She delights in taking the stuff of everyday life and recasting it in fantastical ways. In Okorafor’s mind, jellyfish evolve into an alien species; traditional Nigerian masquerades become spirits from another realm; and the dense, dangerous traffic of the city of Lagos transforms into a literal road monster that swallows drivers whole. “I definitely have a tendency to notice and revel in those things that most would take for granted,” she says. While she occasionally jots her observations in notebooks, on scraps of paper, and on her phone, they mostly live in her head. She knows they will emerge — somehow, someday. On a trip to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon, Okorafor and her daughter, Anya, were caught in a dust storm. “It was awesome,” she says. “Those things are going to show up in my stories. They just are.”

When she’s feeling stuck — and yes, she gets stuck — she may turn to her daughter for inspiration. “She loves to listen to me tell the story before I even write it,” she says. “In telling the story and having someone who’s listening, asking questions and giving feedback, I find my way. There have been so many times when I’ve gotten ideas or figured something out because I’m doing that with her.” In her 2015 novel Binti, the first person thanked by Okorafor in the acknowledgements is Anya. “When you get stuck, ask a plucky imaginative eleven-year-old what happens next in the story,” she wrote; “you’ll be unstuck in no time.”

“I definitely have a tendency to notice and revel in those things that most would take for granted.”

Now, Okorafor has dove into a completely new genre to her: comics. “I read comics as a kid in the newspaper and in graphic novels,” she says. “I never felt welcome in comic-book shops, so my exposure to superheroes was through Saturday morning cartoons.” But when editors at Marvel approached her last year to write comics in the Black Panther universe, she said yes. She has written four Black Panther issues for Marvel, as well as a three-part series “Wakanda Forever” that follows the Dora Milaje, the all-female special forces team that protects Wakanda. She’s about to release a standalone comic about Shuri, Black Panther’s little sister (a breakout character from Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther film).

In her comic-book writing, Okorafor has been able to flex new creative muscles. “The format has been really nurturing for me, because it’s so different from the way that I create,” she says. Unlike her fiction, she knows from the outset who her central characters are. “It’s easier in that the character’s already alive, but it’s harder in those moments when something about the character previously doesn’t make sense to me,” she says. “Then I have to write around it and deal with it.” Another difference of working in the comic universe: she often starts a project knowing exactly how many pages and how many issues she has to tell her story, as Marvel usually sets those parameters in advance (except for Shuri, which is an ongoing series).

How does Okorafor start writing a comic book? She first writes a short summary of the story that will be told in an issue. Next, she constructs a meticulous outline for the story, beat by beat, with frequent feedback from her editors. Once Okorafor and her team have settled on an outline, she writes the first draft of the script — by hand. “The first draft has to be by hand, because it has to be visual,” she says. “I have a notebook where I draw each panel the way it’s going to be set for the page, and then I write within the panel — and sometimes sketch — what’s happening.” After more rounds of revising and feedback with her editors, the approved draft goes to the illustrators. “It’s a completely different, fascinating process for someone like me, who’s used to writing novels, where it’s very solitary – it’s all you,” she says. “It’s a very collaborative effort, but also you have to think in a different way, which was really tough for me.”

Okorafor doesn’t yet know if she will continue to collaborate with Marvel. “I like to focus on what’s right in front of me,” she says. She is writing a new original comic for Berger Books, set in the same universe as the Binti trilogy and Lagoon, about a community of African and shape-shifting alien immigrants in New York City. The four-part LaGuardia series, illustrated by Tana Ford, will be published in December. Her work may also be coming soon to the small screen — her novel Who Fears Death has been optioned by HBO to be turned into a series, with George R.R. Martin as an executive producer.

“Don’t go changing your story to fit the default — that’s the worst thing you can do.”

In the decade that Okorafor has been writing, she has witnessed a positive shift in sci-fi. She sees greater diversity in who the protagonists are, where stories are set and, perhaps most important, who gets to tell them. But she believes much more work is needed to “de-center” the genre and showcase more stories. “I still think that there is a lack of familiarity with other kinds of voices,” she says. Science fiction has the ability to inspire people who otherwise might feel censored or suppressed. “In various societies — not just American society, but worldwide — a lot of people are told to stifle their imaginations, just in order to get by,” Okorafor says. “Science fiction does the exact opposite. People who are missing that expression in their lives are fulfilled when they read a science-fiction narrative.”

Okorafor’s advice to writers of all ages: Just do it, and do it your way. “Write your story, and don’t be afraid to write it. Don’t go changing your story to fit the default — that’s the worst thing you can do,” she says. “You may be able to find great success, and it works — I’ve seen it work many times — but if you really want a deep shift, and also deep creative satisfaction, you stay true to your own story.”

Watch Nnedi Okorafor’s TEDGlobal talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick D’Arcy is the Editorial Manager of the TED Fellows program. This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

TED’s youth conference TED-Ed Weekend acts as a reminder that every student has an idea worth spreading and has the power to effect change. Even though it can sometimes feel like the gap between inspiration and action is wide, speakers at the event remind us that all it takes to get started is a first step.

But let’s get specific! We interviewed some of our speakers to ask them about those first steps, and exactly how they went from having an idea to fulfilling their dreams in our series, “Ideas into Action.”

TED-Ed Weekend speakers Ashton Cofer (AC)— who shared his team’s amazing technique for recycling seemingly un-recyclable styrofoam— and Akash Manoj (AM)— who invented a device to detect silent heart attacks— are two TED-Ed Weekend speakers who prove that age doesn’t limit your ability to solve real-world problems.

Here’s what they had to say about using the scientific method to make the world a better place:

What inspired you to work on your particular invention?

AC: I was originally inspired to work on this invention through my involvement with FIRST Lego League, a program that inspires groups of kids from around the world to identify a problem every year and develop a solution. Working with a group of three other students from my school, we chose the problem of Styrofoam waste, a large issue in not only our community but all over the world. Although the challenge seemed a little daunting at first, it eventually evolved into something that we were determined to solve.

AM: I never knew that I would be researching “silent heart attacks” until the day my grandfather was struck by one. I did not start working on this research with the intention of inventing something; instead, I was concerned about the limitations of an existing solution and wanted to innovate it so that it could turn out to be a promising alternative. It was not because I was emotionally affected that I started my research, but it was because I found the problem to be marvelous, and it was because I visualized the ground-breaking implications that the solution to this problem could have. I was, undoubtedly, inspired by my circumstances, especially my inaccessibility to research resources. When I started taking control over them, things started falling in place. I always believe in one thing: there’s always a way out!

Developing an invention takes time, and many cycles of attempt and failure. How much were you motivated by inspiration versus discipline? Which do you have to work the hardest to find? And do you have any tricks for keeping yourself inspired and/or motivated?

AC: Initially, inspiration was the main factor that motivated this project. However, as the development of the project went on, I would definitely say that discipline was a more prevailing factor. Since my team also had a strict timeline to develop our solution, we had to be disciplined to both work quickly and efficiently and not get discouraged by failures.

I’d say that one thing that really helped motivate us during this project was working on it with other like-minded individuals who would always be there when one of us was discouraged. Even if you are working on an individual project, I find that collaborating with others is essential to keeping yourself disciplined and motivated.

AM: For me, I would say discipline has a more significant role than inspiration, because anyone can get greatly inspired by watching a TED talk, but what gets one to ideate and turn ideas into action is discipline. It is crucial for researchers to be disciplined, and it took me almost a year to be able to master it. It is also essential for everyone to get mentored by someone, and perhaps that was something I had to work the hardest to find. The trick to staying on track and getting motivated is simple: just think of the journey as a whole, not the goal, ask as many questions as possible, and learn from failure. This should probably take you where you want to go.

What were the very first steps you took on your path to making your invention?

AC: The very first steps that we took were to complete background research on the problem and to make a running list as a team of all the possible ideas that we had. We also found that reaching out to experts in the field (in our case it was activated carbon researchers) was extremely helpful in our initial research and getting expert opinions on possible ideas.

“To our surprise, all of these experts were eager to help kids interested in their field and the main barrier was having the courage to reach out to someone new.”

AM: I started off by doing A LOT of Google searches. First, I made it a point to understand what was going on: the working of the heart and other related organs and life processes, the nuances of medical terminologies, and of course, how a (silent) heart attack occurs! This took me a lot more time than I actually had imagined. You see, it was too much to take in, for an eighth grader. I went to university libraries (which were VERY far from where I lived), read medical journals, and tried to learn as much as I could. I, then, got access to the entire health record of my grandfather.

“With all of these resources, I developed a hypothesis, and with the not-so-accurate hypothesis in place, I wrote to professors and institutions from across the country.”

Though I received dozens of rejections, I was fortunate to receive lab space, mentorship, and funding from a government-run institution: SRISTI-BIRAC. I started my research and worked on my experiments right from that moment.

Do you ever feel stuck? Are there any specific steps you take to help yourself feel unstuck? When you need help, who do you turn to?

AC: Being “stuck” is probably one of the most common occurrences that my team had to deal with. Throughout our research, we had to deal with countless testing failures and at one point we even considered giving up and switching to an entirely different project.

For example, during our research, we were trying to emulate the high temperature commercial process of creating activated carbon but instead using polystyrene as the input material (rather than wood or coal). Every single test that we did kept on resulting in the product vaporizing and we had no idea what was causing it. However, after simply decreasing the temperature of the test, we were able to get a successful result.

This process of taking a step back, carefully examining what was going wrong, and persevering truly helped us to overcome being stuck and it was much better than if we had quit. In addition, having other students to turn to was also crucial in overcoming these adversities.

AM: I often feel stuck when something, like technical miscalculations or process errors, in my research seems to be a never-ending problem.

“The key, here, is to stay undaunted: take a break, gain a broader perspective, and perceive the problem with new energy.”

That has been my mantra all this while! When I was too stressed, my parents would have no stone unturned to help me feel better, and I think that has kept me going.

Do you have any advice for young would-be inventors? What is the most valuable advice you’ve received on your journey so far?

AC: One of the most common mistakes is to keep your ideas to yourself and not spread them to others. However,

“Sharing your ideas with others is probably the best way to improve your end result, because you never know how someone with a different perspective can think about your invention in a whole different way”

or apply it to a different situation. By combining your own ideas with the perspective and experience of someone else, inventions can truly be taken to the next level and make a difference.

AM: The most valuable advice I’ve received on my journey is not to let my age limit my thinking and to question everything, big or small. My advice to young would-be inventors would be to observe the world around them for inspiration, because seemingly mundane things can be explored in depth. Look around for problems, and you can find one to work on!

More about Ashton: Ashton Cofer is an inventor with several patents pending, including a glove to reduce hand tremors, a device to detect drowsy driving, and a method to convert polystyrene foam waste into activated carbon for purifying water. He and his teammates won the 2016 Google Science Fair’s Scientific American Innovator Award for this latest invention that addresses the global environmental problem of Styrofoam waste accumulation in our landfills and oceans. Ashton has a passion for science and technology, has exhibited at the White House Science Fair, and recently gave an inspirational TED talk about perseverance that has received well over a half million views. In addition to inventing, Ashton competed in First Lego League robotics, leading his team to win the 2016 FLL World Championship, and he continues to teach robotics workshops to local area youth in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

More about Akash: Akash Manoj, an Ashoka Youth Venturer, is an Indian cardiology researcher and inventor from the state of Tamil Nadu. He is known for his award-winning research on “silent” heart attacks. He is the inventor of a device which could “non-invasively” detect and alert users about the beginning of the early stages of a potential asymptomatic myocardial infarction (heart attack). In 2017, he received nation’s highest honor for students from the President of India: The National Child Award for Exceptional Achievement.

TED’s youth conference TED-Ed Weekend acts as a reminder that every student has an idea worth spreading and has the power to effect change. Even though it can sometimes feel like the gap between inspiration and action is wide, speakers at the event remind us that all it takes to get started is a first step.

But let’s get specific! We interviewed some of our speakers to ask them about those first steps, and exactly how they went from having an idea to fulfilling their dreams in our series, “Ideas into Action.”

Meet Carson Kropfl, inventor, entrepreneur, business owner and all-around go-getter. You might have caught him on Shark Tank where his ingenious locker-friendly skateboard landed him Sir Richard Branson as an investor.

Here’s what he had to say about making your dreams come true:

Hi Carson! What inspired you to develop your product?

In 2016 I started middle school. It was the first time I ever had a locker. I was really excited about it. I wanted to ride my skateboard to school and put it in my backpack and locker. I live in Southern California and our lockers are small. None of my skateboards would fit in my backpack or locker, not even my Penny Board. So, I decided to make one that could fit inside. At first, I made one for myself and all the kids really liked it and wanted to try riding it. Then my parents told me that I had to clean and do chores to pay for my surf contests and surf lessons. I HATE to clean, so I asked them if I could try selling my Locker Boards instead. It turns out that I created the first non-folding skateboard on the market that can fit inside of a backpack. It’s awesome. I take my Locker Board everywhere and just slip it in my backpack when I’m done. They are great for school and traveling.

Developing, manufacturing, marketing and selling a product takes time, and I’m sure it involves a lot of false starts. During that long haul, how much were you motivated by inspiration versus discipline?

It was more inspiration for me. I was inspired to start selling Locker Boards to get out of having to clean! When I started I didn’t have any money to advertise. I used social media to spread the word. This is still a main source of advertising for me. With social media, you’re only limited by your imagination.

This is the first video I ever posted. I had 300 followers the day after I posted this and realized I was on to something. That inspired me too. I liked that people were interested, and it inspired me to start selling my Locker Boards at school. At first, I only sold decks (without trucks and wheels). I would take five decks at a time in my backpack at school and sell them for $20 each. I quickly sold out and that inspired me to make more.

After 6 months of business I had handmade about 400 boards myself. I hired some part time employees to help me, but I was starting to get burned out. Then, the executive producer of Shark Tank called and asked me to apply for the show. This inspired me to keep going. Over 40,000 people applied for the show and they called me and asked me to be on it. I realized I was having an impact. It’s funny. Every time something gets really hard and I want to give up, something good happens and it inspires me to keep going.

There have been a lot of lessons along the way. It’s hard work. Over the long haul it has been inspiration that has kept me going. My favorite part of this whole experience has been the awesome people I’ve met along the way. When someone comes up to me and tells me that I’ve inspired them to go after their dreams, or they tell me how much they love their Locker Board…that inspires me to keep going.

And do you have any tricks for keeping yourself inspired and/or for staying focused and disciplined?

Yes. A couple of things. First of all, I pray for help and inspiration all the time. If you pray, meditate or like to be in nature to have a spiritual connection I think that is a really important part of helping you stay inspired and on the right path.

The second thing I do to stay inspired is when I have a problem,

“I ask for help and do something creative. That has always opened doors for me.”

For example, when I started my business (before Shark Tank) I collected used skateboard decks from skate shops to make my Locker Board decks (when kids buys new skateboard decks they leave their old ones behind). It was a lot of work. I would typically get 2-5 skate decks at a time. I needed a lot of skate decks and was getting burned out driving all over Southern California trying to hunt them down. I sent a DM to Vans on Instagram about what I was doing. They sent me a DM back asking me if I could actually do a trick on my Locker Board, so I posted this video.  They invited me to their corporate headquarters and I met with Steve Van Doren (his Dad started Vans). He set up a recycling program for me at two of their skateparks and I started getting 50-100 recycled decks a month.

What were the very first steps you took on your path to creating Lockerboard? 

The first thing I did was create a prototype. It took me five tries to get it right. The first deck I made was too big, because I didn’t measure my locker. I guessed at its size. I learned a valuable lesson about measuring. The next few decks I made, I tried to shape like a traditional skateboard. They didn’t work because the small size made them unstable and I would flip off. I got super frustrated and almost gave up. But, then I thought what if I squared off the edges so I had more room for my feet? It worked! Here’s a picture of my prototypes.

My parents played a huge role. We had a small outdoor shop in our backyard. My Dad and I always did a lot of projects together around the house, so I knew how to use the tools. But the saw that we had was a table saw and my Mom was freaking out. She was worried I was going to cut my arm off. So my Dad bought me a chop saw with a plastic protective shield that would go over the blade when I cut my boards. They had to drive me around to all of the skate shops to collect decks. They helped me a lot. Here’s a video that shows how I use to make the boards (after Shark Tank I hired a manufacturer to do this for me).

They showed me how to write a business plan so that I would be organized with my goals. That really helped me. It taught me what you have to think through to start a business. It helped me stay focused.

“The turning point for my business was when I skated into my local newspaper office to show them what I was doing.”

The reporter grabbed his tape recorder and immediately started interviewing me. They came to our house and took pictures. The article got picked up nationally and a website that teachers use in classrooms across America, Newsla.com, turned the article into a lesson plan. Here’s a link to it. Kids from all of the US started contacting me and telling me they had to do homework about me. Everyone wanted to buy my boards, so my Mom helped me create a website and we started selling them online.

Did you ever feel stuck? Where did that feeling come from for you? Are there any specific steps you took to help yourself feel unstuck? When you need help, who do you turn to?

I’m new to all of this, and learning along the way.

“I think what’s great about being a kid in business is people want to help you. They don’t expect you to have all of the answers. I’ve learned it’s super important to ask for help.” 

I’ve surrounded myself with mentors. When I meet someone that I connect with, I keep in touch with them. In 2017, I was invited to Nike Headquarters to be mentored for two days by Nike executives. I belong to a group of young entrepreneurs called Independentyouth.org and they organized the trip. While I was there I met the Lead of Sustainable Innovation, Noah Murphy-Reinhertz. He really liked my Locker Boards because they were sustainable. We had a connection. I asked if we could keep in touch. Then, I followed up. I sent him a Locker Board and thank you note. I emailed him. When I got stuck or had an idea I called him. Now we are collaborating on new ideas together! Here’s a video Noah made for me. He’s one of the coolest guys I know.

Do you have any advice for young would-be entrepreneurs? What is the most valuable advice you’ve received on your journey so far?

I have three key pieces of advice I tell young entrepreneurs: 

“Seize the moment, never give up and believe in yourself. People don’t realize that it took me four years to get on Shark Tank.”

I met the executive producer of Shark Tank, Max Swedlow, when I was seven years old. I had another product I had made when I was seven called Streetubez. It’s a skateboard accessory that gives riders the experience of surfing and getting tubed. Here’s a video of it to show you how it works.

My parents helped me make a prototype for it and we took it with us on a family vacation in the mountains so I would have something to play with. They took a bunch of pictures of me playing with it. Then one morning, we were in the elevator of our hotel going to breakfast and a man walked into the elevator wearing a sweatshirt with a Shark Tank logo on it. My Dad asked him if he had been on the show, but he said he was the executive producer of the show. I LOVE Shark Tank so I grabbed my Mom’s phone and started showing him the pictures of Streetubez we just took. I gave him an elevator pitch. This is one of the pictures we showed him.

He liked the idea, but told me my company was too small for Shark Tank. He gave me his contact information and told me to keep in touch. For four years, every 6 months I would update Max about what I was doing. When he found out about Locker Board he called me and said I was ready for Shark Tank. What are the chances of that happening? When you have an opportunity like that you have to seize the moment or you may never get that chance again. If I hadn’t manned up and given Max that elevator pitch none of this would have happened.

Not only do you seize the moment, but you never give up. During those four years I kept working towards my goal, despite facing some serious obstacles. The final thing is to believe in yourself. When I was on Shark Tank three sharks fought to invest in my company (Mark Cuban, Robert Herjavec and Sir Richard Branson). I chose Sir Richard Branson because we had a connection. He told me that I reminded him of himself when he first started his company. People don’t just invest in your business, they also invest in you. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.

With Sir Richard’s help I now have the top manufacturers in the skateboard industry making my sustainable line of Locker Board skateboards, my company has grown 300% and I just launched on Amazon. I now sell three types of Locker Board skateboards. Here’s a video of my new Locker Board product line. Dreams really do come true if you seize the moment, never give up and believe in yourself. If I can do it, you can do it. Shred Hard. Dream Hard. Work Hard.

For more information please visit my website Lockerboard.net and follow me on Instagram @lockerboard or @carson_kropfl

In honor of our lesson on Anna Komnene —a Byzantine princess, scholar, physician and historian — we asked animator Els Decaluwe a few questions about the process of working on this piece.

What are the challenges of designing a character that you have no photographs of, only other artist’s interpretations?

Before I start designing, I always try to look up some background information about the character. In Anna’s case, I got the feeling that she was really ahead of her time. I really wanted to give my design the same aura without trying to copy other artists’ designs. It’s not about how she looks but about what she represents and who she was! For the hair I looked up several historical references and also got lots of help from educator Leonora Neville. I saw lovely complicated up-dos with jewels and decorations between braids. But I felt Anna was kind of a free spirit so she maybe would have worn her hair in a looser style. Not wearing too much jewelry, as it would get in the way of her writing. As for the clothes, I thought Anna should be ”a badass in a dress.”

What techniques do you use in your process?

I’m a real big fan of classical 2D animation, and if I could, I would still make everything on paper. Because of time constraints, though, I traditionally only do the pre-production. Afterwards I digitally try to copy the feel of my traditionally-drawn images. Textures are my best friends and I spend a lot of time preparing traditional textures, to use in the digital coloring process. For the animation itself, I use a frame by frame animation technique. This means that I redraw every frame, so I make approximately 12 drawings per second of film. This is a time-consuming process that gives extra movement and charm to the animation, and to me it is totally worth it!

Which part of this animation are you most happy about?

The scene transitions were really important to me. Though it is a historical realistic subject, I wanted to add some magic to them. That’s why I chose to use transformations in my animations. Anna turning into the year 1083 and than baby Anna coming out of the 0 was my greatest challenge. Animating transformations is like performing a magic trick: when they work well, it really puts a smile on peoples’ faces! I also love the scene where Anna was reading at night. As I am also a children’s book illustrator, I like putting in the extra time to really design a picture book-like illustration with lots of details and textures.

Spending so much time working on the depiction of one character, do you develop any sort of relationship to that character? Do you have any good anecdotes about getting to know Anna Komnene as a character in order to design her and bring her to life?

It was lovely learning more about this heroine. What really struck me was the information I found about people questioning the fact that The Alexiad, her account of her father’s reign, could have been written by a woman. I realised how important it was for me to represent her correctly. That’s also why I chose to mirror Anna and her father in the first and last scene. I wanted to show how many women also have an important role in history. And you can make a difference without using a sword! While animating Anna and Alexios, I used a mirror and acted out their movements and facial expressions. I had a ruler which I used as a sword and hopped around in the office. My co-workers even caught me making funny/crazy facial expressions while animating! That’s why I think there’s also a bit of me in the animation of Anna.

TED’s youth conference TED-Ed Weekend acts as a reminder that every student has an idea worth spreading and has the power to effect change. Even though it can sometimes feel like the gap between inspiration and action is wide, speakers at the event remind us that all it takes to get started is a first step.

But let’s get specific! We interviewed some of our speakers to ask them about those first steps, and exactly how they went from having an idea to fulfilling their dreams in our series, “Ideas into Action.”

Meet Amanda C. Gorman, the first ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States of America. You might have caught her performance of “An American Lyric” at the Library of Congress.

Here’s what she had to say about getting stuff done:

Hi Amanda! How do you decide what you’re going to write about? Where do you turn to for inspiration?

I’m not sure if I decide what I’m going to write; it’s kind of like the subject chooses me. Not to sound too Olivanderian, but just as the wand chooses the wizard, I think sometimes the poem chooses the poet. It’s so difficult, not to mention not healthy nor ideal, to force poetry. My working life sways between periods where I have a lot of ideas, and not a lot of time; or, conversely, sometimes it feels like I finally have time in a hectic life but am running dry on ideas.

“But what tends to inspire me most consistently is the work of other poets.”

I love reading through anthologies (one of my favorites is Angles of Ascent), and trying to understand what I like about a poem, and how I can improve upon it. Usually flipping through anthologies and other collections (for example, I love Sonia Sanchez’s Shake Loose My Skin) starts an explosion of questions inside me, and that’s the beginning of a poem.

How much of your work is based on inspiration versus motivation versus discipline?

Haha! I think poetry is a trichotomy of all of those! It takes incredible discipline to sit down and hone the poetic craft, something that doesn’t always get recognition, financial pay off, or social support. So that discipline and follow through necessitates motivation.

“I’d say for me, poetry isn’t a destination but a pursuit, a journey to write more often, to write better, and to write for something that matters.”

What steps do you take once you’re ready put pen to paper? Do you have any rituals, any specific place you like to write or tools you use for writing? If so, how did you come up with these rituals and systems?

The most consistent ritual I’d say I have is music. If I’m ready to write, and I can make it work, I love playing some Hans Zimmer, Rachel Portman, and/or Michael Giacchino. Particularly I look for music that speaks to the emotions I’m trying to convey. I write with any pen I have available; I just prefer pen because it’s a bit more longer lasting than pencil. From a young age I was always so anguished when I opened my journals to see that all the pencil marks had smudged and disappeared over time! I love writing by the Charles River, but it is definitely too cold for my Southern California fingers to handle it in the winter, so my desk in my dorm has to do.

“I didn’t formulate these rituals ahead of time. I think a lot of finding the right system that works for you comes from experimenting.”

You have to go to different workshops and try out the strategies there, read about other writers’ processes and try them out, as well as improvise with your own and see what feels right. When you discover the one that fits you, you’ll know.

Do you ever feel stuck? What do you think that’s about? Are there any specific steps you take to help yourself feel unstuck?

I’m always furious when I hear a writer, when asked for advice on being stuck, say: “I don’t get writer’s block”. This fury is partly out of jealousy, because writer’s block is very real in my life, but it’s also because simply saying writer’s block doesn’t exist for you doesn’t help other writers who do face it, and who may be pushing through trauma or the belief that their voice isn’t worth being listened to. I think for me, and many people in general, writer’s block often comes from a place of insecurity. It’s a worry that our words don’t matter, that everything has been said before, that we don’t have anything to add.

“I have to remind myself to trust in my craft, that many things have been said before, but they haven’t been said by me in the way I’d say them, that no matter what, speaking up, and also listening, through words will always matter.”

How did you learn to share your work?

I think writers groups, especially ones focused on carving a space for underrepresented identities, have been incredibly helpful in my development. In high school I was part of WriteGirl, which hosts creative writing workshops and a mentorship program for girls. I also attended some weekend poetry workshops for youth at Beyond Baroque and workshops held by YoungArts. Those were spaces in which I could share my work and get constructive feedback, which is always a little scary at first, but like anything, it takes practice.

Do you have any advice for young would-be artists?

Keep writing. Keep going. It sounds cliche and obvious, but I think there are so many forces out there that attempt to delegitimize young artists and their voices. Over and over again you’ll be told you won’t make money, you won’t make a difference. But being committed to your craft, as well as yourself, is a reward in and of itself. By keeping at your art, you’ll be able to do what very few can, which is to use creativity to produce something bigger than yourself.

“Wherever you are, be hungry to find the library, the coffee shop, the after school program, the students meeting in the community center, the places that create space for writers.”

More about Amanda: L.A. native Amanda Gorman has been called “the next great figure of poetry in the U.S.” In 2017, she made history by becoming the first ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States of America. In this  role she has spoken at the Library of Congress, the United Nations x Mashable Social Good Summit, WE Day, and venues across the country. Prior to her national position she served as the inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. and later the West. In these capacities she met Michelle Obama at the White House, conducted a library tour, and published The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough. She is Founder and Executive Director of One Pen One Page, which promotes literacy among youth through free creative writing programming for underserved youth. She has been a HERlead Fellow in Washington, D.C, and London, and a UN Youth Delegate in NYC. She’s performed alongside Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman, and Lin-Manuel Miranda to advocate for youth leadership and arts education, and spoken alongside Al Gore and Secretary Hillary Clinton for environmentalism and women’s rights. Featured in The New York Times, The Today Show, MTV, Teen Vogue, Seventeen Magazine, TIDAL, Essence’s Woke 100 list, Time for Kids, Yahoo Style, the Google Assistant, and more, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Glamour Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, and Elle UK. A model on the side, she’s been a face in two national campaigns for Eileen Fisher and Helmut Lang. She is a recipient of the Making a Difference Award from Black Girls Rock and BET,  recognition from the Scholastic Inc. and YoungArts, a Genius Grant from OZY Media, and a College Women of the Year Award from Glamour Magazine. This fall she was selected from a competitive 20,000+ applicant pool to be one of the newest contributors to the New York Times newsletter The Edit, tailored to college students and recent graduates. Currently a Harvard junior in the top of her class, she studies Sociology and Spanish.

Designer Giorgia Lupi wants to change the way we think about data — far from being cold facts and numbers, it can be warm and often flawed. Follow her step-by-step instructions to generate a data-driven perspective on the person you know best: you.

We humans constantly generate data, and it’s constantly being tracked for us. Every step we take, every item we purchase, every website we visit snowballs into a mountain of information — it’s no coincidence that it’s called Big Data. Data drives many of our decisions today: for example, Amazon suggests what we should put into our shopping carts based on its analysis of our buying history and the history of people with similar tastes; Netflix deploys proprietary formulas to steer us to movie and TV choices so we keep bingeing. Data can also be a great source of anxiety — we worry about our personal information being stolen or used against us. But what if we could take ownership of our day-to-day data and use it to tell our own story instead?

That’s what Giorgia Lupi, co-founder and design director at Accurat, a New York City- and Milan-based firm, is trying to do (TED Talk: How we can find ourselves in data). She looks at data from a perspective she calls “data humanism” that emphasizes its vitality and color. It’s time, she says, “to begin designing ways to connect numbers to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.” She urges to think beyond the hackneyed forms of data visualization — the bar graphs, the linear timelines — and dream up other ways to turn statistics into a story. A data portrait can be a great way to begin reclaiming and recycling your personal information. And there’s no right or wrong way to do it; it’s like a selfie, but made out of data points rather than pixels.

Here’s a template you can use to start taking your data in your own hands. The process is straightforward: just answer these questions, then draw. And don’t worry, it’s meant for artists and non-artists.

Remember that data, like us, is imperfect. “It’s time to leave behind any presumption of absolute control and universal truth,” says Lupi. Since we get our data from humans; it’s riddled with human error and tainted by biases. We should embrace these imperfections, just as we embrace imperfections in ourselves and others. These portraits are only the start of forming a new relationship with your data. Once you feel more connected to it, you’ll see it differently. We must treat data “as the beginning of the conversation,” Lupi says, “and not the end.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Freitas is a writer from Massachusetts. This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

While the musical soundtrack is wholly a product of the imagination, everything else in this spellbinding animation of the HIV virus — created by Janet Iwasa — was based on the findings of researchers.

University of Utah cellular biologist Janet Iwasa has spent much of the past four years engaged in discussions with dozens of HIV researchers. The usual product of these endeavors would be a paper in an academic journal, or maybe a textbook, but for Iwasa, a Senior TED Fellow (Talk: How animations help scientists test a hypothesis) … it became a video animation that shows, for the first time, the life cycle of HIV at molecular scale.

“Most of the knowledge that scientists produce is locked away in jargon-filled publications, difficult to read even for people slightly outside of their field,” she says. “In general, science needs better ways of communicating our research, in ways accessible to everyone.” Her work is an attempt to bring microbiology into the mainstream, and to showcase the information synthesized from many labs working on different aspects of the same disease.

Why HIV? Iwasa became interested in animation while getting her PhD at UC San Francisco. After graduating, she took a 10-week course in animation in Hollywood. Since then, she has created visualizations of many scientific processes, including the origins of life, the workings of CRISPR, the contents of dust, the motility of bacteria, and how proteins detangle other proteins. “I chose HIV for this particular project because it has been well-funded and is very well-studied, so there is a vast amount of information available to create a reasonably accurate interpretation,” she says.

But there’s no central clearinghouse of knowledge about the biology of HIV. “Different researchers study different aspects of the biology — how the virus enters and exits a cell, what’s happening in the nucleus, what’s happening in the cytoplasm, how the RNA moves around, and so on,” she says. Through involvement with CHEETAH, an NIH-funded research center based at the University of Utah that studies HIV structural biology and similar groups, she talked to “about 30 HIV researchers at length” about her project, gathering ideas about what to show. Then she used Autodesk software to build her animation.

Her animation marries artistic license and scientific fact. “Since most molecules and cells are colorless, the colors I selected were arbitrary,” Iwasa says. “I generally made my choices to maximize both aesthetics and clarity. For example, I tried to visually cluster proteins of related functions by using hue, but changed the saturation to differentiate between them.” The shapes and locations of the molecular components are true to life, based on data from the scientists she spoke to. “Structural biologists can figure out the shapes of proteins using X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy,” Iwasa says. “Cell biologists look for where proteins are located in a cell, using light microscopy and fluorescence. With those methods, we can figure out that they’re in a particular part of a cell and how many there are. Then, biochemists can tell us how proteins connect.”

However, the precise motions depicted inside the cell are a best guess. While advanced technologies allow us to view these tiny proteins, “such methods take only a snapshot, frozen in time. Unfortunately, you can’t use these methods to look at proteins in action in a living cell.” As a result, scientists rely on indirect experimentation to start visualizing what exactly occurs at each stage of the HIV life cycle. “We can only say what we think is going on, based on the best evidence we have,” says Iwasa. She compares the process to a CSI, where researchers gather various pieces of data that they piece together to form a picture that tells a story.

Another creative choice: setting the animation to music. She tapped cellist, composer and TED Senior Fellow Joshua Roman (Watch: On violin and cello, Johan Halvorsen’s “Passacaglia”) to provide a musical accompaniment that would offer a sense of familiarity in the strange molecular environment. “Looking at a molecular animation can feel very alien. I hoped to be able to give people a sense of space and rhythm, and Joshua provided a soundscape for the different environments,” says Iwasa. “When you’re outside of the cell, it sounds one way, and when you’re inside a cell, there’s a different sound, more like a machine — proteins moving around. And then when you’re inside the nucleus, it’s a little bit more hushed, but you still have this constant sound of the machinery.

With this work, Iwasa wants to show what scientists have learned about HIV. In particular, she’d like to correct one misconception: that we don’t know much about HIV because we don’t yet have a cure. She says, “It’s a shame the general public doesn’t realize how much we do already understand about HIV and how much progress has been made.” With her vivid depiction, she also wants to show how insidious the virus is. “Retroviruses like HIV work by gluing their own viral DNA with the cellular DNA,” Iwasa adds. “That’s why HIV is so hard to cure: it’s integrated into the cell’s genome.” While she has shared her work in progress with “hundreds of researchers” to get their notes and tweak her efforts, she is just starting to share the clip with the general public. She mentions receiving an email from someone who is HIV-positive. Upon seeing an early clip, they wrote, “The video is so simple, but it’s so powerfully graphic. I never thought that this is what must be going on inside me. I was awestruck.”

That combination of perspective and information is what Iwasa wants to bring to people’s understanding of science. “We scientists have an obligation to communicate what we do, because the vast amount of it is publicly funded. This knowledge really should belong to everyone,” she says. “This project is an attempt to try and make it more accessible for those who are interested.” In addition to instructing the lay public, the video could also help scientists to connect with other people and organizations that can help move their research forward.

Iwasa is already busy on other videos related to this project. “My next animations will show how antiviral drugs work to stop the virus from either infecting an individual — or, once someone is infected, how it keeps the viral population in check,” she says. “I’ll also show different ways scientists are hoping to develop a cure.” In addition, she is currently collaborating with TED Fellows Kellee Santiago and Jimmy Lin to create Project Quorum, a game that will allow anyone to help researchers analyze image data and make discoveries. They plan to release it later this year.

Watch the full video below, and for additional information on the project, go to Iwasa’s Science of HIV site:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Frances Eng is a contributing writer to TED.com, dedicated to covering the feats of the wondrous TED Fellows. Her launchpad is located in Cambridge, UK. This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.