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Clockwise from top left: singer-songwriter Mor Karbasi; Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks; applause from the audience; comic book creator and clinical psychologist Naif AlMutawa; poet Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo
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The show-stopper of day one is Naif Al-Mutawa, a bearded, bespectacled clinical psychologist and creator of The 99, a comic book project that showcases enlightened Muslim values in the guise of superheroes. They are shortly about to interact, thanks to some cross-cultural co-operation between publishers, with DC Comics’ Justice League of America in an ultimate act of pop culture détente. Al-Mutawa’s talk is fast-moving, touching and witty (he describes recently manning a food stall advertising “Free Falafel”, only for an earnest would-be protester to ask him: “Who’s Falafel?”) He gets an ovation and his talk is among the first to be made available from this conference on the TED website.
The quality of TED talks is frequently astonishing, word-perfect, immaculately-timed, shuffling potentially dense information in the lightest of ways. The time slot, 18 minutes, shorter than a Pink Floyd tune-up, seems perfectly prescribed for the average attention span, given that you have to listen to five in succession. You can take a break from the intense atmosphere of the Playhouse by watching a simulcast at the nearby Randolph hotel, where there is a more social vibe, and what seems to be the highest incidence of hugs and iPads per square metre in the western world.
The quality of TED talks is frequently astonishing, word-perfect, immaculately-timed, shuffling potentially dense information in the lightest of ways. The time slot, 18 minutes, shorter than a Pink Floyd tune-up, seems perfectly prescribed for the average attention span, given that you have to listen to five in succession. You can take a break from the intense atmosphere of the Playhouse by watching a simulcast at the nearby Randolph hotel, where there is a more social vibe, and what seems to be the highest incidence of hugs and iPads per square metre in the western world.
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