Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

Sheryl WuDunn's book "Half the Sky" investigates the oppression of women globally. Her stories shock. Only when women in developing countries have equal access to education and economic opportunity will we be using all our human resources.

Sheryl WuDunn and her husband, Nick Kristof, won a Pulitzer for their New York Times coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Their joint reporting work in China and other developing nations convinced them both that, just as slavery was the moral issue of the 19th century, sex trafficking, gender-based violence and other abuses make women's rights the moral issue of the 21st.

Susan notes: a stellar line-up of seven masterful story tellers, some of whom tell stories by profession, others to spread their compelling messages. Thanks as always to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable. TED ROCKS !

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

Laurie Santos runs the Comparative Cognition Laboratory (CapLab) at Yale, where she and collaborators across departments (from psychology to primatology to neurobiology) explore the evolutionary origins of the human mind  by studying lemurs, capuchin monkeys and other primates.

The twist: Santos looks not only for positive humanlike traits, like tool-using and altruism, but irrational ones, like biased decisionmaking.

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.

We all think we're good at making choices; many of us even enjoy making them. Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisionmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.

At TEDIndia, Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer/actor/politician, tells a transformative story in dance -- and argues that the arts may be the most powerful way to effect change, whether political, social or personal.

Mallika Sarabhai is a powerhouse of communication and the arts in India. Educated in business, she now leads the Darpana dance company, which works in the Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi forms. She's also a writer, publisher, actor, producer, anchorwoman ... and all her varied forms of artistic engagement are wrapped around a deep social conscience.