Richard Saul Wurman created the TED conference in 1984 as a onetime event. (As you may already know, TED refers to Technology, Education, and Design.) It became a four-day conference six years later. Chris Anderson purchased TED in 2001. Until 2005, it remained a once-a-year conference: four days of programs, 50 speakers, 18-minute presentations. Anderson added TEDGlobal to reach an international audience. TED.com was launched in 2006. Thus far, the website has attracted more than one  billion views, averaging about two million day. The video programs have been translated into more than 100 languages.

According to Anderson, “With TED, the end of the talk should not be the end of the idea, but just the beginning.” TED showcases speakers who are knowledgeable, of course, but also “human, relatable, and often emotional, so what they share lights people up.”

There are no charges to access any of the TED programs. After attending the 2006 conference, documentary filmmaker Daphne Zuniga described it as “Cirque Du Soleil for the mind.” Oprah Winfrey later observed, “TED is where brilliant people go to hear other brilliant people.

I will continue to recommend the TED programs that are among the most highly rated. For example, Anne-Marie Slaughter. A public policy expert, she has made waves with her 2012 article in The Atlantic, “Why women still can’t have it all.” But really, is this only a question for women? Here Slaughter expands her ideas and explains why shifts in work culture, public policy and social mores can lead to more equality — for men, women, all of us.

Slaughter has served as the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and was the first female Director of Policy Planning for the US Department of State. In late 2013 she left Princeton to assume the presidency of the New America Foundation. With her husband, Slaughter has also raised two sons. And she is on the record saying that integrating her remarkably high-powered career and motherhood was doable when she had the flexibility to control her own schedule, but impossible once she was no longer her own boss.

In a 2012 article for The Atlantic that became the magazine’s most-read ever, Slaughter dismantles the recently-popularized notion that women who fail to “have it all” lack the ambition to do so. Instead, she argues that the way most top jobs are structured, including the expectations of workers regardless of gender, uphold slavish devotion to work above family life or other passions. Creating a more flexible work environment would benefit not just individual women and men, but society as a whole. It is unacceptable, she argues, that a desire to spend time with one’s family should be cause for shame.

Here is a direct link to her most popular TED presentation. I envy anyone who has not as yet seen it.