Picture warm, gooey cookies, crunchy candies, velvety cakes, waffle cones piled high with ice cream.
Is your mouth watering?
Are you craving dessert?
Why?
What happens in the brain that makes sugary foods so hard to resist?
Sugar is a general term used to describe a class of molecules called carbohydrates, and it's found in a wide variety of food and drink.
Just check the labels on sweet products you buy.
Glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose, lactose, dextrose, and starch are all forms of sugar.
So are high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice, raw sugar, and honey.
And sugar isn't just in candies and desserts, it's also added to tomato sauce, yogurt, dried fruit, flavored waters, or granola bars.
Since sugar is everywhere, it's important to understand how it affects the brain.
What happens when sugar hits your tongue?
And does eating a little bit of sugar make you crave more?
You take a bite of cereal.
The sugars it contains activate the sweet-taste receptors, part of the taste buds on the tongue.
These receptors send a signal up to the brain stem, and from there, it forks off into many areas of the forebrain, one of which is the cerebral cortex.
Different sections of the cerebral cortex process different tastes: bitter, salty, umami, and, in our case, sweet.
From here, the signal activates the brain's reward system.
This reward system is a series of electrical and chemical pathways across several different regions of the brain.
It's a complicated network, but it helps answer a single, subconscious question: should I do that again?
That warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you taste Grandma's chocolate cake?
That's your reward system saying, "Mmm, yes!"
And it's not just activated by food.
Socializing, sexual behavior, and drugs are just a few examples of things and experiences that also activate the reward system.
But overactivating this reward system kickstarts a series of unfortunate events: loss of control, craving, and increased tolerance to sugar.
Let's get back to our bite of cereal.
It travels down into your stomach and eventually into your gut.
And guess what?
There are sugar receptors here, too.
They are not taste buds, but they do send signals telling your brain that you're full or that your body should produce more insulin to deal with the extra sugar you're eating.
The major currency of our reward system is dopamine, an important chemical or neurotransmitter.
There are many dopamine receptors in the forebrain, but they're not evenly distributed.
Certain areas contain dense clusters of receptors, and these dopamine hot spots are a part of our reward system.
Drugs like alcohol, nicotine, or heroin send dopamine into overdrive, leading some people to constantly seek that high, in other words, to be addicted.
Sugar also causes dopamine to be released, though not as violently as drugs.
And sugar is rare among dopamine-inducing foods.
Broccoli, for example, has no effect, which probably explains why it's so hard to get kids to eat their veggies.
Speaking of healthy foods, let's say you're hungry and decide to eat a balanced meal.
You do, and dopamine levels spike in the reward system hot spots.
But if you eat that same dish many days in a row, dopamine levels will spike less and less, eventually leveling out.
That's because when it comes to food, the brain evolved to pay special attention to new or different tastes.
Why?
Two reasons: first, to detect food that's gone bad.
And second, because the more variety we have in our diet, the more likely we are to get all the nutrients we need.
To keep that variety up, we need to be able to recognize a new food, and more importantly, we need to want to keep eating new foods.
And that's why the dopamine levels off when a food becomes boring.
Now, back to that meal.
What happens if in place of the healthy, balanced dish, you eat sugar-rich food instead?
If you rarely eat sugar or don't eat much at a time, the effect is similar to that of the balanced meal.
But if you eat too much, the dopamine response does not level out.
In other words, eating lots of sugar will continue to feel rewarding.
In this way, sugar behaves a little bit like a drug.
It's one reason people seem to be hooked on sugary foods.
So, think back to all those different kinds of sugar.
Each one is unique, but every time any sugar is consumed, it kickstarts a domino effect in the brain that sparks a rewarding feeling.
Too much, too often, and things can go into overdrive.
So, yes, overconsumption of sugar can have addictive effects on the brain, but a wedge of cake once in a while won't hurt you.
Let me show you some images of what I consider to be the cities of tomorrow.
So, that's Kibera, the largest squatter community in Nairobi.
This is the squatter community in Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Bombay, India, what's called Mumbai these days.
This is Hosinia, the largest and most urbanized favela in Rio de Janeiro.
And this is Sultanbelyi, which is one of the largest squatter communities in Istanbul.
They are what I consider to be the cities of tomorrow, the new urban world.
Now, why do I say that?
To tell you about that I have to talk about this fellow here, his name is Julius.
And I met Julius the last week that I was living in Kibera.
So, I had been there almost three months, and I was touring around the city going to different squatter areas and Julius was tagging along, and he was bug eyed and at certain points we were walking around, he grabbed my hand for support, which is something most Kenyans would never consider doing.
They're very polite and they don't get so forward so quickly.
And I found out later that it was Julius' first day in Nairobi, and he's one of many.
So, close to 200,000 people a day migrate from the rural to the urban areas.
That's, and I'm going to be fair to the statisticians who talked this morning, not almost 1.5 million people a week, but almost 1.4 million people a week but I'm a journalist, and we exaggerate, so almost 1.5 million people a week, close to 70 million people a year.
And if you do the math, that's 130 people every minute.
So, that'll be -- in the 18 minutes that I'm given to talk here, between two and three thousand people will have journeyed to the cities.
And here are the statistics.
Today -- a billion squatters, one in six people on the planet.
2030 -- two billion squatters, one in four people on the planet.
And the estimate is that in 2050, there'll be three billion squatters, better than one in three people on earth.
So, these are the cities of the future, and we have to engage them.
And I was thinking this morning of the good life, and before I show you the rest of my presentation, I'm going to violate TED rules here, and I'm going to read you something from my book as quickly as I can.
Because I think it says something about reversing our perception of what we think the good life is.
So -- "The hut was made of corrugated metal, set on a concrete pad.
It was a 10 by 10 cell.
Armstrong O'Brian, Jr. shared it with three other men.
Armstrong and his friends had no water -- they bought it from a nearby tap owner -- no toilet -- the families in this compound shared a single pit-latrine -- and no sewers or sanitation.
They did have electricity, but it was illegal service tapped from someone else's wires, and could only power one feeble bulb.
This was Southland, a small shanty community on the western side of Nairobi, Kenya.
But it could've been anywhere in the city, because more than half the city of Nairobi lives like this.
1.5 million people stuffed into mud or metal huts with no services, no toilets, no rights.
"Armstrong explained the brutal reality of their situation: they paid 1,500 shillings in rent, about 20 bucks a month, a relatively high price for a Kenyan shantytown, and they could not afford to be late with the money.
'In case you owe one month, the landlord will come with his henchmen and bundle you out.
He will confiscate your things,' Armstrong said.
'Not one month, one day,' his roommate Hilary Kibagendi Onsomu, who was cooking ugali, the spongy white cornmeal concoction that is the staple food in the country, cut into the conversation.
They called their landlord a Wabenzi, meaning that he is a person who has enough money to drive a Mercedes-Benz.
Hilary served the ugali with a fry of meat and tomatoes; the sun slammed down on the thin steel roof; and we perspired as we ate.
"After we finished, Armstrong straightened his tie, put on a wool sports jacket, and we headed out into the glare.
Outside a mound of garbage formed the border between Southland and the adjacent legal neighborhood of Langata.
It was perhaps eight feet tall, 40 feet long, and 10 feet wide.
And it was set in a wider watery ooze.
As we passed, two boys were climbing the mount Kenya of trash.
They couldn't have been more than five or six years old.
They were barefoot, and with each step their toes sank into the muck sending hundreds of flies scattering from the rancid pile.
I thought they might be playing King of the Hill, but I was wrong.
Once atop the pile, one of the boys lowered his shorts, squatted, and defecated.
The flies buzzed hungrily around his legs.
When 20 families -- 100 people or so -- share a single latrine, a boy pooping on a garbage pile is perhaps no big thing.
But it stood in jarring contrast to something Armstrong had said as we were eating -- that he treasured the quality of life in his neighborhood.
"For Armstrong, Southland wasn't constrained by its material conditions.
Instead, the human spirit radiated out from the metal walls and garbage heaps to offer something no legal neighborhood could: freedom.
'This place is very addictive,' he had said.
'It's a simple life, but nobody is restricting you.
Nobody is controlling what you do.
Once you have stayed here, you cannot go back.'
He meant back beyond that mountain of trash, back in the legal city, of legal buildings, with legal leases and legal rights.
'Once you have stayed here,' he said, 'you can stay for the rest of your life.'"
So, he has hope, and this is where these communities start.
This is perhaps the most primitive shanty that you can find in Kibera, little more than a stick-and-mud hut next to a garbage heap.
This is getting ready for the monsoon in Bombay, India.
This is home improvement: putting plastic tarps on your roof.
This is in Rio de Janeiro, and it's getting a bit better, right?
We're seeing scavenged terra cotta tile and little pieces of signs, and plaster over the brick, some color, and this is Sulay Montakaya's house in Sultanbelyi, and it's getting even better.
He's got a fence; he scavenged a door; he's got new tile on the roof.
And then you get Rocinha and you can see that it's getting even better.
The buildings here are multi-story.
They develop -- you can see on the far right one where it seems to just stack on top of each other, room, after room, after room.
And what people do is they develop their home on one or two stories, and they sell their loggia or roof rights, and someone else builds on top of their building, and then that person sells the roof rights, and someone else builds on top of their building.
All of these buildings are made out of reinforced concrete and brick.
And then you get Sultanbelyi, in Turkey, where it's even built to a higher level of design.
The crud in the front is mattress stuffing, and you see that all over Turkey.
People dry out or air out their mattress stuffing on their roofs.
But the green building, on behind, you can see that the top floor is not occupied, so people are building with the possibility of expansion.
And it's built to a pretty high standard of design.
And then you finally get squatter homes like this, which is built on the suburban model.
Hey, that's a single family home in the squatter community.
That's also in Istanbul, Turkey.
They're quite vital places, these communities.
This is the main drag of Rocinha, the Estrada da Gavea, and there's a bus route that runs through it, lots of people out on the street.
These communities in these cities are actually more vital than the illegal communities.
They have more things going on in them.
This is a typical pathway in Rocinha called a "beco" -- these are how you get around the community.
It's on very steep ground.
They're built on the hills, inland from the beaches in Rio, and you can see that the houses are just cantilevered over the natural obstructions.
So, that's just a rock in the hillside.
And these becos are normally very crowded, and people hump furniture up them, or refrigerators up them, all sorts of things.
Beer is all carried in on your shoulders.
Beer is a very important thing in Brazil.
This is commerce in Kenya, right along the train tracks, so close to the train tracks that the merchants sometimes have to pull the merchandise out of the way.
This is a marketplace, also in Kenya, Toi Market, lots of dealers, in almost everything you want to buy.
Those green things in the foreground are mangoes.
This is a shopping street in Kibera, and you can see that there's a soda dealer, a health clinic, two beauty salons, a bar, two grocery stores, and a church, and more.
It's a typical downtown street; it just happens to be self-built.
This here, on the right-hand side, is what's called a -- if you look at the fine print under the awning -- it's a hotel.
And what hotel means, in Kenya and India, is an eating-place.
So, that's a restaurant.
People steal electrical power -- this is Rio.
People tap in and they have thieves who are called "grillos" or "crickets," and they steal the electrical power and wire the neighborhood.
People burn trash to get rid of the garbage, and they dig their own sewer channels.
Talk about more plastic bags than plankton.
And sometimes they have natural trash-disposal.
And when they have more money they cement their streets, and they put in sewers and good water pipes, and stuff like that.
This is water going to Rio.
People run their water pipes all over the place, and that little hut right there has a pump in it, and that's what people do: they steal electricity; they install a pump and they tap into the water main, and pump water up to their houses.
So, the question is how do you go from the mud-hut village, to the more developed city, to the even highly developed Sultanbelyi?
I say there are two things.
One is people need a guarantee they won't be evicted.
That does not necessarily mean property rights, and I would disagree with Hernando de Soto on that question, because property rights create a lot of complications.
They're most often sold to people, and people then wind up in debt and have to pay back the debt, and sometimes have to sell their property in order to pay back the debt.
There's a whole variety of other reasons why property rights sometimes don't work in these cases, but they do need security of tenure.
And they need access to politics, and that can mean two things.
That can mean community organizing from below, but it can also mean possibilities from above.
And I say that because the system in Turkey is notable.
Turkey has two great laws that protect squatters.
One is that -- it's called "gecekondu" in Turkish, which means "built overnight," and if you build your house overnight in Turkey, you can't be evicted without due process of law, if they don't catch you during the night.
And the second aspect is that once you have 2,000 people in the community, you can petition the government to be recognized as a legal sub-municipality.
And when you're a legal sub-municipality, you suddenly have politics.
You're allowed to have an elected government, collect taxes, provide municipal services, and that's exactly what they do.
So, these are the civic leaders of the future.
The woman in the center is Geeta Jiwa.
She lives in one of those tents on the highway median in Mumbai.
That's Sureka Gundi; she also lives with her family on the tent along the same highway median.
They're very outspoken.
They're very active.
They can be community leaders.
This woman is Nine, which means "grandma" in Turkish.
And there were three old ladies who lived in -- that's her self-built house behind her -- and they've lived there for 30 or 40 years, and they are the backbone of the community there.
This is Richard Muthama Peter, and he is an itinerant street photographer in Kibera.
He makes money taking pictures of the neighborhood, and the people in the neighborhood, and is a great resource in the community.
And finally my choice to run for mayor of Rio is Cezinio, the fruit merchant with his two kids here, and a more honest and giving and caring man I don't know.
The future of these communities is in the people and in our ability to work with those people.
So, I think the message I take, from what I read from the book, from what Armstrong said, and from all these people, is that these are neighborhoods.
The issue is not urban poverty.
The issue is not the larger, over-arching thing.
The issue is for us to recognize that these are neighborhoods -- this is a legitimate form of urban development -- and that cities have to engage these residents, because they are building the cities of the future.
Thank you very much.
As someone who has spent his entire career trying to be invisible standing in front of an audience is a cross between an out-of-body experience and a deer caught in the headlights, so please forgive me for violating one of the TED commandments by relying on words on paper, and I only hope I'm not struck by lightning bolts before I'm done.
I'd like to begin by talking about some of the ideas that motivated me to become a documentary photographer.
I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and on a personal level, an awakening sense of idealism.
The war in Vietnam was raging; the Civil Rights Movement was under way; and pictures had a powerful influence on me.
Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing, and photographers were telling us another.
I believed the photographers, and so did millions of other Americans.
Their images fueled resistance to the war and to racism.
They not only recorded history; they helped change the course of history.
Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable.
I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus both the benefits and the cost of political policies.
It can give credit to sound decision-making, adding momentum to success.
In the face of poor political judgment or political inaction, it becomes a kind of intervention, assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior.
It puts a human face on issues which from afar can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.
What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one.
And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view.
It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice.
And as a reaction, it stimulates public opinion and gives impetus to public debate, thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda, much as they would like to.
Coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly.
The press is certainly a business, and in order to survive it must be a successful business, but the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibility.
Society's problems can't be solved until they're identified.
On a higher plane, the press is a service industry, and the service it provides is awareness.
Every story does not have to sell something.
There's also a time to give.
That was a tradition I wanted to follow.
Seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved and that visual journalism could actually become a factor in conflict resolution -- I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer.
But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph.
I'd like to take you on a visual journey through some of the events and issues I've been involved in over the past 25 years.
In 1981, I went to Northern Ireland.
10 IRA prisoners were in the process of starving themselves to death in protest against conditions in jail.
The reaction on the streets was violent confrontation.
I saw that the front lines of contemporary wars are not on isolated battlefields, but right where people live.
During the early '80s, I spent a lot of time in Central America, which was engulfed by civil wars that straddled the ideological divide of the Cold War.
In Guatemala, the central government -- controlled by a oligarchy of European decent -- was waging a scorched Earth campaign against an indigenous rebellion, and I saw an image that reflected the history of Latin America: conquest through a combination of the Bible and the sword.
An anti-Sandinista guerrilla was mortally wounded as Commander Zero attacked a town in Southern Nicaragua.
A destroyed tank belonging to Somoza's national guard was left as a monument in a park in Managua, and was transformed by the energy and spirit of a child.
At the same time, a civil war was taking place in El Salvador, and again, the civilian population was caught up in the conflict.
I've been covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 1981.
This is a moment from the beginning of the second intifada, in 2000, when it was still stones and Molotovs against an army.
In 2001, the uprising escalated into an armed conflict, and one of the major incidents was the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin.
Without the political will to find common ground, the continual friction of tactic and counter-tactic only creates suspicion and hatred and vengeance, and perpetuates the cycle of violence.
In the '90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia fractured along ethnic fault lines, and civil war broke out between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.
This is a scene of house-to-house fighting in Mostar, neighbor against neighbor.
A bedroom, the place where people share intimacy, where life itself is conceived, became a battlefield.
A mosque in northern Bosnia was destroyed by Serbian artillery and was used as a makeshift morgue.
Dead Serbian soldiers were collected after a battle and used as barter for the return of prisoners or Bosnian soldiers killed in action.
This was once a park.
The Bosnian soldier who guided me told me that all of his friends were there now.
At the same time in South Africa, after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, the black population commenced the final phase of liberation from apartheid.
One of the things I had to learn as a journalist was what to do with my anger.
I had to use it, channel its energy, turn it into something that would clarify my vision, instead of clouding it.
In Transkei, I witnessed a rite of passage into manhood, of the Xhosa tribe.
Teenage boys lived in isolation, their bodies covered with white clay.
After several weeks, they washed off the white and took on the full responsibilities of men.
It was a very old ritual that seemed symbolic of the political struggle that was changing the face of South Africa.
Children in Soweto playing on a trampoline.
Elsewhere in Africa there was famine.
In Somalia, the central government collapsed and clan warfare broke out.
Farmers were driven off their land, and crops and livestock were destroyed or stolen.
Starvation was being used as a weapon of mass destruction -- primitive but extremely effective.
Hundreds of thousands of people were exterminated, slowly and painfully.
The international community responded with massive humanitarian relief, and hundreds of thousands of more lives were saved.
American troops were sent to protect the relief shipments, but they were eventually drawn into the conflict, and after the tragic battle in Mogadishu, they were withdrawn.
In southern Sudan, another civil war saw similar use of starvation as a means of genocide.
Again, international NGOs, united under the umbrella of the U.N., staged a massive relief operation and thousands of lives were saved.
I'm a witness, and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored.
I also want it to be powerful and eloquent, and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people I'm photographing.
This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped.
He literally had nothing.
He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move.
He had not given up, and if he didn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope?
In 1994, after three months of covering the South African election, I saw the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, and it was the most uplifting thing I've ever seen.
It exemplified the best that humanity has to offer.
The next day I left for Rwanda, and it was like taking the express elevator to hell.
This man had just been liberated from a Hutu death camp.
He allowed me to photograph him for quite a long time, and he even turned his face toward the light, as if he wanted me to see him better.
I think he knew what the scars on his face would say to the rest of the world.
This time, maybe confused or discouraged by the military disaster in Somalia, the international community remained silent, and somewhere around 800,000 people were slaughtered by their own countrymen -- sometimes their own neighbors -- using farm implements as weapons.
Perhaps because a lesson had been learned by the weak response to the war in Bosnia and the failure in Rwanda, when Serbia attacked Kosovo, international action was taken much more decisively.
NATO forces went in, and the Serbian army withdrew.
Ethnic Albanians had been murdered, their farms destroyed and a huge number of people forcibly deported.
They were received in refugee camps set up by NGOs in Albania and Macedonia.
The imprint of a man who had been burned inside his own home.
The image reminded me of a cave painting, and echoed how primitive we still are in so many ways.
Between 1995 and '96, I covered the first two wars in Chechnya from inside Grozny.
This is a Chechen rebel on the front line against the Russian army.
The Russians bombarded Grozny constantly for weeks, killing mainly the civilians who were still trapped inside.
I found a boy from the local orphanage wandering around the front line.
My work has evolved from being concerned mainly with war to a focus on critical social issues as well.
After the fall of Ceausescu, I went to Romania and discovered a kind of gulag of children, where thousands of orphans were being kept in medieval conditions.
Ceausescu had imposed a quota on the number of children to be produced by each family, thereby making women's bodies an instrument of state economic policy.
Children who couldn't be supported by their families were raised in government orphanages.
Children with birth defects were labeled incurables, and confined for life to inhuman conditions.
As reports began to surface, again international aid went in.
Going deeper into the legacy of the Eastern European regimes, I worked for several months on a story about the effects of industrial pollution, where there had been no regard for the environment or the health of either workers or the general population.
An aluminum factory in Czechoslovakia was filled with carcinogenic smoke and dust, and four out of five workers came down with cancer.
After the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, I began to explore conditions of poverty in a country that was on its way towards modernization.
I spent a good deal of time with a man who lived with his family on a railway embankment and had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident.
When the story was published, unsolicited donations poured in.
A trust fund was established, and the family now lives in a house in the countryside and all their basic necessities are taken care of.
It was a story that wasn't trying to sell anything.
Journalism had provided a channel for people's natural sense of generosity, and the readers responded.
I met a band of homeless children who'd come to Jakarta from the countryside, and ended up living in a train station.
By the age of 12 or 14, they'd become beggars and drug addicts.
The rural poor had become the urban poor, and in the process, they'd become invisible.
These heroin addicts in detox in Pakistan reminded me of figures in a play by Beckett: isolated, waiting in the dark, but drawn to the light.
Agent Orange was a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to deny cover to the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army.
The active ingredient was dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical that was sprayed in vast quantities, and whose effects passed through the genes to the next generation.
In 2000, I began documenting global health issues, concentrating first on AIDS in Africa.
I tried to tell the story through the work of caregivers.
I thought it was important to emphasize that people were being helped, whether by international NGOs or by local grassroots organizations.
So many children have been orphaned by the epidemic that grandmothers have taken the place of parents, and a lot of children had been born with HIV.
A hospital in Zambia.
I began documenting the close connection between HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.
This is an MSF hospital in Cambodia.
My pictures can play a supporting role to the work of NGOs by shedding light on the critical social problems they're trying to deal with.
I went to Congo with MSF, and contributed to a book and an exhibition that focused attention on a forgotten war in which millions of people have died, and exposure to disease without treatment is used as a weapon.
A malnourished child being measured as part of the supplemental feeding program.
In the fall of 2004 I went to Darfur.
This time I was on assignment for a magazine, but again worked closely with MSF.
The international community still hasn't found a way to create the pressure necessary to stop this genocide.
An MSF hospital in a camp for displaced people.
I've been working on a long project on crime and punishment in America.
This is a scene from New Orleans.
A prisoner on a chain gang in Alabama was punished by being handcuffed to a post in the midday sun.
This experience raised a lot of questions, among them questions about race and equality and for whom in our country opportunities and options are available.
In the yard of a chain gang in Alabama.
I didn't see either of the planes hit, and when I glanced out my window, I saw the first tower burning, and I thought it might have been an accident.
A few minutes later when I looked again and saw the second tower burning, I knew we cgeorge@example.com.
In the midst of the wreckage at Ground Zero, I had a realization.
I'd been photographing in the Islamic world since 1981 -- not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia and Europe.
At the time I was photographing in these different places, I thought I was covering separate stories, but on 9/11 history crystallized, and I understood I'd actually been covering a single story for more than 20 years, and the attack on New York was its latest manifestation.
The central commercial district of Kabul, Afghanistan at the end of the civil war, shortly before the city fell to the Taliban.
Land mine victims being helped at the Red Cross rehab center being run by Alberto Cairo.
A boy who lost a leg to a leftover mine.
I'd witnessed immense suffering in the Islamic world from political oppression, civil war, foreign invasions, poverty, famine.
I understood that in its suffering, the Islamic world had been crying out.
Why weren't we listening?
A Taliban fighter shot during a battle as the Northern Alliance entered the city of Kunduz.
When war with Iraq was imminent, I realized the American troops would be very well covered, so I decided to cover the invasion from inside Baghdad.
A marketplace was hit by a mortar shell that killed several members of a single family.
A day after American forces entered Baghdad, a company of Marines began rounding up bank robbers and were cheered on by the crowds -- a hopeful moment that was short lived.
For the first time in years, Shi'ites were allowed to make the pilgrimage to Karbala to observe Ashura, and I was amazed by the sheer number of people and how fervently they practiced their religion.
A group of men march through the streets cutting themselves with knives.
It was obvious that the Shi'ites were a force to be reckoned with, and we would do well to understand them and learn how to deal with them.
Last year I spent several months documenting our wounded troops, from the battlefield in Iraq all the way home.
This is a helicopter medic giving CPR to a soldier who had been shot in the head.
Military medicine has become so efficient that the percentage of troops who survive after being wounded is much higher in this war than in any other war in our history.
The signature weapon of the war is the IED, and the signature wound is severe leg damage.
After enduring extreme pain and trauma, the wounded face a grueling physical and psychological struggle in rehab.
The spirit they displayed was absolutely remarkable.
I tried to imagine myself in their place, and I was totally humbled by their courage and determination in the face of such catastrophic loss.
Good people had been put in a very bad situation for questionable results.
One day in rehab someone, started talking about surfing and all these guys who'd never surfed before said, "Hey, let's go."
And they went surfing.
Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what's going on.
Sometimes they put their lives on the line, because they believe your opinions and your influence matter.
They aim their pictures at your best instincts, generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.
My TED wish: there's a vital story that needs to be told, and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)