James Kennicott’s life advice for his granddaughter: “Just roll with it.” The two recorded an interview using the StoryCorps app while sitting in an Applebee’s parking lot. StoryCorps’ Dave Isay, the winner of the 2015 TED Prize, wants hundreds of thousands to interview a grandparent over Thanksgiving weekend. Photo: Courtesy of StoryCorps

When James Kennicott, now 86, was young, he loved ice-skating on the river near his home in Waterloo, Iowa. One day, the ice cracked under his feet and he plunged into the water below. He didn’t have hot water at home. So he broke into his school to take a hot shower.

“I think that says a lot about his childhood, that there was really no one there to help him get out of the water or keep him warm,” says his granddaughter Kara Masteller, 21.

Kara heard this story for the first time when she used the StoryCorps app — launched by StoryCorps founder Dave Isay with the 2015 TED Prize — to interview her grandfather. Because James didn’t want to talk at the senior community where he lives, the two drove to a local mall and recorded their interview while sitting in an Applebee’s parking lot. NPR highlighted their interview on Friday’s Morning Edition — the first interview recorded on the app to be broadcast in the weekly StoryCorps segment.

The interview serves an appetizer for the Great Thanksgiving Listen, StoryCorps’ mass movement to record the stories of a generation of elders over the coming holiday weekend. StoryCorps hopes that as many as 250,000 people will participate and ask a grandparent or family friend questions to unlock their experience.

On Google today, these words appear underneath the search bar: “Grandparents have the best stories. Record your grandparents’ story this Thanksgiving.” The thought links to an animation about the Great Thanksgiving Listen narrated by David Hyde Pierce of Frasier. “We can find wisdom and poetry all around us,” he says. “Help us make history.”

A new TED-Ed lesson released today also shows how taking part in the Great Thanksgiving Listen will add a fresh, first-person dimension to what exists in history books.

“What if Anne Frank hadn’t kept a diary? What if no one could listen to Martin Luther King’s Mountaintop speech?” the lesson asks. “You can make history by recording it.”

Everyone is invited to participate in the Great Thanksgiving Listen. Download the StoryCorps app, choose your questions and follow the prompts. Then upload your interview at the Library of Congress, using the hashtag #TheGreatListen.

A Ford Fiesta becomes a squatting Transformer in this new sculpture by Hetain Patel. Photo: Hetain Patel

Hetain Patel: Who am I? Think again Today’s talk isn’t so much a “talk” as a hilarious topsy-turvy performance by Hetain Patel that reflects on an identity forged as much from Spider-Man comics and Bruce Lee movies as by a father who emigrated from India to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. An excerpt from his latest stage work, Be Like Water, this talk introduces us to Patel’s art, which looks at identity as a game of imitation.

As his talk goes live, Patel has just unveiled a brand new work, his very first sculpture. For it, Patel converted an old Ford Fiesta — his first car — into a squatting Transformer. This was a huge undertaking for Patel, made especially meaningful because he was only able to do it with the help of his father, who works in hearse construction. Patel’s father has been a prime source of inspiration for his art over the years. (See Patel grow a mustache like the one his father sported in the 1960s.)

Below, Patel tells us all about this very cool piece.

My first car was a 1988 Ford Fiesta gifted to me by my father as I turned 17. Born in the U.K. to immigrant Indian parents, the passing of a car between generations provided me with my first taste of independence. In this new work, I’ve reworked a newly acquired 1988 Ford Fiesta, of the same specifications as my original car, to create my first sculpture. Manufactured in England, this car stands as a symbol of working class Britain — a native body, albeit a metal one.

This car was Hetain Patel’s first, a gift from his father. Notice that the license plate almost reads ‘family.’ Photo: Hetain Patel

Another significant influence for this work: Transformers, an American film and toy franchise since 1984, and a widely recognisable pop culture reference that reaches far back in my memory. In this new sculpture, Transformers have been made manifest, physically, in a literal transformation of a car into a large-scale, squatting, human-like figure. For me, these ‘robots in disguise’ (as per the cartoon’s theme song) stand as a metaphor for the other, in a fantasy world where they can transform out of a marginal position into one of empowerment.

I created this sculpture together with my father, with additional help from my engineer brother and fellow Transformers enthusiast, Pritum Patel. My father, whose day job is to convert cars into hearses and limousines for funerals, has carried out all the fabrication and structural work with me. This work is the third in an ongoing collaboration between us. (Other works are: the video “To Dance Like Your Dad,” 2009, and the live performance “Me and me Dad and me Wife,” 2012, both presented in 2012 at the Tanks at Tate Modern.)

Unlike the popular toys and films, however, the car here is not a high-powered sports car or truck transformed into a powerful warrior, but rather a small, inexpensive Ford Fiesta transformed into a human, calmly squatting. This posture is a recurring image in my work and forges a link between the lower classes in India and my immigrant family in the U.K., both of whom sit comfortably this way. Naturally this introduces a tension in this sculpture between the seemingly submissive nature of the squat and, in this case, its oddly larger than life scale.

As an artist who is most often the main protagonist in my work, this sculpture is the first time that my representation of the body is not immediately visibly linked to my ethnicity. The material and aesthetic of the work lend themselves to wider interpretations and contradictions around identity, exploring the increasingly murky ground between reality and fantasy, fixed identity and transformation.

Hetain Patel, his father, and the Fiesta Transformer. Photo: Hetain Patel

I first had the idea for this Fiesta Transformer in May, but no idea how to finance it. Normally, it could take a year or two to do something like this. But then came TED Global 2013 in June … and, lucky for me, I was able to have lots of amazing conversations that week with some incredible people. One such person was Asha Jadeja. Her brilliant organization, the Rajeev Motwani Foundation, invests in and develops new learning and education technologies for children.

Asha and I quickly bonded over our common personal interests in parent-child relationships and the influence of migration and globalisation on this. Our dialogue continued beyond the conference, and led to her generous support in the realisation of this dream project – my first sculpture, created in collaboration with my father. From idea to exhibition in less than six months: that’s unheard of for me! I’ve literally just gotten back from France, having installed it in the Galleria Continua. It will be on display there until December 22.

As the project went on, this family endeavor grew, as even my brother got involved. As you’ll see, even the number plate on the car is perfect, almost spelling out ‘family.’ That’s the original, untouched number plate of the car.

Watch an amazing timelapse of the making of this Transformer:

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Inspired by Helen Fisher’s classic TED Talk, “The brain in love,” we invited three speakers with big ideas on relationships, sex and family to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a program to tackle timely topics. Love was certainly in the air.

After a screening of the incredibly sweet office-romance film “Post-It Love,” Christian Rudder stepped to the stage. The co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid, Rudder set out to parse some of the data pouring into the site at all times from its users. For example, Rudder shared that when a man on the site writes a woman without any previous interaction, he has a 25% chance of getting a response from her. Meanwhile, women cold-writing men through the site have a 40% chance of a reply. Rudder shared another interesting tidbit — that half of responses are sent to a message are sent with seven hours. As Rudder put it to a big laugh, “Seven hours is basically the half-life of your hopes and dreams.”

But Rudder shared an inspiring bit of news. Every day, 500 people deactivate their OKCupid profiles because they met someone through the site. “All it takes is one,” says Rudder. This sentiment was echoed in the ahhhh-worthy Google video, “Parisian Love,” which tells a moving love story via search.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and the new book The Secrets of Happy Families, stepped up next to share the surprising thing that has revolutionized his family life: agile programming. A method of software development, agile breaks down large projects into small, do-able bits — allowing people throughout the process to give feedback as they go. Agile was developed in opposition to the “waterfall method,” where people in charge determine the flow of the project and people inside the process have no input.

Applying this to a family means creating detailed daily checklists. “You can’t underestimate the power of making a checkmark,” says Feiler. “It works in offices and it works with kids.” Agile in the home also involves having weekly meetings to talk about what went well over the course of seven days and what needs improvement. And Feiler reveals a surprising fact about his twin 8-year-olds: that they’re able to pick their own punishments and they generally give themselves harsher ones than their parents would have picked.

Finally, we heard from Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, who spoke about keeping passion in long-term relationships now that human beings “live twice as long” as we used to. Perel nailed the basic challenge of modern relationships — that, on the one hand, they must satisfy our deep-seated need for security, dependability and permanence while at the same time meeting our equally strong need for adventure, mystery and the unexpected.

“Can we want what we already have?” Perel asked. The answer is yes. But because Perel sees desire as the space between the self and the other, she reveals that this can be achieved in some counter-intuitive ways — in part by being more selfish and savoring moments of absence. Her thoughts were truly surprising and inspiring.

Stay tuned for these great talks on TED.com and the TED Blog in the upcoming weeks. And a special thanks to Built It Green, who donated the wood for the beautiful backdrop you see in these images.

Photos by Cloe Shasha