Marty Kaplan

The reason that our financial system isn't going to crash and burn again, the reason that taxpayers won't have to fork over another trillion dollars of no-strings-attached bailout money, is -- well, I forget.

I haven't forgotten the reason, because there isn't any. What I've forgotten is that there is no reason it can't happen again. I've forgotten the bipartisan sliminess that enabled this catastrophe, like the demolition of the Glass-Steagall wall between banking and stock speculation. I've forgotten the battalions of Wall Street lobbyists armed with limitless campaign cash that decimated Dodd-Frank's attempt to regulate derivatives. I've forgotten the obscene bonuses, underwritten by our rescue money, that plutocrats have kept on awarding themselves to celebrate escaping accountability.

I know: I haven't really forgotten them. In fact, I'm enthralled and repulsed by accounts of what went wrong, from the terrific three-part "Money, Power and Wall Street" documentary that Frontline just aired, to books by Michael Lewis, Simon Johnson, William D. Cohan and other chroniclers of greed, criminality and a political system addicted to legalized graft.

But if more people were paying even a modicum of attention to the past, the economic debate in the 2012 presidential campaign wouldn't be between one political party beholden to big money that dreamily depicts investment bankers and oligarchs as jobs creators, and another political party, also beholden to big money, that wants applause for fixing the problem. If more people remembered which policies worked and which failed during the Depression -- as Paul Krugman documents in his new book End This Depression Now! -- then the jobs debate in this election wouldn't be about austerity and deficits, it would be about stimulating short-term demand and making long-term investments in education, research and infrastructure.

Total recall is a total buzz killer. Take Instagram, a photo-sharing startup that has yet to make a penny, but was just bought for a festive billion dollars by Facebook, which in turn is being valued at $100 billion. Hello? Dot-com bubble burst of 2000? Tulip sector -- I mean, tech sector valuations like these, larger than many nations' GDP, don't derive from companies' cash flows or their assets and liabilities. They're a function of expectations, of the wisdom and the madness of crowds. The worth of your pension fund is about to depend on the forgetfulness of the stock market, which is actually a pretty good example of a senior moment.

Johanna Blakley

I'm really proud to be on the board of advisers for TEDxUSC, the site of the first TEDx in the world (there have been about 4,000 of them since). Videos from this year's event are just starting to trickle out: Doug Thomas, from the USC Annenberg School, gave a stand-out talk about the ways in which the academy can quash creativity in the classroom and fail to tap into the passionate interests of the students.

His talk resonated because of the Lear Center's involvement in a broad, university-wide initiative at USC to promote Creativity & Collaboration in the Academy. It's easy to claim that we want to be innovative and to think out of the box, but interdisciplinary work is incredibly hard in institutions defined by disciplinary boundaries, and working in groups to solve complex problems can be more time-consuming and frustrating than working quietly on your own on a topic that safely falls within your realm of expertise. Students who are trained to memorize information by educators who teach to the test aren't exactly being prepared for the messy world outside the academy, where most jobs require teamwork of some kind, and the problems that need to be solved don't fit conveniently in any single knowledge silo.

Pro-skateboarder and entrepreneur Rodney Mullen gave a wonderfully humble talk that clearly addressed this year's theme: spheres of influence. He compared the skateboarder community to software hackers: both groups regard themselves as outsiders, often operating on the fringes of the law (Rodney mentioned what a trip it was to be in a building on USC's campus -- he was always outside, or being escorted off). Their creativity and their drive to innovate are driven primarily by their commitment to a fiercely loyal (and competitive) peer group that feeds off each other's exploits. Group members are relentless in their effort to make their mark, to be even more daring than the last daredevil. Although it may seem like a battle of egos, both communities have an underlying open-source sensibility, where sharing knowledge is essential to membership in the group and the possibility of innovating within it.

Without question, the most galvanizing performer this year was the ridiculously talented Reggie Watts. A musician, singer and stand-up comic, Watts never sings the same song or uses a set routine. His clever, poetic riffs on the talks and the theme of the event, which I can't even imagine paraphrasing, helped knit together the entire event for me. And while I'm a huge fan of the carefully choreographed TED talk, it was a welcome relief to be wowed by the free-flowing freshness of a skilled improviser. It made me wonder how all of us might find a better way to balance the two in our own lives and work: as a teacher, for instance, how can you respond to the vagaries of interest and desire in a classroom, and still communicate, in a precise way, the essential methodologies and hard-earned knowledge that are worth transmitting across generations? How do you make an experience fun and substantial? We should all try to get better at it.