TED Talks Daily - News tells you what happened. Drawing shows you how it felt | George Butler

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

What does a war look like when you sit still long enough to draw it? Reportage artist and TED Fellow George Butler sketches the people that the news passes by: a 99-year-old survivor of the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, a man gathering books blasted into a rose garden, an architect whose home was hit by a Russian missile. Urging us to slow down in the age of immediate news, Butler shows how a drawing reveals what a headline can't. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Every day, all day, images of war flash across our screens. Blown open buildings, scattered lives, rubble where a home used to be. It's constant. And if I'm honest, there are nights it leaves me feeling numb or helpless, or mainly just wanting to look away. Maybe you know the feeling. For reportage artist and Ted fellow George Butler, it's different.

He spent two decades in places like Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza, doing something that runs counter to that rush of images. He sits down, and slowly he draws. The news can tell us what happened, but the drawing can show us how it felt. You may remember George from a conversation we shared last year with Ted Fellows program director, Lily James Olds. He talked about his medium, ink on paper in the middle of conflict zones.

For magazines and newspapers, has allowed him to go deeper than the headlines. This time, he brought that work to the TED stage. In his talk, George shares the stories of the people he's met in places under bombardment, and he makes a quiet case for a different way of paying attention, to witness these stories rather than just consume them, to slow down and to hold on to our connection to one another. I believe the news is failing us.

It promotes destruction before humanity. Drawing, he says, is almost an excuse. What it really buys him is time. Time to sit with one person long enough to hear their story. And the people you'll hear about in this talk, found in the rubble, in hospital beds, at the very edges of catastrophe are impossible to forget. The talk is coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day.

A couple of years ago, I stood on the streets in eastern Ukraine, in Kramatorsk, in the aftermath of a Russian cruise missile strike on a residential apartment building. I remember the front of the building was blown off. You could see a living room and a kitchen inside, belongings burnt, scattered on the floor, mixed in with the rubble. There were some weapons inspectors on one side,

an excavator in the middle, and of course in amongst it all, the journalists were there trying to interview those involved. One lady in particular, had soot on her face. It was very moving to watch. She gathered her belongings from the rubble

and she put them on the floor and she sat on them for safekeeping. These are the sorts of scenes that are broadcast around the world every night. I found them to be so moving and let me tell you, the destruction is truly captivating. But around the back of the same building,

I found a library of books had been blasted into a rose garden, and in amongst the thorns and the roses stood Petro, age 70. On his morning walk, he couldn't go any further. He felt it was his duty to stop, pick up the books, stack them in neat little piles. And as I drew him, he challenged me, and he said, I was bought up,

that if I see a loaf of bread on the floor, I'll pick it up. It's the same with books. They are food for the soul. I've drawn mass graves in Ukraine, a cesarian in Afghanistan, and the war in Syria. And over two decades, I've had one realization over and over that there are many truths to war. But on that morning in Kramatosk, in Ukraine, it was so stark. It was Petro that captured my heart, this gentle soul standing amidst atrocity. This is what I do.

I draw for magazines and newspapers in ink on location, and over weeks and weeks in Ukraine, it became my mission to be slow, to delve deeper. And I found that the news can tell us what happened, but the drawing can show us how it felt. In Kiev, I met Madame Olga, age 99. She was too old to get out of her bed when the air raid sirens rang. I remember she had a Bible tucked under her pillow.

She was very muddled. She was confusing Putin and Hitler, and she held the translator's hands about six inches from her face. And in this moment of wonderful clarity, she said, if you be quiet, I will tell you the story from the beginning. She was born in 1923. She was taken to a collective farm with her father. she survived the Holodomor, the great famine, which killed four million Ukrainians.

When World War II started, she worked as a slave for a Nazi family. She recounted this story about one time they fed her worms. She ran away on another occasion to the police station, but the policeman returned her straight back to the house. When the war ended, she began to walk home to Ukraine. She met her husband on the way, future husband, I should say, they got married, she had four children, she lived another 80 years. If it hadn't been for the process of drawing, I wouldn't have shared this moment with Olga,

and I wouldn't be able to share it with you. She died a couple of months after we met, peacefully in her sleep before her 100th birthday. I believe the news is failing us. It promotes destruction before humanity. It's polarizing and fatiguing. It gives the illusion of certainty. You might feel helpless or hopeless. We'd certainly be forgiven for turning it off.

My antidote is to wander the streets and stand on corners. I work with local translators and fixes to interview the unsung and the understated, like Oleg, a 23-year-old mixed martial arts fighter and football fan from Ukraine. He joined the military to fight the Russians with his football friends. But on this day, I drew him being served borsh by his mother, Lisa, the English teacher from that town.

And he posed for me with his Kalashnikov, but also, more unusually, with his guinea pig, almond. And throughout the sitting, he whispered to Almond affectionately, you are a big pig. You are a big pig. It's people like Sergei that remind me that these stories are continuing as I stand in front of you. Perhaps the most ordinary of them all,

a architect whose house fell on his head when it was hit by a Russian missile. And I met him in the hospital, bandage wrapped around his head. I said, I asked if I could draw him, and the nurse translated, and he looked at me down his nose, and he grinned from ear to ear, said, yes, but I will also draw you.

And a date, very formally, a date was arranged for the next day, and I came back and we sat in one of the wardrooms. The windows are still cellotaped up in case there was an explosion. And we sat and we drew each other. We didn't share any common language. He was, we were both shy about our drawings, like all good artists. He blamed his tools for the quality of his picture. and he'd probably be secretly proud to know that I was showing you this.

Hey, y'all, Elise here. Up on the screen behind George, we see two drawings. On the left, Sergei's drawing of George. He's looking down at what we can imagine is his drawing pad. On the right, George's drawing of Sergey. He's standing, slightly angled, and looking towards George or us. His face has the most detail, including a thick mustache, and he's wearing a hat, an overcoat, and leaning.

on a king. Sergei, this is your story. Of course, these are only four stories from Ukraine. But over the years in Syria and Tajikistan, Gaza and Iraq, I have met and drawn hundreds of other people. But why in the age of immediate news do you need to know about Alman the Guinea Pig, or Sergei the architect, or Olga the great-great-grandmother?

grandmother, or Hamdo, Lisa, Dimitri, well, perhaps it's obvious. I believe they could so easily have been one of us. They are the true consequences of war. And I tell you, I share them with you tonight because they are ordinary people who had terror poured on their lives and resisted it with their hearts. I would, uh, I'd like to

I finish with a confession, more of an admission, if you like, but a difficult one for artists, I think, to admit. As it turns out, it isn't really about the painting at all. That's just an excuse to sit a little longer, to give time. We've heard about listening accurately today. This is about observing, seeing properly. Drawing is the only way I know how to do that, But today I invite you, more than that, actually, if I'm allowed, I urge you to witness these

stories and not consume them, to be deliberately slow and to cherish human connection. Thank you for listening. That was George Butler at TED-20206. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team,

Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzika Sung-Marnivom. Additional support from Daniela Ballerazo, Christopher Faisi Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban-Ban-Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey-Lott. Learn more at podcasts.com. I am Elise Hu.

Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow. with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.