Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas Loren Friedman (born July 20, 1953, in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American journalist and author. He became the foreign-affairs columnist for The New York Times in January 1995. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, for international reporting in 1983 and 1988 and for commentary in 2002.

Friedman received a B.A. in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975, after semesters at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the American University in Cairo, and an M.Phil. in modern Middle East studies from the University of Oxford in 1978 as a Marshall Scholar. He worked in the London bureau of United Press International and from 1979 to 1981 was a correspondent in Beirut. The Times hired him in May 1981 as a business reporter covering OPEC and oil; in April 1982 he was appointed Beirut bureau chief, a post he took up six weeks before Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and from June 1984 to February 1988 he was the paper's bureau chief in Jerusalem. He shared the 1983 international-reporting Pulitzer for his coverage of the invasion of Lebanon, and the 1988 prize was awarded for his "balanced and informed coverage of Israel."

From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), drawn from that reporting, won the National Book Award for nonfiction. In 1999 he published The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, and in April 2005 The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, which won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He later published Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, extending his columns on energy, global warming, and alternative energy.

After the September 11 attacks, a 2003 Guardian profile described him as a "liberal hawk" who supported American military action in Afghanistan and in the Iraq War, while urging President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologize for hyping intelligence. His flat-world account of globalization drew a data-based rebuttal from the economist Pankaj Ghemawat, who wrote that more than 90 percent of phone calls, web traffic, and investment remained local and that cross-border integration was far thinner than that account implied.

Early life and education

Family and St. Louis Park

Thomas Loren Friedman was born on July 20, 1953, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in the adjoining suburb of St. Louis Park. The St. Louis Park Historical Society places the family home at 6831 West 23rd Street. His parents were Harold and Margaret Friedman. During the Depression, Margaret left the University of Minnesota to work as a clerk and help support her family; she later served in the United States Navy WAVES in World War II. She and Harold raised their family in St. Louis Park. Harold died in 1973.

Friedman graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1971. The 1971 yearbook lists him as business manager of the student newspaper, The Echo, in 1969–70 and on its staff in 1970–71, and as a golf-team member throughout high school. He later said he had captained that team and, in 1970, caddied for Chi-Chi Rodríguez at the U.S. Open.

In a 2001 column he traced his reporting to one course: introduction to journalism, taught in 1969 in Room 313 by Hattie M. Steinberg, who also supervised The Echo. He wrote that he never took another journalism class. Steinberg, he recalled, drilled leads, accurate quotation, and professional conduct, and had The New York Times delivered to the room each morning. In eleventh grade she judged his writing short of a reporting assignment and made him business manager, selling ads; the one story she allowed that year was a brief interview with the Israeli general Ariel Sharon, then lecturing at the University of Minnesota, which Friedman called his first published article. Steinberg died on July 31, 2000.

A 1968 family trip to Israel, to visit an older sister studying at Tel Aviv University, is the episode that reference biographies identify as the start of his interest in the Middle East. He later said the visit swept him off his feet and that he spent later high-school summers on a kibbutz.

University and the Marshall Scholarship

Friedman started at the University of Minnesota. In a 2015 talk at Brandeis he said he spent his sophomore year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and transferred to Brandeis University in the fall of 1973. He told a campus interviewer that a friend of an older sister had liked Brandeis and that he wanted somewhere to study the Middle East. He majored in Mediterranean studies, with a focus on Arabic and the region, wrote a few pieces for the student paper The Justice, and took no journalism courses there. Encyclopaedia Britannica records the 1975 bachelor's degree as including a semester at Hebrew University and another at the American University in Cairo—a shorter Jerusalem stay than the sophomore year he described. Biographies issued for his public appearances say he graduated summa cum laude.

He then held a 1975 Marshall Scholarship at St Antony's College, Oxford. Those appearance biographies say that in 1978 he received an M.Phil. in modern Middle East studies. The college's own 2006 record uses both titles: the warden's letter calls the degree an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies and describes it as the launching pad of his journalism, while the Middle East Centre's note says he completed the B.Phil. in that subject in 1978, the year he was later elected an honorary fellow.

In 1975, he later recalled, a London headline about Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger prompted a column that The Des Moines Register published for $50. After Harold's death, Margaret moved to England during her son's Oxford studies—he called it "a very big idea" for a woman in her late fifties—became a senior life master at bridge, and returned to Minnesota in the late 1970s. She died of pneumonia in Minnetonka on April 6, 2008, at 89.

Reporting career

United Press International

Thomas L. Friedman began daily journalism in the summer of 1978 as a general-assignment reporter in the London bureau of United Press International. A New York Times biography says he spent about a year there before the agency sent him to Beirut in 1979, and that he lived in the city from June 1979 to May 1981 while covering the Lebanese Civil War and other regional stories, from the 1980 coup in Turkey to the Iran–Iraq War.

On February 2, 1981, UPI named him chief correspondent for the Middle East. The announcement described a 27-year-old already based in Beirut for 18 months and fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, who had joined the London bureau in 1978 after degrees from Brandeis University and St Antony’s College, Oxford, and who was runner-up for the 1980 Bernard J. Cabanes award for a series on the Persian Gulf. He later said the wire job meant filing a breaking story, a radio spot, and a picture while taking cover, and called it “the best journalism school there is.” He left UPI for The New York Times in May 1981.

Beirut and Jerusalem

A. M. Rosenthal hired him that month. Until April 1982 he was a general-assignment business reporter in New York, specializing in OPEC and oil after the Iranian revolution. In April 1982 he was appointed Beirut bureau chief and took up the post about six weeks before the 1982 Lebanon War.

For the next 26 months he covered the departure of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the bombing of the U.S. embassy, the Marine barracks bombings, a split in the PLO, and Israel’s withdrawal from the city. On September 26, 1982, the paper led with his reconstruction, “The Beirut Massacre: The Four Days.” David Zucchino, then in Beirut for The Philadelphia Inquirer, later told The New Yorker that colleagues sometimes called Friedman “Little Tommy,” a “boy wonder” who treated even meals as work. Friedman told that profile he pursued the massacre “not for news reasons but for Jewish reasons,” because he regarded it as “a real blot on my people’s history.”

The 1983 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting went to Friedman and Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post “for their individual reporting of the Israeli invasion of Beirut and its tragic aftermath.” The 1982 George Polk Awards gave the foreign-reporting prize to Friedman and Times colleague David K. Shipler for coverage of the same invasion.

In June 1984 the paper moved him to Jerusalem as its Israel bureau chief, a post he held until February 1988. The 1988 Pulitzer for International Reporting cited “balanced and informed coverage of Israel.” He later recalled that his wife, hearing of the prize, asked whether it was for commentary; he was still a reporter, he said, “but I was very opinionated.” In his own account, Israel was relatively quiet while the First Intifada was forming in the West Bank and Gaza and erupted at the end of the tour. A leave from February 1988 to January 1989 preceded the move to Washington.

Washington bureau and the column

From January 1989 to November 1992 he was chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C., an assignment built around Secretary of State James Baker. Stories under his byline included the U.S. reaction as the Berlin Wall opened, the Bush administration’s “measured response” after Tiananmen Square, and Baker’s argument, in the crisis that became the Gulf War, that American jobs were at stake in the Gulf. He has described the years as more than 500,000 miles of travel and “a front-row seat” for the end of the Cold War, the Gulf War, and the aftermath of Tiananmen.

A 2008 New Yorker profile says that after the State Department beat he was chief White House correspondent for the first year of the Bill Clinton administration, and that he was “not built” for the nightly race to match The Washington Post’s front page. A Times biography dates the White House assignment from November 1992 and lists him as chief economic correspondent from January 1994, while also extending the White House title through December 1994. The profile reports that in April 1993 Strobe Talbott left a foreign-affairs column at Time for the State Department and Friedman was offered the vacancy. He declined, then spoke with publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who did not promise a column but told him he needed economic training and should “stretch.” As an international economics correspondent he covered the Treasury, trade agreements, and what was beginning to be called globalization.

He became the paper’s foreign-affairs columnist on the Op-Ed page in January 1995. Encyclopaedia Britannica says he announced that he would concentrate on Asia, where he expected the deepest changes, while also writing about Russia, Mexico, and the Middle East. He later said that mix, including a column asking whether Microsoft had a foreign policy, surprised readers who still treated foreign policy as Europe and arms control. By the time of the 2008 profile, a colleague described the column as running twice a week.

Books

Thomas L. Friedman's books, published in the United States primarily by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, turn his reporting and columns into longer arguments about the Middle East, globalization, technology, energy, and American competitiveness. A 2008 New York Times survey noted that The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) had been translated into 27 languages and that The World Is Flat (2005) had sold more than two million copies. A Times review of his 2016 book described a string of best-selling works on globalization and climate change.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989) recounts Friedman's reporting from Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and then from Jerusalem through the early First Intifada. The 525-page Farrar, Straus and Giroux volume sets street scenes from Lebanon—car bombs, militias, the 1982 Israeli invasion—beside a reading of Israel after 1967. Leading the New York Times Book Review, Roger Rosenblatt called it "the most intelligent and comprehensive account one is likely to read" of those years, "a story of how the past cripples the present and confounds the future." He highlighted the book's statement of Israel's post-1967 bind: Jewish, democratic, and sovereign over all the land it held, the state could not, on Friedman's argument, be all three, and its major parties had avoided choosing.

Time called the book a "crowded, fascinating memoir" and tied it to reporting for which Friedman had already received two Pulitzer Prizes. It won the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction. The Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award, for the best nonfiction book on international affairs, called the same volume an "extraordinary book."

Globalization, technology, and the environment

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999) treated globalization as the system that replaced the Cold War. The Times described the 394-page book as a "spirited and imaginative exploration" of integrated markets, with the Lexus as modern prosperity and the olive tree as rooted identity—a contrast, the review said, that the book never fully reconciled. Friedman wrote of an "Electronic Herd" of investors and a "Golden Straitjacket" of policies required to attract them. In Foreign Affairs, Barry Eichengreen praised its "economic common sense" and noted the "Golden Arches" claim that no two countries with a McDonald's had gone to war, while criticizing technological determinism and a thin treatment of inequality and security. Benjamin M. Friedman, in The New York Review of Books, called the view triumphalist and doubted that lenders had learned lasting lessons from the Asian financial crisis. The book received the Cornelius Ryan Award for 1999.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) argued that software, cheap connectivity, outsourcing, and supply chains had leveled competition, so knowledge work could be split and moved—to India and China, among other places—and individuals anywhere could compete with workers in the United States. On 21 November 2005 it won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and its £30,000 prize; Lloyd Blankfein said Friedman had named the era's central economic theme and given it a vocabulary. A Financial Times review later quoted on the award site was cooler, calling the book "a bad, good book, one whose vices are the mirror image of its virtues."

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America (2008) added climate stress and a larger consuming population to the "flat" thesis. Stephen Kotkin, in the Times, described the proposed green revolution as both a security project and an industrial one, with the United States raising the cost of fossil fuels so cleaner technologies could scale. David G. Victor read it as a call for a new "Sputnik moment," stronger on diagnosis than on remedies, including the assumption that wind and solar were the main way out. Kirkus Reviews summarized the stakes as tighter energy supplies, faster extinctions, energy poverty, and stronger petro-dictatorships.

Later books

Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002) collected columns from around the September 11 attacks with an unpublished "analytical diary" of reporting trips. Kirkus called it sharply pointed and "essential reading" on the war on terrorism, and controversial: Friedman rejected the claim that the United States had "had it coming," while criticizing how the Bush administration explained American aims.

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (2011), written with the Johns Hopkins political scientist Michael Mandelbaum, held that American influence abroad required domestic renewal. Walter Russell Mead's Times review cast their program—education, infrastructure, and energy investment, with tighter public finances—as a Hamiltonian case for an active, pro-market national government, addressed to both parties. Peter Preston, in The Guardian, found the diagnosis "fascinating" and "chilling" and the recovery plan an "almighty ask" unlikely to be met. Kirkus called the problems real but the book unoriginal and disappointing.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (2016) grouped the same themes under three accelerating forces: technology, markets, and climate. John Micklethwait's Times review called Friedman an "explanatory journalist," found the diagnosis of why life felt out of control more convincing than the reassurance that adaptation was still possible, and judged the book "very hard to beat" as a guide for perplexed Western readers. Kirkus dated a technological break to 2007 and called the "age of accelerations" required reading for a generation "asked to dance in a hurricane."

Ideas on globalization and conflict

Theories of economic interdependence

In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman argued that globalization had replaced the Cold War as the international system: an integration of markets, states, and information technology that let people and countries reach farther and faster, and that also produced a backlash from those left behind. The title, a New Yorker review noted, set global prosperity—the Lexus—against local history and identity, the olive tree.

His best-known claim about how integration might restrain war was the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, from a December 1996 column. He wrote that no two countries that both had a McDonald's had fought a war against each other, treating the chain as a sign that a country had a middle class large enough, and enough at stake, that its people preferred to “wait in line for burgers.” He said he was speaking tongue in cheek. In the same column, Francis Fukuyama said that income level was too low to mark a real tipping point, and that he would not be surprised if several such countries went to war within ten years.

Friedman paired the claim with a warning about actors the system empowered. In a March 1999 New York Times Magazine essay drawn from the book, he described balances among states, an “electronic herd” of investors, and “super-empowered individuals,” who could reach markets and governments directly because barriers had fallen and the world was networked. His example was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire with his own network, at whom the United States had fired cruise missiles “as though he were another nation-state.” A review of the book cast that figure as Friedman’s “Super-Empowered Angry Man”: hostile to globalization, but able to use its wealth and technology.

Later wars were used, by him and by critics, as tests. When NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo put countries with McDonald's outlets on opposite sides, Friedman argued that the ending confirmed the rule: Belgrade, he wrote, wanted its place in the global economy—and its restaurants reopened—more than it wanted Kosovo, so the exception “only proves how powerful is the rule.” Fact-checkers have since listed other conflicts, including the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan and the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, as cases in which countries with the chain did fight. In September 2008 The Guardian wrote that the war between Russia and Georgia had “finally blown this theory out of the water.” Friedman’s column on the fighting did not revisit the arches claim. He blamed Vladimir Putin for what he called brutish stupidity, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili for recklessness, and American administrations for a NATO expansion he had long opposed.

The flat-world thesis

The World Is Flat (2005) shifted the account toward technology and production. As John Gray summarized it, Friedman divided globalization into phases led by states, then companies, then individuals, with a fiber-optic network as the technology of the latest phase. Gray traced the metaphor to Infosys chief executive Nandan Nilekani, who told Friedman the playing field was being leveled. In a Wired interview Friedman grouped the change into ten forces, among them the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape offering and the fiber-optic build-out, open-source collaboration, outsourcing of service work, often to India, the shift of manufacturing to China, supply chains, and wireless and search tools that let work move to wherever it could be done.

The updated conflict argument, the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, replaced the restaurant with a computer firm’s just-in-time network. Summarizing a Guardian extract, John Naughton reported Friedman’s stipulation that no two countries in the same major global supply chain—Dell’s was the example—would fight each other while both remained in it, because people in those chains wanted just-in-time deliveries rather than what Friedman called old-time wars. On that reading, such chains restrained geopolitical risk-taking more tightly than the prosperity a McDonald's had symbolized, a point Friedman illustrated by tracing the laptop on which he wrote the book.

Reviewers treated “flatness” as an argument, not a finding. In Foreign Affairs, G. John Ikenberry called it “a view of the world from a seat in business class”: firms searching for cheap labor, missing inequality and the geopolitical hierarchy in which the rise of China and India was an upheaval, not a leveling. Gray wrote that globalization might make the world smaller, and parts of it richer, but “does not make it more peaceful, or more liberal. Least of all does it make it flat.” The 2008 Caucasus war was a sharper public test of the arches claim, which critics applied to two countries with McDonald's outlets, than of the narrower supply-chain version. Friedman’s column discussed oil-backed Russian power and NATO, not whether Russia and Georgia shared an electronics network.

Foreign policy commentary

The Middle East

In his foreign-affairs column for The New York Times, Friedman treated the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as the center of the wider Arab-Israeli struggle. On September 5, 1993, as Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization initialed a secret agreement reached in Norway, he called autonomy in the Gaza Strip and Jericho “nothing less than the Israeli Balfour Declaration for the Palestinians.” The change that mattered, he argued, was recognition: the two sides were “finally recognizing each other as legitimate enemies that have to be reconciled,” and he quoted Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that peace “is made with enemies.”

After the 2000 Camp David Summit and the Second Intifada, “The End of Something” (June 30, 2002) asked whether the Oslo Accords and “the whole idea of a two-state solution” were finished. Friedman wrote that Palestinians had made “a huge mistake” by answering an outline from President Bill Clinton with an uprising and suicide bombings that shattered Israel’s peace camp, and he quoted Stephen P. Cohen calling the uprising “Yasser Arafat’s 1967 war.”

After September 11 and the Iraq War

Friedman was in Jerusalem on September 11, 2001. Two days later, “World War III” called the attacks the start of a long war against “super-empowered angry men and women” who had turned airliners into “human-directed, precision-guided cruise missiles,” and closed: “We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules, and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists.” The Pulitzer Prize board’s 2002 commentary award cited “his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat.”

From Kabul in January 2002 he defined the U.S. interest in the war in Afghanistan as keeping the country from again sheltering someone like Osama bin Laden, warned that the task was “nation-building on the moon,” and said the administration of George W. Bush could not “win the peace in Afghanistan by remote control.”

He supported invading Iraq and rejected the weapons case offered in public. In “Because We Could” (June 4, 2003) the “real reason,” he wrote, was that America “needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world” to puncture a “terrorism bubble,” and “we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it.” A post-Saddam Hussein model and Hussein’s atrocities were the “right” and “moral” reasons; weapons of mass destruction were the wrong issue, and Friedman wrote that he had argued Hussein was no immediate threat to the United States and had no links with Al-Qaeda. On Charlie Rose around May 30, 2003, he said troops going “house to house from Basra to Baghdad” had to tell that world to “suck on this.” The Christian Science Monitor later called those remarks a window onto Washington opinion at the time, and noted that Hussein and ordinary Iraqis had nothing to do with September 11.

“Bad Planning” (June 25, 2003) said the Pentagon had expected to govern through surviving Iraqi institutions; they collapsed, and looting left the country “starting below zero.” In October 2005 he wrote that, as a “neo-liberal” rather than a neoconservative, he had tried to tilt an invasion he thought inevitable toward “the right war, the right way”; that he had coined a “Pottery Barn rule”—“You break it you own it”—which reached Colin Powell through Richard Armitage; and that he had been wrong about competence: “I placed my hopes over my experience.” He blamed Donald Rumsfeld for “just enough troops to lose,” but still hoped for a “decent outcome.” From late 2003 into 2006 he often said the next six months would decide Iraq, a pattern FAIR compiled and later criticism named the “Friedman Unit.” “Ten Months or Ten Years” (November 29, 2006) then called Iraq “Hobbes’s jungle” and set withdrawal over about ten months against a ten-year rebuild with at least 150,000 more troops, adding that Iraq “was already pretty broken before we got there,” held together by Hussein’s “iron fist.”

Later geopolitics

In “I Was Wrong About Chinese Censorship” (July 21, 2022), Friedman wrote, “I confess that I’ve been too optimistic” that China would open its information system. He quoted The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999)—“China’s going to have a free press”—hoped the prediction had only been premature, and described a reversal under Xi Jinping.

On the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, his July 15, 2015, interview with President Barack Obama recorded that Friedman wanted more time to study the text. Obama rejected Friedman’s argument that Washington had left leverage unused against Iran and asked to be judged on whether the accord blocked an Iranian weapon for ten years. Friedman wrote that the longer test was whether the deal transformed Iran and limited proliferation in the Middle East.

Two days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “We Have Never Been Here Before” (February 25, 2022) treated Vladimir Putin’s attack as a major power’s land grab inside a wired global economy. At the Chautauqua Institution in August 2025, Friedman called Ukraine’s attempt to join the West, which he said Russia stopped, and Israel’s attempt to “join the East,” which he said Iran and Hamas tried to stop, the two largest geopolitical shocks since 2023. He framed both as a contest between a “resistance network” (Iran, Russia, North Korea, and sometimes China) and an “inclusion network” of the United States, the European Union, and other partners—“democracies plus decencies.”

Energy, climate, and the environment

The case for a green revolution

In the April 15, 2007, New York Times Magazine essay “The Power of Green,” Friedman treated jobs, climate change, and oil-funded insecurity as one problem. He wanted “green” renamed geostrategic, capitalistic, and patriotic—“Green is the new red, white and blue”—and wrote that talk of an already “greenest generation” ignored the cost of shifting to a largely emissions-free energy system over about fifty years.

He expanded that case in Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), joining global warming, the globalization of his earlier writing, and population growth with rising consumption. Stephen Kotkin, reviewing the book, noted the labels “Code Green” and “Energy-Climate Era” and the policy at the center: raise the cost of hydrocarbons with new taxes and a price floor, and lower the cost of alternatives with tax breaks until clean industries could compete without subsidies. Friedman told Scientific American that inventors needed a carbon tax that was “long-term, fixed and durable,” so a fall in the oil price would not wipe out clean-energy investment, and that utilities should be paid for watts saved rather than kilowatts sold.

Jonathan Freedland wrote that the book lacked the force of Silent Spring or An Inconvenient Truth but might reach executives Friedman had already persuaded about globalization. Joseph Nye, in The Washington Post, called it important and guardedly optimistic, while wanting more economic evidence and stressing that China’s coal-fired growth—China passed the United States in 2007 as the largest carbon-dioxide emitter—could overshadow American cuts. Kotkin quoted Friedman’s warning that if China did not “go green,” its emissions would “nullify everything everyone else does,” and called the politics of lobbies and “dumb” leaders “too-pat.” John Gray, in The Observer, credited the case for high-technology options, including nuclear power, but treated the “First Law of Petro-Politics” (cheaper oil, more freedom) as wishful and the appeal to rediscover America as parochial. A 2009 paperback, which Robin McKie described as substantially rewritten, paired the financial crisis with ecological crises and shifted the subtitle toward a “global future.”

Television and later writing

Friedman had already taken the argument to the Discovery Channel. Addicted to Oil aired on June 24, 2006, ran about 45 minutes, and tied U.S. oil use to security, warming, and cars while surveying hybrids, biofuels, efficiency, and renewable electricity. David Roberts wrote in Grist that it put a “fairly radical” case in mainstream language but that Friedman “never digs far below the surface.” Green: The New Red, White and Blue, written and reported by Friedman and directed by David Hickman, was airing on Discovery and the Discovery Times Channel by April 23, 2007. Ryan Grim, in Politico, called it “facile and superficial”: it took Al Gore’s film as having settled the science, then skimmed drawbacks of hybrids, nuclear power, hydrogen, and ethanol.

In 2014 he was a correspondent on the Showtime series Years of Living Dangerously. Mike Hale wrote that Friedman’s question—whether a long drought in Syria was a primary cause of the civil war—was the most ambitious segment of the opening episode and “probably too big and complex a question for 20 minutes of screen time.” He returned to the policy frame on January 8, 2019, in “The Green New Deal Rises Again,” writing that he had called for a Green New Deal in 2007 and developed it in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. He described his own version as that of a “green capitalist”: rising mileage, manufacturing, and emissions standards, stronger building codes, and carbon-market prices, rather than a platform that also included a job guarantee and universal health care.

Reception and criticism

Prose, predictions, and the Friedman Unit

Friedman’s travel anecdotes, brand names, and extended metaphors have been praised as explanation and attacked as a style that outruns the evidence. In an April 2005 New York Press review of The World Is Flat, Matt Taibbi argued that the images do not agree, and that the premise was a mishearing: Infosys chief executive Nandan Nilekani said the “playing field is being leveled,” and Friedman, within a few pages, took that as the discovery that the world is flat. Taibbi wrote that “level” and “flat” are different ideas, and that a round earth, not a flat one, is the usual figure for distant places being connected.

Reviewers of the reporting were often warmer. Roger Rosenblatt, in The New York Times Book Review, called From Beirut to Jerusalem “the most intelligent and comprehensive account one is likely to read” of those years. Time’s Paul Gray called it a “crowded, fascinating memoir.” Fareed Zakaria, reviewing The World Is Flat, called it an “excellent new book” and the metaphor ingenious, while noting that the interview-heavy method would irritate some readers.

A separate line of criticism concerned timelines. In May 2006 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting listed columns and broadcasts in which Friedman, from a 30 November 2003 Times column on, had called the next six months—or a similar short window—decisive for the Iraq War. The advisory said that period had already lasted two and a half years: the 2003 column called it “the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time,” and on Hardball in May 2006 he still expected an answer “in the next year to six months—probably sooner.” Duncan Black, blogging as Atrios, wrote that Friedman’s “accountability moment is always 6 months away,” and that November dated one forecast “Two Friedmans from now.” The interval came to be called the Friedman Unit. In 2009 Spencer Ackerman used it for an aide’s claim that Washington would know within three to six months whether Hamid Karzai was curbing corruption and building an Afghan army—another renewable deadline, not a conclusion about the war.

Globalization and economics

Critics of The World Is Flat tended to grant new technology a real effect and to reject the idea that distance had stopped mattering. In Foreign Policy in 2007, Pankaj Ghemawat’s “10 percent presumption” held that migration, calls, patents, investment, and foreign direct investment clustered near 10 percent of the relevant total, not 100 percent. FDI was under 10 percent of world capital formation in 2003–05; Canada–U.S. trade still showed a large home bias after NAFTA. He called that semiglobalized, and the ten “flatteners” an exaggerated picture of globalization. Friedman replied that the world was obviously “not yet flat,” and that the process, not a finished state, was the claim.

Joseph Stiglitz, in the Times, called the book “exciting and very readable” and agreed that bringing billions of people into the world economy was “a big deal.” He added that trade’s winners rarely compensate its losers, so “a flatter world means a less flat America—more inequality,” and that technology can also widen gaps and entrench monopolies. Edward E. Leamer, in the March 2007 Journal of Economic Literature, wrote that Friedman warned of a world in which “your wages are set in Shanghai,” whereas most footloose factory jobs had already left the United States and innovation keeps creating work that is not globally contestable. Richard Florida’s October 2005 Atlantic essay “The World Is Spiky” used patents and nighttime lights to argue that innovation sits in a few urban peaks—in 2003 India and China together received fewer U.S. patents than the University of California—and that globalization raises the value of those peaks rather than leveling the field.

The argument did not prevent institutional praise. On 21 November 2005 the book won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, £30,000 for “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.” FT editor Lionel Barber called it relevant to politicians and executives; Goldman Sachs president Lloyd Blankfein said Friedman had given them “the vocabulary for debating” globalization’s merits and challenges.

Foreign policy and the Middle East

From Beirut to Jerusalem won the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction. Rosenblatt and Gray praised the account of Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon, the killings at Sabra and Shatila, and the early uprising. Edward Said’s 1989 review, “The Orientalist Express,” credited the comparison of Labor and Likud and the description of harsh Israeli policy, then rejected the generalizations. Said wrote that the book sets Israel and the United States as standards for “less gifted and culturally backward Arabs,” called the jump from the 1982 Hama massacre to desert “tribalism” (“Hama Rules”) “the purest Orientalism,” and dismissed the claim that Arab politics had produced only “the merchant and the messiah.” He read the book as a reporter’s case for his own promotion to sage.

Belén Fernández’s The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011) is a later polemic, not a digest of that mixed reception. Published in Verso’s Counterblasts series, which the house described as a revival of pamphlet warfare, it treats the columns and books as the work of an “apologist for American empire” and as evidence that newsrooms prefer “macho rhetoric” and “reductionist analysis.” It extends that objection to the Iraq columns and the globalization books, as one critique from the left rather than a replacement for the earlier praise of the reporting.

Outside income became a dispute in May 2009, when the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, a public agency, paid Friedman $75,000—the Times called it his standard fee—for an Oakland climate speech and a signing of Hot, Flat, and Crowded. San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross reported the booking. Times rules allowed fees only from “educational and other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and political activity are not a major focus.” After the Los Angeles Times asked, the paper said he would return the money over “a misunderstanding” about the sponsor. Columnist James Rainey wrote that he saw no sign the views had been bought, and that journalists should disclose large speaking fees.

Awards and honors

Thomas L. Friedman has won three Pulitzer Prizes for work in The New York Times. In 1983 he shared the prize for international reporting with Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post; the official citation was “For their individual reporting of the Israeli invasion of Beirut and its tragic aftermath.” In 1988 he won the same category, cited “For balanced and informed coverage of Israel.” In 2002 the prize for commentary went to him “for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat,” for columns written after the September 11 attacks. The George Polk Awards named him and David K. Shipler joint winners of the 1982 foreign-reporting award for coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

As a United Press International correspondent he received the Overseas Press Club of America’s 1980 award for best business news reporting from abroad, for Middle East coverage. A Guggenheim Fellowship supported From Beirut to Jerusalem, which won the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction and the club’s 1989 Cornelius Ryan Award. The club’s 1999 Cornelius Ryan Award recognized The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In 2004 the Overseas Press Club gave him an award for lifetime achievement, and Elizabeth II conferred the honorary title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

The World Is Flat won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, announced in London on 21 November 2005. The £30,000 prize was for the book offering “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.” In 2009 the National Press Club gave him its Fourth Estate Award, presented for a lifetime of contributions to American journalism. A Times biography records his election to the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2005. In 2012 the Pulitzer organization announced that he and Gregory Moore, then editor of The Denver Post, had been elected co-chairs and that both had served on the board since 2004.

Honorary degrees include a Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Minnesota, conferred on February 23, 2001; a doctor of laws from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004; and a Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Delaware at its 2009 commencement.

Personal life

Marriage and family

While in England, Friedman met Ann Bucksbaum, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University who was then studying at the London School of Economics and who came from an Iowa real-estate family. Her father, Matthew Bucksbaum, and his brothers Maurice and Martin left a family grocery business in Marshalltown and, starting with a shopping center in Cedar Rapids in 1954, built the mall company General Growth Properties. A New York Times obituary after Bucksbaum’s death in 2013 identified his daughter, Ann B. Friedman, as married to Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.

They married in 1978 at a small ceremony at London’s Hyde Park Synagogue. Friedman’s account dates the wedding to Thanksgiving Day that year. Their daughters were born in Jerusalem while he was the Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, from June 1984 to February 1988: Orly in 1985 and Natalie in 1988. A July 2006 profile gave their ages as 21 and 18 and reported that Ann, who declined to be interviewed, taught first-grade reading at Burning Tree Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, edited nearly all of his columns, and served on boards including that of the National Symphony Orchestra.

The 2006 profile said the Friedmans built a house in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2003, near Bethesda Country Club. An October 2012 Times wedding notice for Natalie Harold Friedman described her as a daughter of Ann B. Friedman and Thomas L. On January 25, 2017, the District selected Ann B. Friedman and Dantes Partners to redevelop the historic Franklin School as Planet Word, an interactive museum of language, and said she had developed the plans with her husband’s support. The Washington Post described her as a philanthropist and former reading instructor, married to Thomas Friedman, who linked the project to her teaching at Burning Tree.

Public roles

Brandeis University reported in 2015 that Friedman, an alumnus, had served on its Board of Trustees for 20 years, from 1994 to 2014, had often returned to speak with students and faculty, and had delivered the commencement keynote in 2007. In February 2005 he joined Harvard University president Lawrence Summers and government professor Michael Sandel, a Brandeis classmate, for the opening session of the undergraduate core course Social Analysis 78, “Globalization and Its Critics,” in Sanders Theatre. The Harvard Crimson described him as the advocate of global capitalism in a debate with Sandel, not as a regular member of the faculty.