Speakers
Thomas Friedman
One of the world's preeminent commentators on international affairs, Thomas Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner. Vanity Fair called him “the country's best newspaper columnist.”
In 1981, Friedman joined The New York Times as a business reporter, specializing in oil-related news. He was quickly named Beirut bureau chief. He also has served as Israel bureau chief, Washington chief diplomatic correspondent, chief White House correspondent and chief economics correspondent.
Friedman has covered many of the monumental stories of recent decades. For his coverage of Israel and Lebanon, he earned 1983 and 1988 Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting. In the months following 9/11, his Op-Ed page column for The New York Times earned him his third Pulitzer Prize—the 2002 award for Distinguished Commentary.
Friedman's latest book is the international bestseller The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. His previous books include Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism, as well as the bestselling From Beirut to Jerusalem, which won both the National Book Award and Overseas Press Club Award in 1989, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which Kirkus Reviews called “simply the best book written on globalization.”
