Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times Thomas L. Friedman '75 addressed an audience of about 300 in the Shapiro Atrium on May 2 as part of the "Meet the Author" series to promote his new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.An interpretation of the new face of globalization that Friedman perceives to be a growing threat to the American workforce, his book argues that the speedy advancement of technology and worldwide communication has changed the workforce so that countries such as India and China, who once were thought to be removed from the international marketplace, have come to the forefront. Many of the trade barriers that once existed have now been torn down, he said.

"When I was here at Brandeis, my parents would tell me, 'Tom, finish your dinner because children in India and China are starving,'" Friedman said. "Now I tell my girls, 'Girls, finish your homework because children in India and China are starving for your jobs.' In a flat world, they can have them. There is no such thing as an American job in a flat world,"

The book originates "accidentally" from 60 hours of interviews Friedman conducted during his trip to Bangalore, India in January 2004.

"Throughout the course of the interviews, I got very sick and it was not because of the food," Friedman said. "I realized that when I had been sleeping during 9/11, something big was happening."

Friedman explained that since that time, he came to understand that the international marketplace is being "flattened."

He spent the rest of the talk outlining the divisions of his book's chapters according to each of the factors contributing to this situation which, progressively, has evolved as a concept redefining the world's economic dynamic.

"What emerged from the convergence of these flatteners was a global platform irrespective of time, distance and geography progressively flattening," he said. "It's the ability of people to buy into this that helps this flattening.