Friedman has hosted several documentaries for the Discovery Channel from several locations around the world. In Straddling the Fence (2003), he visited the West Bank and spoke to Israelis and Palestinians about the Israeli West Bank barrier and its impact on their lives. Also in 2003, Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: Searching for the Roots of 9/11 aired on the Discovery Times Channel. This program investigated how the Sept. 11th attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon were viewed in the Muslim world. In The Other Side of Outsourcing (2004), he visited a call centre in Bangalore, interviewing the young Indians working there, and then travelled to an impoverished rural part of India, where he debated the pros and cons of globalization with locals (this trip spawned his eventual best-selling book The World is Flat). In Does Europe Hate Us? (2005), Friedman travelled through Britain, France and Germany, talking with academics, journalists, Marshall and Rhodes scholars, young Muslims and others about the nature of the strained relationship between Europe and the United States. Addicted to Oil (2006) premiered at the Silverdocs Documentary Festival at 5:30 PM on June 16, 2006, and aired on June 24, 2006, on the Discovery Times Channel. In it he examined the geopolitical, economic, and environmental consequences of petroleum use and ways that green technologies such as alternative fuels and energy efficiency and conservation can reduce oil dependence. In Green: The New Red, White and Blue (2007),[80] Friedman elaborates on the green technologies and efforts touched on in Addicted to Oil and in doing so, attempts to redefine green energy as geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. He explores efforts by companies and individuals to reduce their carbon footprint and save money with conservation, efficiency, and technologies such as solar, wind, biomass, nuclear, and clean coal. Friedman was born in St. Louis Park, Minnesota on July 20, 1953, to Margaret Blanche (Phillips) and Harold Abe Friedman.[1] Harold, who was vice president of a ball bearing company, United Bearing, died of a heart attack in 1973, when Tom was nineteen years old. Margaret, who served in the United States Navy during World War II and studied home economics at the University of Wisconsin, was a homemaker and a part-time bookkeeper. She was also a Senior Life Master duplicate bridge player, and died in 2008. Friedman has two older sisters, Shelly and Jane. From an early age, Friedman, whose father often brought him to the golf course for a round after work, wanted to be a professional golfer. He played a lot of sports, and became serious about tennis and golf. He caddied at a local country club and in 1970 caddied for professional golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez when the US Open came to town.[2] Friedman is Jewish.[3] He attended Hebrew school five days a week until his Bar Mitzvah,[4] then St. Louis Park High School, where he wrote articles for his school's newspaper.[5] He became enamored of Israel after a visit there in December 1968, and he spent all three of his high school summers living on Kibbutz HaHotrim, near Haifa.[6] He has characterized his high school years as "one big celebration of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War."[6] Friedman studied at the University of Minnesota for two years, but later transferred to Brandeis University and graduated summa cum laude in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies. Friedman later taught a class in economics at Brandeis in 2006, and was a commencement speaker there in 2007.[7] After graduating from Brandeis, he attended St Antony's College at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, earning an M.Phil. in Middle Eastern studies. Friedman's wife, Ann (née Bucksbaum), is a graduate of Stanford University and the London School of Economics.[8] She is the daughter of real estate developer Matthew Bucksbaum.[9] They were married in London on Thanksgiving Day 1978 and live in Bethesda, Maryland in a 1022-square meter (11,000-sq. ft.) home. The couple has two daughters, Orly (b. 1985) and Natalie (b. 1988). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman Image By World Economic Forum (Flickr: Tipping Points: Thomas L. Friedman) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 03 Feb 2016
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