In June 2004, I was visiting London with my daughter Orly, and one evening we went to see the play Billy Elliot at a theater near Victoria Station. During intermission, I was standing up, stretching my legs in the aisle next to my seat, when a stranger approached and asked me, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" When I nodded yes, he introduced himself: "My name is Emad Tinawi. I am a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen," the consulting firm. Tinawi said that while he disagreed with some of the columns I had written, particularly on the Middle East, there was one column he especially liked and still kept.

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

1. Nation building in Iraq will be very difficult and requires careful planning.
2. Without such planning, the invasion could turn out to be a terrible mistake.
3. It seems that the Bush administration is not doing any planning.
4. Therefore, I support the war.

Perhaps my favorite Friedman piece of all time. He begins with the delicious image of listening to the Battle Hymn of the Republic on his car stereo, and then moves on to his central idea: This war is a "gut call," and his gut "has told [him] four things." First: This is a war of choice. Second: Reconstructing Iraq will be more difficult than we think. Third: We ought to take our time there once we’re in. And fourth: The majority of the world still hopes to avert war.

Unwittingly, Friedman has led his reader on a tour through the four chambers of his stomach. He has literally revealed to the world that he is a cow. It would take a genius on the order of Shakespeare to invent a character capable of writing such a thing.

Suppose you find yourself in the following situation. You're writing an article or giving a speech and have a point to make. The length of your article or speech is limited. You think that you might best be able to get your point across by using an analogy. However, after giving it some thought, you come up with not one, not two, not three, but four perfect analogies.

Do you:

A) include just the best one, in the interest of brevity?

B) include the best two, because repetition might help the point stick?

C) include the best three, on the theory that all good things come in threes?

D) include all four, because you're in love with the idea of yourself and overly enamored of your own analogy-making abilities?

See if you can guess how our beloved Mr. Friedman would answer that question, taking this section of his latest column as a hint:

"... our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet."

FRIEDMAN: And so I’ve kind of developed an answer that to me India and China are both two six-lane superhighways. And everyone’s going really fast.

Now China’s a six-lane superhighway — perfectly paved roads, perfect sidewalks, streetlamps on a lot of these highways. Just one problem. Off in the distance there’s a speed bump called political reform. And when 1.3 billion people going 80 miles an hour hit a speed bump, one of two things happens: your car jumps up in the air, slams down, everyone says, You O.K.? You O.K.? I’m O.K., drives on; the other thing that happens, car jumps up in the air, slams down and all the wheels fall off. And what will happen in China’s case? I have no idea. All I know is I’m rooting for the first scenario.

Now India’s also a six-lane superhighway — cracked cement, half the sidewalks aren’t finished and three-quarters of the streetlights don’t work. But off in the distance it looks like it smoothes out into a perfect six-lane superhighway.

KOPPEL: Because?

FRIEDMAN: The question with India: Is that a mirage or is that the oasis? So those are the two big questions I have —

It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel, as long as you remember you’re driving without one.

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.

The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.

So here’s how I feel. I feel as if the president is presenting us with a beautiful carved mahogany table–a big, bold, gutsy vision. But if you look underneath, you discover that this table has only one leg. His bold vision on Iraq is not supported by boldness in other areas.

In short, Iraq is not a vase that we broke to remove the rancid water inside, and now we just need to glue it back together. We have to build a whole new vase. We have to dig the clay, mix it, shape it, harden it and paint it.

America is surely the only nation that could — in the same decade — go to war against a president named Hussein (Saddam of Iraq), threaten to use force against a country whose most revered religious martyr is named Hussein (Iran) and then elect its own president who’s middle-named Hussein.

Is this a great country or what?

So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”

The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. […] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been--but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

Over the next couple of years, two very big countries, America and China, will give birth to something very important. They’re each going to give birth to close to $1 trillion worth of economic stimulus — in the form of tax cuts, infrastructure, highways, mass transit and new energy systems. But a lot is riding on these two babies. If China and America each give birth to a pig — a big, energy-devouring, climate-spoiling stimulus hog — our kids are done for. It will be the burden of their lifetimes. If they each give birth to a gazelle — a lean, energy-efficient and innovation-friendly stimulus — it will be the opportunity of their lifetimes.

We’re getting perilously close to closing the window on a two-state solution, because the two chief window-closers — Hamas in Gaza and the fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank — have been in the driver’s seats. Hamas is busy making a two-state solution inconceivable, while the settlers have steadily worked to make it impossible.

The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: 'Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?'

So George Mitchell is, in effect, “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Nurturing a Coherent Palestinian Authority and a Coherent Israeli Negotiating Position So That the Two Might One Day Be Able to Strike a Deal Again.” Richard Holbrooke is “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Bringing Coherence to the Afghan and Pakistan Governments So That They Can One Day Be Internally Stable and United Against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.” And Dennis Ross is “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Amassing Global Leverage on the Incomprehensibly Byzantine Iranian Government So That It Will Terminate Its Nuclear Weapons Program.”

Reading Friedman is fascinating–the same way that it’s fascinating to watch a zoo gorilla make mounds out of its own feces. The gorilla is a noble, intelligent animal that will demean itself in captivity. Friedman is a less noble animal of roughly the same intelligence, whose cage is the English language. It’s an amazing thing to behold.