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On Monday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose predictably placed the blame for the unusually cold weather in North America on climate change. Rose wondered, "Is it definitely connected to global warming?"

Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel, The Possessed, is a tale about a small town overcome by revolutionary ideas. After an intense meeting of a literary salon, a fire breaks out and one of the villagers comments, “The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings.” The historian James Billington used that phrase — “the fire in the minds of men” — to describe the incendiary ardor of Russian revolutionaries of all stripes, making it the title of his epic history of the subject. Now, in the hands of New York Times columnist Tom Fried­man, this scene could...

HONG KONG (AFP) – Best-selling author Thomas Friedman on Tuesday praised Barack Obama's new energy team and said the next US president had to insist on a radical environmental agenda to tackle global warming. Friedman, whose new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" is a call-to-arms to reduce US dependency on oil and coal, said Obama's nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his new energy secretary was a "terrific" move. He insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming. "We can...

Some time back, The New York Times Foreign Affairs writer, Thomas Friedman (liberals genuflect here), wrote a fascinating tome entitled The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I was living and working in Minneapolis when I had the chance to see him speak about the book. By the way, if I heard him correctly, he said he had grown up in St. Louis Park, which is where pesky Air America liberal Al Franken now lives. Coincidence? The point of the book was based on some thoughts he had, in having seen the advanced robotics being used by Toyota to create their...

ON BOOK TV THIS WEEKEND In Depth: Thomas Friedman Airing the first Sunday of every month, In Depth is Book TV's LIVE three-hour interview and call-in show with notable authors. Our May guest is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He is the author of the recently-released "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century." SUN., C-SPAN2, 12-3PM ET

WWW.NYPRESS.COM | APRIL 20, 2005 NEWS & COLUMNS I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world’s manganese supply. Who knew what it meant—but one had to assume the worst "It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised,...