UPDATE: Due to a personal emergency, Thomas Friedman is unable to make his annual holiday trip to the Valley this year. Tickets purchased for the Dec. 23 “Coffee with Tom Friedman” event will be promptly refunded. The Sopris Sun and TACAW look forward to rescheduling a talk with Mr. Friedman later in 2026, as schedules permit. Thank you for your continued support.
“As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations, as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan,” Thomas Friedman recently wrote in a New York Times column.
Friedman introduces the concept of “Polcene” — a new epoch of nuanced, multinodal interconnectedness challenging the binary paradigm of old. The column, titled “Welcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?” goes on to describe implications of rising artificial intelligence technologies, the polycrisis of climate change, the crisscrossing of geopolitical alliances, shifting notions of identity, commerce and more.
How to navigate such unfamiliar terrain? Friedman goes on to quote Dov Seidman, a business philosopher and founder of the HOW Institute for Society, saying, “Interdependence is no longer our choice … It is our condition. We will either build healthy interdependencies and rise together or suffer through unhealthy interdependencies and fall together.”
“Whichever way we go, though, we’re going there together,” Friedman concludes.
On Dec. 23, Valley locals will have the opportunity to meet this renowned political commentator when he speaks at TACAW by way of a Sopris Sun invitation. This will be the second installment of our Mountain Perspectives speaker series in collaboration with TACAW, following an evening with Ken Rudin earlier this year.
Mountain Perspectives, Sopris Sun Executive Director Todd Chamberlin explained, is the name of a speaker series and a new online engagement platform developed by Sopris Apps in collaboration with The Sopris Sun. Both initiatives are meant to inspire richer, deeper conversations within our community. “For me, Mountain Perspectives reflects the best of who we are — a community that’s curious, engaged, and willing to talk with one another about what matters, whether we’re gathered at TACAW or connecting online,” said Chamberlin. “Together, we’re building a living, growing hub for civic dialogue across the Valley — online and off.”
Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization and environmental issues. He joined the New York Times in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984, in Washington, D.C. as the diplomatic correspondent in 1989 and later the White House correspondent and economics correspondent.
Introducing Friedman will be fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Loren Jenkins, a Sopris Sun board member and former foreign correspondent at various news outlets. Jenkins also served five years as publisher and editor-in-chief of The Aspen Times in the ‘90s.
They met while covering the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, Lebanon in 1982. Christian militias had indiscriminately murdered over 1,000 civilians, including children, living in Palestinian refugee camps under the watch of occupying Israeli forces. Jenkins and Friedman were among the first to enter the scene the following day and both won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their work. “There’s no way any one individual can get the whole story,” Jenkins said of reporting on such a tragedy. “You share. It’s all confusion all day long.”
Before the Dec. 23 talk, scheduled for 11am, guests are invited to network while enjoying coffee and pastries at TACAW. Books authored by Friedman will be available for purchase and through White River Books in Carbondale. A Q&A session will follow Friedman’s talk.