What sets him apart from other journalists, he says, is not his intellect ("I'm a horizontal thinker. I scored very low on my SAT s"). His strength, he says, is his ability to "connect dots, to take a bunch of disparate ideas, in finance, politics, technology, and geopolitics, and make a theory around them," the way he does in his latest book by identifying 10 major political events, innovations, and companies, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to outsourcing to the Internet, that have flattened the world. "Then I explain it in a way the average person can understand. And that average person is me."

Yet there's nothing average about his work ethic. In the past few weeks, for example, Friedman visited Singapore and Japan. After touching down at home, he set off again, first for Iraq and then for China. "There's no question he's the hardest-working-est reporter I've ever seen," says Richard Ben Cramer, former Middle Eastern correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the early '80s, in Beirut, while Cramer and the other correspondents were relaxing in the bar after filing their stories, "Tommy would still be working, while the rest of us were on our third drink."

Friedman says there are two kinds of columnists: those in the lighting business, educating and elucidating, and those in the heating business, driving an ideological point of view. He considers himself a lighting man. "I'm a big shoe-leather guy," he says, meaning he loves the hunt for the next story and is driven by curiosity and wherever it leads. "Talking to that one extra person, that's always the one who unlocks the whole story," he says.

His career path has been serendipitous. In 1975, while attending graduate school in London, he glimpsed a headline about Jimmy Carter, who was running for president, promising Jewish voters that he would fire Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish secretary of state. That struck Friedman as unusual, and he immediately wrote a column about it. His girlfriend (now wife) knew the editor of the Des Moines Register , who published it.

It was a life-changing event. "I was walking down the street, I had an opinion, and someone paid me $50 for it. That was the coolest thing in the world," he says. After graduate school, he was hired at the London bureau of United Press International. The fledgling reporter, who had never covered a fire or a city hall meeting, was so nervous that he began having severe nosebleeds. To the amusement of his more experienced colleagues, he had to have his nose cauterized.

Within a year he was sent to Beirut, which was in the middle of a civil war. "I went into journalism as a way of getting to the Middle East. Frankly, I didn't know anything other than the Middle East," he recalls. From there, he went to the New York Times, where he has worked since 1981.

Plugged in. On a typical day, when not on the road, he's at his home computer by 5:30 a.m., reading publications online. ("I'm probably the only person who reads both Wired and the Jerusalem Post on a regular basis.") He enjoys reading foreign newspapers and trade journals and checking out favorite blogs, such as AndrewSullivan.com. His regular E-mail buddies include entrepreneurs like Michael Dell and Meg Whitman and an international group of Muslim women.