Thomas Friedman is the New York Times' three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist, known for his sustained cheerleading of the Iraq war and his faithful service on behalf of the corporate elite.

In this excerpt from The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, Belén Fernández discusses various aspects of Friedmanomics, such as his detection in 2010 of the need for a "Root Canal Politics" to compensate for the global financial recession and the profligacy of the baby boomer generation-defined simultaneously as the offspring of "The Greatest Generation" and the offspring of "the Tooth Fairy."