Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

There has never ever been a time when the human being was capable of doing something and yet, eventually, that something did not happen. That means one of three things: 1) the human psyche is going to change fundamentally (good luck with that!); 2) the worldwide social contract changes so that the “angry men” can no longer be “empowered” (good luck with that too!); or 3) boom! —Garrett Andrews, online comment on my October 21, 2015, column on NYTimes.com Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our [expletive] problems. —Comedian Samantha Bee, commenting on the Orlando massacre on her TBS show, Full Frontal, June 13, 2016 I have been on the road selling different books ever since I published From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989. I’ve given several hundred book talks to different audiences. So what’s the best question I ever got from someone in the audience on any book? That’s easy to answer. It was at an event at the Portland Theater, in Portland, Oregon, in 1999, when I was promoting The Lexus and the Olive Tree. A young man stood up in the balcony and asked me this question: “Is God in cyberspace?” I confess, I didn’t know how to answer his question, which was asked with the utmost sincerity and demanded an answer. After all, mankind had created a vast new realm for human interaction. (If the supernova is somewhere between Heaven and Earth, who is in charge there? Amazon or God on high?) The question seized me. So I called one of my most cherished sp...