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

by Thomas L. Friedman

A “black elephant,” it was explained to me by the London-based investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, is a cross between a “black swan”—a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications—and “the elephant in the room: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.” “Currently,” Sweidan told me, “there are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there”—global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, and mass biodiversity extinction, just to name four. “When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans that no one could have predicted, but in fact they are black elephants, very visible right now”—