Don't Want No Specialists

Another interesting bit of information:

Thomas Friedman likens journalism to hedge fund management.

He discovered that his best intellectual sources do not come from academia or diplomats but from hedge fund managers who “tend to be extremely well informed about global affairs and have a natural ability and willingness to arbitrage and interpolate information...before drawing their conclusions.”

The only difference between a hedge fund manager and himself was that at the end of the day, the former made a bet on a stock or bond and the latter wrote an opinion on some aspect of international relations.

So to write as well as Friedman does, you've got to be well-versed and able to see the world through many different dimensions: Politics, culture, balance of power (arms control, superpower competition, Cold War allaince management, power geopolitics), financial markets, technology and enviromentalism.