Dowd! Friedman! It's Punditpalooza!

Sci-fi geeks may have the upcoming Star Wars movie, but to political geeks, their Revenge of the Sith may just be this Friday when UC Berkeley hosts a discussion with New York Times' columnists Thomas Friedman AND Maureen Dowd. It's like the Sunday edition of the New York Times come to life except without the coffee and bagels. Seeing these two super-stud columnists together is like the "Real World/Road Rules Challenges" before they became overdone and overrun by attention seeking camera hos. Friedman, the Times' foreign affairs columnist, is the happy global warrior, the cheerleader for globalization. And Dowd is the Times' resident bete noir of the Bushies with her snarky and a little too full of itself takes on our political world. Friedman has three pulitzers and Dowd one. That's a lot of pulitzers.

According to Leah Garchik, the double-bill might never have happened. Dean Orville Schell got Dowd to appear and came up with the idea of adding Friedman to the bill. When he asked an editor at the New York Times, he was told that it wouldn't work and that "their chemistry wouldn't work." What? Like people were expecting Bogart & Bacall? Who cares? Tickets are $10 each and available at the Zellerbach Hall Box Office. You can purchase them here.