I'm Christopher Lighten, and this is open source. It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language

what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head.

Chomsky had the a-ha insight that the power of language is born into our biology. It's not acquired later.

Chomsky and linguistics came to explain how the human species alone got that gift of language.

But it's not the only reason Professor Chomsky is on our minds this summer of 2023.

Frail and quiet, approaching his 95th birthday in the fall,

Chomsky has been for half a century the model of Socrates in the American Square,

the public pest with questions that sting. So we are listening again to some of our best encounters

with this fortress of science and political dissent. This one was in his MIT office in 2017.

I'm Christopher Lighten, this is open source. A world in trouble beats a path to Noam Chomsky's door

if only because he's been forthright for so long about a whirlwind coming.

Not that the world quite knows what to do with Noam Chomsky's thoughts on disaster in the making.

Here was the famous unpleasantness from the Petrician TV host Wilenef Buckby, Jr. meeting Chomsky's icy anger

about the war in Vietnam in 1969.

I rejoice in your disposition to argue the Vietnam question, especially when I recognize what an act of self-control this must involve.

It does, sure. It really does. I mean, I think it is the kind of issue where it very well. Sometimes I lose my temper.

Maybe not tonight.

Because if you would, I'd smash him to God down there.

But you say you say, and you're reason for not losing my temper.

Strange thing about Noam Chomsky, the New York Times calls him arguably the most important public thinker alive,

though the paper seldom quotes him or argues with him, and giant pop media like network television never do.

And yet the man is universally famous in his 89th year, and almost familiar.

...