Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is David Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine. And I am joined today by Bev Bwaso Stoll. She ran Noam Tchopsky's office at MIT for nearly two and a half decades and is now the author of the delightful book

Chomsky and me a memoir available from Orr books about which Johan Hari who appeared a couple

of months ago on this program described described it as a beautiful, tender,

and profound book. And Michelle Gondry calls it so much fun. And Catherine Keener calls it an

amazing story, which I think it is. Beth Stoll, welcome to Current Affairs.

Hi, Nathan. Thanks. Hey, I've been looking forward to this.

Let me start by, before we get to the fascinating world of Noam Tromsky's office and your observations

of him and his life and work over the course of a couple of decades, tell us a bit more

about yourself, your own background

and your road to this peculiar position that you ended up holding. This was not my plan.

Right. My plan was to go to school and finish a master's degree in psychology. So in order

to do that, I worked my way up in

MIT, and I was managing a graduate program in economics, and I decided, you know what, I think I really

want to be, I had a lot of students coming to me, crying, upset, breaking up with each other,

you know, stressed. And so I thought, I really want to finish that, that psych degree. So I decided to take an easier job.

How'd that work out for you? You can see where this is going. You can see where this is going. You want a less

stressful job. An easier, less stressful job. So I took this job working for Noome Chomsky thinking, okay, now I'll have time to finish my

master's degree and all of that.

And what happened was kind of, it was opposite day because after a couple of years, when

I was thinking I would finish the master's, I started to burn out because I saw some

things that were so upsetting to me, the brother and sister group in a home that had been in a bad

car accident and all of the stuff that I hadn't really considered. And I knew I'd be taking

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