Bio
Larry Bensky
Larry Bensky is a literary and political journalist with more than forty years experience in both print and broadcast media, as well as a teacher and long-time political activist. He is well known for his work with Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, and for the many nationally-broadcast hearings he anchored for the Pacifica network.
A native of New York City, Bensky graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1954 and, with departmental honors, from Yale University, where he was managing editor of the Yale Daily News. He is married and has one daughter.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, is the author of numerous books on U.S. foreign policy, including American Power and the New Mandarins, Political Economy of Human Rights (two volumes, written with Edward Herman), Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, and Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World. His most recent books are Failed States and Perilous Power.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- Chomsky, (Avram) Noam
(born Dec. 7, 1928, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. linguist, philosopher, and political activist. He received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, the same year he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Chomsky takes the proper object of study for linguistics to be the mentally represented grammars that constitute the native speaker's knowledge of his language and the biologically innate language faculty, or “universal grammar,” that enables the developmentally normal language learner, as a child, to construct a grammar of the language to which he is exposed. For Chomsky, the ultimate goal of linguistic science is to develop a theory of universal grammar that provides a descriptively adequate grammar for any natural language given only the kind of “primary linguistic data” available in the social environments of children. This imperative has motivated the gradual refinement of Chomskyan linguistic theory from the early transformational grammar of the 1950s and '60s to the Minimalist Program of the 1990s and beyond. A self-described libertarian socialist, Chomsky has written numerous books and lectured widely on what he considers the antidemocratic character of American capitalism and its pernicious influence on the country's politics and foreign policy, mass media, and academic and intellectual culture. See also generative grammar.
- Chomsky, (Avram) Noam on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
