At age 90, the MIT professor has been an éminence grise of the American left for so long that it’s easy to forget that he is, above all, an academic linguist who has made major (if controversial) contributions to his field. Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press (and a former student of Chomsky’s as well as editor of his books), talks with him about language versus birdsong, linguistics and machine learning, and his most famous (and most misunderstood) sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” – The MIT Press Reader