Noam Chomsky Biography Flash a weekly Biography.
Noam Chomsky has spent a lifetime insisting we focus on structures, not personalities, but in the past few days his own name has been very much a story. At 96, he remains physically absent from the public eye after what his longtime MIT office manager Beverly Stohl described earlier this year, in interviews summarized by Time magazine, as a serious medical event in mid 2024 that left him largely noncommunicative and unlikely to return to public life. Time reported that family members say he is not in pain but is no longer writing, speaking, or ambulating, a stark turning point in the biography of a man who once answered almost every email.
That silence has made his intellectual afterlife unusually loud. In the last few days, major outlets and institutions have been revisiting his work rather than reporting new statements from him. The Nation has been promoting its in depth profile The Worlds of Noam Chomsky, framing him as, quote, the most famous critic of US empire in the world, and asking how his decades of media criticism and foreign policy analysis look in an age of social media and fragmented attention. At the same time, Monthly Review has highlighted its December issue of tributes to media scholar Robert McChesney, explicitly situating McChesneys work on communication and capitalism in the lineage of Chomsky and Edward Herman.
Universities are also using Chomskys legacy as a springboard. In Paris, the College de France just hosted a colloquium on Rationality, Truth and Democracy built around a so called family of thought linking Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Noam Chomsky, treating his career as a reference point for the intellectuals role in public life. In London, Imperial College advertised a lecture titled The Responsibility of Humanities in the 21st Century, explicitly billed as a rejoinder to Chomskys classic 1967 essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals and inviting scholars to update or challenge his call to speak truth and expose lies.
Meanwhile, less flattering aspects of his record are back in the headlines. WBUR in Boston recently detailed newly released House Oversight Committee emails showing that Chomsky maintained a friendly, even admiring relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein well after Epsteins 2008 conviction, including a warm letter of support and social invitations involving Chomsky and his wife. Commentators from outlets such as Scroll in India have used that relationship to probe blind spots inside progressive politics, asking how a fierce critic of power could overlook the power dynamics of sexual violence in his own circle. These stories are not new events in Chomskys life, but their resurfacing will likely become a durable chapter in how his biography is told.
On social media, Chomsky is being talked about rather than talking. YouTube channels and commentators have been resurfacing older interviews on Gaza, Ukraine, and US power, sometimes to praise his consistency, sometimes to attack him as out of touch or morally compromised. One recent YouTube commentary video, for example, promises that Noam Chomsky is exposed so badly he may never recover, a reminder that his long record now fuels a cottage industry of both hagiography and takedown.
There are, importantly, no verified reports in the last 24 hours of new writings, interviews, or public appearances by Chomsky himself. Any posts purporting to quote him on current events should be treated as unconfirmed unless they are clearly tied to a reputable outlet or his official archives at Chomsky dot info. For now, the significant biographical development is the way the world is beginning to talk about Noam Chomsky in the past tense while he is still alive, sorting his towering contributions to linguistics and political critique alongside the contradictions and compromises that will color his legacy.
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