title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print, and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime – early productions included "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain" which was performed in the West End's Adelphi Theatre in 1848 – and, as early as 1901, the British silent film "Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost" was made by Walter R. Booth. Contemporaries such as publisher Edward Lloyd cashed in on Dickens's popularity with cheap imitations of his novels, resulting in his own popular 'penny dreadfuls'.


title: Charles Dickens

text: From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, Dickens's achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare. Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era. His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of "Bleak House" in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls "Bleak House" 'a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a "drear decline" in Dickens, from a writer of "bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social" commentary. "The Spectator" called "Bleak House" "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in "The Rambler", characterised "Hard Times" as "this dreary framework"; "Fraser's Magazine" thought "Little Dorrit" "decidedly the worst of his novels". All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, 'the public never deserted its favourite'". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and "Household Words" and later "All the Year Round" were highly successful.


title: Charles Dickens

text: As his career progressed, Dickens's fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868 "The Times" wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone." A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote in the 1950s: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession." Juliet John backed the claim for Dickens "to be called the first self-made global media star of the age of mass culture." Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star, "The Guardian" states, "People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the 'speculator' or ticket tout (scalpers) – the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants."


title: Charles Dickens

text: Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking". In 1888 Leslie Stephen commented in the "Dictionary of National Biography" that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists". Anthony Trollope's "Autobiography" famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!" Tolstoy referred to "David Copperfield" as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as "a model for his own autobiographical reflections". French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression". Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings like "Vincent's Chair" and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially "A Christmas Carol", was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide. Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature. Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth, and the novels, "loose baggy monsters", betrayed a "cavalier organisation". Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, noting he had "an intense and unreasoning affection" for "Bleak House" dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in "The Secret Agent" (1907). Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with Dickens, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Around 1940–41, the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens – led by George Orwell in "Inside the Whale and Other Essays" (March 1940), Edmund Wilson in "The Wound and the Bow" (1941) and Humphry House in "Dickens and his World". However, even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in "The Great Tradition", asserted that "the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness"; Dickens was indeed a great genius, "but the genius was that of a great entertainer", though he later changed his opinion with "Dickens the Novelist" (1970, with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers". In 1944, Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens's influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting – where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as "Oliver Twist".


title: Charles Dickens

text: In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: "Bleak House", "Little Dorrit", and "Great Expectations" – and (less unanimously) in "Hard Times" and "Our Mutual Friend"". Dickens was a favourite author of Roald Dahl; the best-selling children's author would include three of Dickens's novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel "Matilda". An avid reader of Dickens, in 2005, Paul McCartney named "Nicholas Nickleby" his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, "I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language", adding, "A lot of my stuff – it's kind of Dickensian." Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan's screenplay for "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012) was inspired by "A Tale of Two Cities", with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel "one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces". On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in "The Telegraph": "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".


title: Charles Dickens

text: Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote "Oliver Twist", "The Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby"; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled "Dickens and Little Nell", cast in 1890 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park in Sydney, Australia. In 1960 a bas-relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London. In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by his great-great-grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.


title: Charles Dickens

text: "A Christmas Carol" is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by "A Christmas Carol". Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. "Merry Christmas", a prominent phrase from the tale, was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his exclamation "Bah! Humbug!'", a dismissal of the festive spirit, likewise gained currency as an idiom. The Victorian era novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from "The Pickwick Papers". The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years. In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the . In the 2003 UK survey The Big Read carried out by the BBC, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Actors who have portrayed Dickens on screen include Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow, Dan Stevens and Ralph Fiennes, the latter playing the author in "The Invisible Woman" (2013) which depicts Dickens's secret love affair with Ellen Ternan which lasted for thirteen years until his death in 1870.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps in countries including: the United Kingdom (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012 issued by the Royal Mail—their 2012 collection marked the bicentenary of Dickens' birth), the Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), and Mozambique (2014). In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honour.


title: Charles Dickens

text: In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote "A Christmas Carol". It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844. The Charles Dickens Museum is reported to have paid £180,000 for the portrait.


title: Charles Dickens

text: Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats.


title: Adrien Brody

text: Adrien Nicholas Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor. He received widespread recognition and acclaim after starring as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" (2002), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29, becoming the youngest actor to win in that category. Brody is the second male American actor after Christopher Lambert to receive the César Award for Best Actor.


title: Adrien Brody

text: Other successful films that Brody has starred in are "The Thin Red Line" (1998), "The Village" (2004), "King Kong" (2005), "Predators" (2010) and "Midnight in Paris" (2011). He is a frequent collaborator of Wes Anderson's, having starred in four of Anderson's films, "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007), "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009), "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014), and "The French Dispatch" (2021). In 2017, he portrayed Luca Changretta in the fourth season of the BBC series "Peaky Blinders". In 2022, he portrayed Arthur Miller in the Marilyn Monroe biopic "Blonde" and also starred as Pat Riley in the first season of the HBO sports drama series "".


title: Adrien Brody

text: Brody was born in Woodhaven, Queens, New York City, the son of Sylvia Plachy, a photographer, and Elliot Brody, a retired history professor and painter. Brody's father is of Polish Jewish descent; Brody's mother, who was raised Catholic, was born in Budapest, Hungary, and is the daughter of a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat father and a Czech Jewish mother, although Brody says he was raised "without a strong connection" to either Judaism or Christianity.


title: Adrien Brody

text: As a child, Brody performed magic shows at children's birthday parties as "The Amazing Adrien". He attended I.S. 145 Joseph Pulitzer Middle School and New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. His parents enrolled him in acting classes to distance him from the dangerous children with whom he associated. He attended summer camp at Long Lake Camp for the Arts in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Brody attended Stony Brook University before transferring to Queens College for a semester.


title: Adrien Brody

text: Taking acting classes as a child, by age thirteen, he appeared in an Off-Broadway play and a PBS television film. After appearing in "Bullet" in 1996 with Tupac Shakur and Mickey Rourke, Brody hovered on the brink of stardom, receiving an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his role in the 1998 film "Restaurant", and later praise for his roles in Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" and Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line". He received widespread recognition when he was cast as the lead in Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" (2002). To prepare for the role, Brody withdrew for months, gave up his apartment and his car, broke up with his then-girlfriend, learned how to play Chopin on the piano; at tall, he lost , dropping him to . The role won him an Academy Award for Best Actor, making him, at age twenty nine, the youngest actor ever to win the award, and, to date, the only winner under the age of thirty. He also won a César Award for his performance.


title: Adrien Brody

text: Brody appeared on "Saturday Night Live" on May 10, 2003, his first TV work. During this appearance, he controversially gave an improvised introduction for Jamaican reggae musical guest Sean Paul, while wearing faux dreadlocks and using a Jamaican accent. Brody did so without permission of producer Lorne Michaels, causing him to be banned from "Saturday Night Live". Other TV appearances include NBC's "The Today Show", and on MTV's "Punk'd" after being tricked by Ashton Kutcher.


title: Adrien Brody

text: After "The Pianist", Brody appeared in four very different films. In "Dummy" (released in 2003, but originally shot in 2000, just prior to his work in "The Pianist"), he portrayed Steven Schoichet, a socially awkward aspiring ventriloquist in pursuit of a love interest (his employment counsellor). He learned ventriloquism and puppetry for the role (under the tutelage of actor/ventriloquist Alan Semok) convincingly enough to perform all of the voice stunts and puppet manipulation live on set in real time, with no subsequent post dubbing. He played Noah Percy, a mentally disabled young man, in the film "The Village", by M. Night Shyamalan, shell-shocked war veteran Jack Starks in "The Jacket", writer Jack Driscoll in the 2005 "King Kong" remake, and father-to-be Peter Whitman in "The Darjeeling Limited" by Wes Anderson. "King Kong" was both a critical and box office success—it grossed $550 million worldwide, and is Brody's most successful film to date, financially. He reprised his role voicing Driscoll in the video game adaptation of the film. Additionally, Brody played a detective in "Hollywoodland". He has also appeared in Diet Coke and Schweppes commercials, as well as Tori Amos' music video for "A Sorta Fairytale".


title: Adrien Brody

text: On January 5, 2006, Brody confirmed speculation that he was interested in playing the role of The Joker in 2008's "The Dark Knight". and also met with director Christopher Nolan. However, Nolan and Warner Bros. decided instead to cast Heath Ledger in the role. He was also in talks with Paramount to play Spock in J. J. Abrams' "Star Trek", but it ultimately went to Zachary Quinto. In 2009, he starred in "Splice", a science-fiction film written and directed by Vincenzo Natali. Originally a Sundance film, "Splice" was adopted by Dark Castle Entertainment and distributed by Warner Bros. In 2010, he played the star role of Royce in "Predators" (a sequel to the original "Predator"), directed by Nimród Antal and produced by Robert Rodriguez.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In 2011, Brody starred in a Stella Artois beer ad called "Crying Jean" that premiered right after half-time of Super Bowl XLV as part of Stella's "She Is a Thing of Beauty" campaign. He appeared in Woody Allen's 2011 Academy Award-winning comedy, "Midnight in Paris" as Salvador Dalí. On January 16, 2012, Brody made his debut as a runway model for Prada Men Fall/Winter 2012 show.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In 2014, Brody collaborated again with Wes Anderson in the Academy Award-winning "The Grand Budapest Hotel", where he played Dmitri. He received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or in a Movie for portraying the title character in "Houdini" a History miniseries. The same year Brody was cast as the title role of Lee Tamahori's action epic "Emperor," about a young woman seeking revenge for the execution of her father by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, opposite Sophie Cookson. The movie was finished and screened at Cannes in 2017 but its release has been by legal challenges.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In 2015, he starred as Tiberius in the Chinese film "Dragon Blade", which grossed $54.8 million in its opening week in China. He also received the Cinema Vanguard award at the San Diego Film Festival the same year.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In 2017, it was announced that he would join the cast of the fourth season of the BBC crime drama "Peaky Blinders". On August 4, 2017, he received the Leopard Club Award at the Locarno Festival. The Leopard Club Award pays homage to a major film personality whose work has made a lasting impact on the collective imagination.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In 1992, Brody was seriously hurt in a motorcycle accident in which he flew over a car and crashed head-first into a crosswalk. He spent months recuperating. He has broken his nose three times doing stunts, including during the filming of "Summer of Sam".


title: Adrien Brody

text: Brody began dating Spanish actress and model Elsa Pataky in 2006. For Pataky's 31st birthday in July 2007, Brody purchased for her a 19th-century farm in Central New York state that was remodeled to look like a castle. Brody and Pataky were featured at their New York home in a 35-page spread for "HELLO!" magazine in October 2008. The pair broke up in 2009.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In 2009, Brody signed a petition which called for the release of Roman Polanski, during his arrest in Switzerland for his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.


title: Adrien Brody

text: In February 2020, it was reported that he was in a relationship with English fashion designer and actress Georgina Chapman, former wife of Harvey Weinstein.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Hans Florian Zimmer (; born 12 September 1957) is a German film score composer and music producer. He has won two Oscars and four Grammys, and has been nominated for two Emmys and a Tony. Zimmer was also named on the list of Top 100 Living Geniuses, published by "The Daily Telegraph".


title: Hans Zimmer

text: His works are notable for integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements. Since the 1980s, Zimmer has composed music for over 150 films. His works include "The Lion King" (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1995), "Gladiator", "The Last Samurai", the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, "The Dark Knight" trilogy, "Inception", "Interstellar" and "Dunkirk". He won a second Academy Award for "Dune" in 2022.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer spent the early part of his career in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. He is the head of the film music division at DreamWorks Pictures and DreamWorks Animation studios and works with other composers through the company that he founded, Remote Control Productions, formerly known as Media Ventures. His studio in Santa Monica, California has an extensive range of computer equipment and keyboards, allowing demo versions of film scores to be created quickly.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer was born on 12 September 1957 in Frankfurt, West Germany. As a young child, he lived in Königstein-Falkenstein, where he played the piano at home but had piano lessons only briefly, as he disliked the discipline of formal lessons. In one of his Reddit AMAs, he said: "My formal training was two weeks of piano lessons. I was thrown out of eight schools. But I joined a band. I am self-taught. But I've always heard music in my head. And I'm a child of the 20th century; computers came in very handy." Zimmer attended the Ecole D'Humanité, an international boarding school in Canton Bern, Switzerland. He moved to London as a teenager, where he attended Hurtwood House school. During his childhood, he was strongly influenced by the film scores of Ennio Morricone and has cited "Once Upon a Time in the West" as the score that inspired him to become a film composer.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In a speech at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, Zimmer stated that he is Jewish, and talked about his mother surviving World War II thanks to her escape from Germany to England in 1939. In an interview in May 2014, Zimmer revealed that it was difficult growing up in post-War Germany being Jewish and said, "I think my parents were always wary of me telling the neighbors" that they were Jewish. In an interview with Mashable in February 2013, he said of his parents: "My mother was very musical, basically a musician and my father was an engineer and an inventor. So I grew up modifying the piano, shall we say, which made my mother gasp in horror, and my father would think it was fantastic when I would attach chainsaws and stuff like that to the piano because he thought it was an evolution in technology." In an interview with the German television station ZDF in 2006, he commented: "My father died when I was just a child, and I escaped somehow into the music and music has been my best friend."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer began his career playing keyboards and synthesizers in the 1970s, with the band Krakatoa. He worked with the Buggles, a new wave band formed in London in 1977 with Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes, and Bruce Woolley. Zimmer can be seen briefly in the Buggles' music video for the 1979 song "Video Killed the Radio Star". After working with the Buggles, he started to work for the Italian group Krisma, a new wave band formed in 1976 with Maurizio Arcieri and Christina Moser. He was a featured synthesist for Krisma's third album, "Cathode Mamma". He has also worked with the band Helden (with Warren Cann from Ultravox). Both Zimmer (on keyboards) and Cann (on drums), were invited to be part of the Spanish group Mecano for a live performance in Segovia (Spain) in 1984. Two songs from this concert were included in the "" album released in 1985 only in Spain. In 1985, he contributed to the Shriekback album "Oil & Gold". In 1980, Zimmer co-produced a single, "History of the World, Part 1," with, and for, UK punk band The Damned, which was also included on their 1980 LP release, "The Black Album", and carried the description of his efforts as "Over-Produced by Hans Zimmer."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: While living in London, Zimmer wrote advertising jingles for Air-Edel Associates. In the 1980s, Zimmer partnered with Stanley Myers, a prolific film composer who wrote the scores for over sixty films. Zimmer and Myers co–founded the London–based Lillie Yard recording studio. Together, Myers and Zimmer worked on fusing the traditional orchestral sound with electronic instruments. Some of the films on which Zimmer and Myers worked are "Moonlighting" (1982), "Success Is the Best Revenge" (1984), "Insignificance" (1985), and "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985). Zimmer's first solo score was "Terminal Exposure" for director Nico Mastorakis in 1987, for which he also wrote the songs. Zimmer acted as score producer for the 1987 film "The Last Emperor", which won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: One of Zimmer's most durable works from his time in the United Kingdom was the theme song for the television game show "Going for Gold", which he composed with Sandy McClelland in 1987. In an interview with the BBC, Zimmer said: ""Going for Gold" was a lot of fun. It's the sort of stuff you do when you don't have a career yet. God, I just felt so lucky because this thing paid my rent for the longest time."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: A turning point in Zimmer's career occurred with the 1988 film "Rain Man". Hollywood director Barry Levinson was looking for someone to score "Rain Man", and his wife heard the soundtrack CD of the anti-apartheid drama "A World Apart", for which Zimmer had composed the music. Levinson was impressed by Zimmer's work and hired him to score "Rain Man". In the score, Zimmer uses synthesizers (mostly a Fairlight CMI) mixed with steel drums. Zimmer explained that "It was a road movie, and road movies usually have jangly guitars or a bunch of strings. I kept thinking don't be bigger than the characters. Try to keep it contained. The Raymond character doesn't actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don't we just invent our own world music for a world that doesn't really exist?" Zimmer's score for "Rain Man" was nominated for an Academy Award in 1989, and the film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: A year after "Rain Man", Zimmer was asked to compose the score for Bruce Beresford's "Driving Miss Daisy" which, like "Rain Man", won an Academy Award for Best Picture. "Driving Miss Daisy"'s instrumentation consisted entirely of synthesizers and samplers, played by Zimmer. According to an interview with "Sound on Sound" magazine in 2002, the piano sounds heard within the score come from the Roland MKS–20, a rackmount synthesizer. Zimmer joked: "It didn't sound anything like a piano, but it behaved like a piano."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: The soundtrack to Ridley Scott's 1991 film "Thelma & Louise" by Zimmer featured the trademark slide guitar performance by Pete Haycock on the "Thunderbird" theme in the film. As a teenager, Zimmer was a fan of Haycock, and their collaboration on film scores includes "K2" and "Drop Zone".


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer wrote the theme for Tony Scott's 1993 film "True Romance", which he based on Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer". "Gassenhauer" had previously been used in the 1973 film "Badlands", which had a similar story of a young man and a girl on the run following a violent crime. The catchy theme, played on nine marimbas, contrasts starkly with the violence of the film.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: For the 1992 film "The Power of One", Zimmer traveled to Africa in order to use African choirs and drums in the recording of the score. On the strength of this work, Walt Disney Feature Animation approached Zimmer to compose the score for the 1994 film "The Lion King". This was to be his first score for an animated film. Zimmer said that he had wanted to go to South Africa to record parts of the soundtrack, but was unable to visit the country as he had a police record there "for doing 'subversive' movies" after his work on "The Power of One". Disney studio bosses expressed fears that Zimmer would be killed if he went to South Africa, so the recording of the choirs was organized during a visit by Lebo M. Zimmer won numerous awards for his work on "The Lion King", including an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, and two Grammys. In 1997, the score was adapted into a Broadway musical version which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1998.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: , the musical version of "The Lion King" is the highest grossing Broadway show of all time, having grossed $853.8 million.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer's score for Tony Scott's 1995 film "Crimson Tide" won a Grammy Award for the main theme, which makes heavy use of synthesizers in place of traditional orchestral instruments. For "The Thin Red Line" (1998), Zimmer said that the director Terrence Malick wanted the music before he started filming, so he recorded six and a half hours of music. Zimmer's next project was "The Prince of Egypt" (1998), which was produced by DreamWorks Animation. He introduced Ofra Haza, an Israeli Yemenite singer, to the directors, and they thought she was so beautiful that they designed one of the characters in the film to look like her.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer's score for the 1998 film "The Thin Red Line" is regarded as one of his most important works. The nine-minute cue at the climax of the film, "The Journey to the Line", uses a recurring theme based on four chords, combined with a "ticking clock" motif that has been featured in a range of subsequent scores composed by Zimmer. The piece has been used in numerous trailers and video games, and has earned the nickname "the forbidden cue" due to the tendency of film makers to use it as a temp track for dramatic scenes.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In the 2000s, Zimmer composed scores for Hollywood blockbuster films including three Ridley Scott films, "Gladiator" (2000), "Black Hawk Down" and "Hannibal" (2001), followed by "The Last Samurai" (2003), "Madagascar" (2005), "The Da Vinci Code" (2006), "The Simpsons Movie" (2007), "Kung Fu Panda" (2008), which he co-composed with John Powell, "Angels & Demons" (2009), and "Sherlock Holmes" (2009). Other work in the 2000s included the Spanish language film "Casi Divas", and "The Burning Plain" (2009). He composed the theme for the television boxing series "The Contender" and worked with Lorne Balfe on the music for "", which was his first video game project. Zimmer also collaborated with composers Borislav Slavov and Tilman Sillescu to create the score for the video game "Crysis 2".


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In October 2000, Zimmer performed live in concert for the first time with an orchestra and choir at the 27th Annual Flanders International Film Festival in Ghent. While writing the score for "The Last Samurai", Zimmer felt that his knowledge of Japanese music was extremely limited. He began doing extensive research, but the more he studied, the less he felt he knew. Finally, Zimmer took what he had written to Japan for feedback and was shocked when he was asked how he knew so much about Japanese music.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: During the scoring of "The Last Samurai" in early 2003, Zimmer was approached by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with whom he had worked previously on "Crimson Tide", "Days of Thunder", "The Rock," and "Pearl Harbor". Bruckheimer had finished shooting "" but was unhappy with the music composed for the film by Alan Silvestri and wanted a replacement score. Bruckheimer wanted Zimmer to rescore the film, but due to his commitments on "The Last Samurai", the task of composing and supervising music for "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" was given to Klaus Badelt, one of Zimmer's colleagues at Media Ventures. Zimmer provided some themes that were used in the film, although he is not credited on screen. Zimmer was hired as the composer for the three subsequent films in the series, "" (2006), "" (2007), and "" (2011), collaborating with Rodrigo y Gabriela for the last.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer is also noted for his work on the scores of Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" (2005) and "The Dark Knight" (2008), which he co-composed with James Newton Howard. For the soundtrack of "The Dark Knight", Zimmer decided to represent the character of The Joker by a single note played on the cello by his long-time colleague Martin Tillman. Zimmer commented "I wanted to write something people would truly hate." The scores for these films were disqualified from receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score due to too many composers being listed on the cue sheet. Zimmer succeeded in reversing the decision not to nominate "The Dark Knight" in December 2008, arguing that the process of creating a modern film score was collaborative and that it was important to credit a range of people who had played a part in its production. Zimmer explained his approach to scoring with other musicians in an interview with "Soundtrack.net" in 2006:


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Originally I had this idea that it should be possible to create some kind of community around this kind of work, and I think by muddying the titles – not having "you are the composer, you are the arranger, you are the orchestrator" – it just sort of helped us to work more collaboratively. It wasn't that important to me that I had "score by Hans Zimmer" and took sole credit on these things. It's like "Gladiator": I gave Lisa Gerrard the co-credit because, even though she didn't write the main theme, her presence and contributions were very influential. She was more than just a soloist, and this is why I have such a problem with specific credits.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: For the 2009 film "Sherlock Holmes", "Daily Variety" reported that Zimmer purchased an out-of-tune piano for 200 dollars and used it throughout the scoring process because of its "quirkiness". For the 2011 sequel, "", Zimmer and director Guy Ritchie incorporated authentic Romani music, which they researched by visiting Slovakia, Italy, and France. The music in the film is played by Romani virtuoso musicians.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: For the 2010 film "Inception", Zimmer used electronic manipulation of the song "Non, je ne regrette rien". The horn sound in the score, described by Zimmer as "like huge foghorns over a city" became a popular feature in film trailers. "It's funny how that sort of thing becomes part of the zeitgeist," he said. "But I suppose that's exactly what trailers are looking for: something iconic, lasts less than a second, and shakes the seats in the theater."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In 2012, Zimmer composed and produced the music for the 84th Academy Awards with Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes. He also composed a new version of the theme music for "ABC World News". Zimmer also composed the score for "The Dark Knight Rises", the final installment of Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" Trilogy. The film was released in July 2012. Zimmer described himself as "devastated" in the aftermath of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting, which occurred at a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises", commenting, "I just feel so incredibly sad for these people." He recorded a track entitled "Aurora", a choral arrangement of a theme from the "Dark Knight Rises" soundtrack, to raise money for the victims of the shooting.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer co-composed the music for the television series "The Bible", which was broadcast in March 2013, with Lorne Balfe and Lisa Gerrard, and the score for "12 Years a Slave", which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in March 2014. Zimmer composed the "Tomorrowland Hymn" for the Tomorrowland festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary in July 2014.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer composed the music for the 2014 film "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" alongside "The Magnificent Six", which consisted of Pharrell Williams, Johnny Marr, Michael Einziger, Junkie XL, Andrew Kawczynski, and Steve Mazzaro.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer also composed the music for Christopher Nolan's 2014 film "Interstellar", which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. He partnered with Junkie XL to compose the music for the 2016 film "". In an interview with BBC News in March 2016, Zimmer said that he was retiring from composing the music for superhero films, saying of "Batman v Superman": "This one was very hard for me to do, to try to find new language".


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer composed the main theme for the 2016 BBC nature documentary "Planet Earth II", presented by David Attenborough. He later composed the score for the 2017 BBC nature documentary "Blue Planet II" alongside Jacob Shea and David Fleming, also presented by David Attenborough. In an interview with Kirsty Wark on BBC Radio, Zimmer said in October 2022: "I think the only work that I've done that's worth anything is working for Sir David Attenborough on those programmes, because it's the only thing that actually means something to this world and ultimately might have an impact on how we approach this world."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer composed the main theme for the 2016 Netflix production "The Crown". Also in 2016 Zimmer released an online course teaching the basics of film scoring. He next composed the score for Christopher Nolan's 2017 film "Dunkirk", basing part of the score on a recording of a ticking watch that he had been given by Nolan. Zimmer also worked on the score for Denis Villeneuve's "Blade Runner 2049". Hans Zimmer and co-composer Benjamin Wallfisch took over scoring duties after Jóhann Jóhannsson left the project.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In 2018, Zimmer composed the score for the new FIFA Anthem, called "Living Football" in reference to the new motto of FIFA, "Living Football" was also used as television intro theme for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia. Also in 2018, Zimmer remixed the UEFA Champions League Anthem with rapper Vince Staples for EA Sports' "FIFA" video game "FIFA 19", with it also featuring in the game's reveal trailer. Zimmer composed the score for "Dark Phoenix", directed by Simon Kinberg, contrary to his 2016 statements of not scoring another superhero film following his experience working on "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice". Also for 2019, he scored the photorealistic computer-animated remake of Disney's "The Lion King", directed by Jon Favreau.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: On 22 August 2018, Zimmer was also announced as the composer for "Wonder Woman 1984". On 18 March 2019, it was announced that Zimmer would be scoring Denis Villeneuve's "Dune". In June 2019, Zimmer was hired to create sounds for BMW's concept vehicle, the Vision M Next.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: On 6 January 2020, it was announced that he would be taking over as composer for the "James Bond" film "No Time to Die" after previous composer Dan Romer left the project. Speaking on scoring for "No Time To Die", Zimmer told "The Hindu", "Having done the three "Batman" movies — which are three movies to you but are 12 years of my life to me — I really understand where Daniel [Craig] was with this; he dedicated 16 years of his life to Bond... I wanted to not only do a good score but dig a little deeper and honour the man, the work and all the people who've been working on this for so long."


title: Hans Zimmer

text: On 26 February 2020, Major League Soccer released an anthem for its 25th season, which was composed by Zimmer.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer also composed the score for the film "Dune", which earned him his second Academy Award for Best Original Score. He is also set to compose the score for the . In 2022 he collaborated with Camila Cabello on the song "Take Me Back Home" for the documentary series "Frozen Planet II".


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer has also produced and composed sounds for BMW's electric car line. These sounds are both for those on the interior and on the exterior, and could help warn pedestrians that an electric car is approching.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer's first wife was model Vicki Carolin, with whom he has a daughter. The couple divorced in 1992. On 3 April 2020, Zimmer filed for divorce from his second wife, Suzanne Zimmer, with whom he has three children.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: Zimmer has received a range of honors and awards, including the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award at Hollywood in Vienna in 2018, the Career Achievement Award "for excellence in film music composition" from the National Board of Review in 2003, the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2003, the ASCAP Henry Mancini Award in 2003, and the Richard Kirk Career Achievement Award from the BMI Film Music Awards in 1996.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In December 2010, Zimmer received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He dedicated the award to his publicist and long-term friend Ronni Chasen, who had been shot and killed in Beverly Hills the previous month.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In 2016, Zimmer was one of the inaugural winners of the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.


title: Hans Zimmer

text: In November 2017, a main-belt asteroid——discovered by Polish astronomers Michał Kusiak and Michał Żołnowski, was named "Hanszimmer".


title: Hans Zimmer

text: As of 2022, Zimmer has received twelve Academy Award nominations for his work, with two wins; the first being at the 67th Academy Awards for the 1994 film "The Lion King" and the second being for the 2021 film "Dune" at the 94th Academy Awards.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work "Syntactic Structures", which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in "Manufacturing Consent", and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. Chomsky began teaching at the University of Arizona in 2017.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: One of the most cited scholars alive, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarship, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary state capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ze'ev "William" Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants. William had fled the Russian Empire in 1913 to escape conscription and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending university. After moving to Philadelphia, William became principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He placed great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, concerned about improving and enhancing the world, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a mission that shaped and was subsequently adopted by his son. Elsie was a teacher and activist born in Belarus. They met at Mikveh Israel, where they both worked.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Noam (born 1928) was the Chomskys' first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky (1934–2021), was born five years later, and worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia. The brothers were close, though David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. Chomsky and his brother were raised Jewish, being taught Hebrew and regularly involved with discussing the political theories of Zionism; the family was particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am. Chomsky faced antisemitism as a child, particularly from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky attended the independent, Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia's Central High School, where he excelled academically and joined various clubs and societies, but was troubled by the school's hierarchical and regimented teaching methods. He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats" with center-left politics, but relatives involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union exposed him to socialism and far-left politics. He was substantially influenced by his uncle and the Jewish leftists who frequented his New York City newspaper stand to debate current affairs. Chomsky himself often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores when visiting his uncle in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He wrote his first article at age 10 on the spread of fascism following the fall of Barcelona (Feb. 1939) during the Spanish Civil War and, from the age of 12 or 13, identified with anarchist politics, as well as the "anti-Bolshevik Left." He later described his discovery of anarchism as "a lucky accident" that made him critical of Stalinism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic. Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew. Frustrated with his experiences at the university, he considered dropping out and moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine, but his intellectual curiosity was reawakened through conversations with the Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris, whom he first met in a political circle in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in the subject. Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language. Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book. He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: From 1951 to 1955 Chomsky was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he undertook research on what became his doctoral dissertation. Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply, Chomsky was attracted to Harvard in part because the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was based there. Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford, strongly influenced Chomsky. In 1952 Chomsky published his first academic article, "Systems of Syntactic Analysis", which appeared not in a journal of linguistics but in "The Journal of Symbolic Logic". Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954 he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory". Harvard professor George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics. Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In 1947 Chomsky began a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since early childhood. They married in 1949. After Chomsky was made a Fellow at Harvard, the couple moved to the Allston area of Boston and remained there until 1965, when they relocated to the suburb of Lexington. In 1953 the couple took a Harvard travel grant to Europe, from the United Kingdom through France, Switzerland into Italy, and Israel, where they lived in Hashomer Hatzair's HaZore'a kibbutz. Despite enjoying himself, Chomsky was appalled by the country's Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab racism and, within the kibbutz's leftist community, pro-Stalinism.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: On visits to New York City, Chomsky continued to frequent the office of the Yiddish anarchist journal "Fraye Arbeter Shtime" and became enamored with the ideas of Rudolf Rocker, a contributor whose work introduced Chomsky to the link between anarchism and classical liberalism. Chomsky also read other political thinkers: the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg. His readings convinced him of the desirability of an anarcho-syndicalist society, and he became fascinated by the anarcho-syndicalist communes set up during the Spanish Civil War, as documented in Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" (1938). He read the leftist journal "Politics", which furthered his interest in anarchism, and the council communist periodical "Living Marxism", though he rejected the orthodoxy of its editor, Paul Mattick.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. At MIT, Chomsky spent half his time on a mechanical translation project and half teaching a course on linguistics and philosophy. He described MIT as "a pretty free and open place, open to experimentation and without rigid requirements. It was just perfect for someone of my idiosyncratic interests and work." In 1957 MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor, and from 1957 to 1958 he was also employed by Columbia University as a visiting professor. The Chomskys had their first child that same year, a daughter named Aviva. He also published his first book on linguistics, "Syntactic Structures", a work that radically opposed the dominant Harris–Bloomfield trend in the field. Responses to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. The linguist John Lyons later asserted that "Syntactic Structures" "revolutionized the scientific study of language". From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In 1959, Chomsky published a review of B. F. Skinner's 1957 book "Verbal Behavior" in the academic journal "Language", in which he argued against Skinner's view of language as learned behavior. The review argued that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics and helped to establish Chomsky as an intellectual. With Halle, Chomsky proceeded to found MIT's graduate program in linguistics. In 1961 he was awarded tenure, becoming a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Chomsky went on to be appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which established him as the "de facto" spokesperson of American linguistics. Between 1963 and 1965 he consulted on a military-sponsored project "to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control"; Barbara Partee, a collaborator on this project and then-student of Chomsky, has said this research was justified to the military on the basis that "in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program."


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, including in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965), "Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar" (1966), and "" (1966). Along with Halle, he also edited the "Studies in Language" series of books for Harper and Row. As he began to accrue significant academic recognition and honors for his work, Chomsky lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. His Beckman lectures at Berkeley were assembled and published as "Language and Mind" in 1968. Despite his growing stature, an intellectual falling-out between Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doctoral students—including Paul Postal, John "Haj" Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley—triggered a series of academic debates that came to be known as the "Linguistics Wars", although they revolved largely around philosophical issues rather than linguistics proper.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky joined protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes. His 1967 critique of U.S. involvement, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", among other contributions to "The New York Review of Books", debuted Chomsky as a public dissident. This essay and other political articles were collected and published in 1969 as part of Chomsky's first political book, "American Power and the New Mandarins". He followed this with further political books, including "At War with Asia" (1970), "The Backroom Boys" (1973), "For Reasons of State" (1973), and "Peace in the Middle East?" (1974), published by Pantheon Books. These publications led to Chomsky's association with the American New Left movement, though he thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and preferred the company of activists to that of intellectuals. Chomsky remained largely ignored by the mainstream press throughout this period.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: He also became involved in left-wing activism. Chomsky refused to pay half his taxes, publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested while participating an anti-war teach-in outside the Pentagon. During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collective RESIST with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald. Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests, Chomsky gave many lectures to student activist groups and, with his colleague Louis Kampf, ran undergraduate courses on politics at MIT independently of the conservative-dominated political science department. When student activists campaigned to stop weapons and counterinsurgency research at MIT, Chomsky was sympathetic but felt that the research should remain under MIT's oversight and limited to systems of deterrence and defense. Chomsky has acknowledged that his MIT lab's funding at this time came from the military. He later said he considered resigning from MIT during the Vietnam War. There has since been a wide-ranging debate about what effects Chomsky's employment at MIT had on his political and linguistic ideas.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Because of his anti-war activism, Chomsky was arrested on multiple occasions and included on President Richard Nixon's master list of political opponents. Chomsky was aware of the potential repercussions of his civil disobedience, and his wife began studying for her own doctorate in linguistics to support the family in the event of Chomsky's imprisonment or joblessness. Chomsky's scientific reputation insulated him from administrative action based on his beliefs. In 1970 he visited southeast Asia to lecture at Vietnam's Hanoi University of Science and Technology and toured war refugee camps in Laos. In 1973 he helped lead a committee commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War Resisters League.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: His work in linguistics continued to gain international recognition as he received multiple honorary doctorates. He delivered public lectures at the University of Cambridge, Columbia University (Woodbridge Lectures), and Stanford University. His appearance in a 1971 debate with French continental philosopher Michel Foucault positioned Chomsky as a symbolic figurehead of analytic philosophy. He continued to publish extensively on linguistics, producing "Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar" (1972), an enlarged edition of "Language and Mind" (1972), and "Reflections on Language" (1975). In 1974 Chomsky became a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In the late 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky's linguistic publications expanded and clarified his earlier work, addressing his critics and updating his grammatical theory. His political talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized the Israeli government and military. In the early 1970s Chomsky began collaborating with Edward S. Herman, who had also published critiques of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Together they wrote "", a book that criticized U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and the mainstream media's failure to cover it. Warner Modular published it in 1973, but its parent company disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies destroyed.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from Michael Albert's South End Press, an activist-oriented publishing company. In 1979, South End published Chomsky and Herman's revised "Counter-Revolutionary Violence" as the two-volume "The Political Economy of Human Rights", which compares U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. It argues that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on events in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy. Chomsky's response included two testimonials before the United Nations' Special Committee on Decolonization, successful encouragement for American media to cover the occupation, and meetings with refugees in Lisbon. The Marxist academic Steven Lukes publicly accused Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader Pol Pot. Herman said that the controversy "imposed a serious personal cost" on Chomsky, Chomsky said that "conformist intellectuals of East or West" deal with dissident opinion by trying "to overwhelm it with a flood of lies". He regarded the personal criticism as less important than the evidence that "mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified the crimes of their own states".


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial. Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book . Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations. Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled "Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers". The Faurisson affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career, especially in France.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In 1985, during the Nicaraguan Contra War—in which the U.S. supported the contra militia against the Sandinista government—Chomsky traveled to Managua to meet with workers' organizations and refugees of the conflict, giving public lectures on politics and linguistics. Many of these lectures were published in 1987 as "On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures". In 1983 he published "The Fateful Triangle", which argued that the U.S. had continually used the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for its own ends. In 1988, Chomsky visited the Palestinian territories to witness the impact of Israeli occupation.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky and Herman's "" (1988) outlines their propaganda model for understanding mainstream media. Even in countries without official censorship, they argued, the news is censored through five filters that greatly influence both what and how news is presented. The book was inspired by Alex Carey and adapted into . In 1989, Chomsky published "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies," in which he suggests that a worthwhile democracy requires that its citizens undertake intellectual self-defense against the media and elite intellectual culture that seeks to control them. By the 1980s, Chomsky's students had become prominent linguists who, in turn, expanded and revised his linguistic theories.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before. Retaining his commitment to the cause of East Timorese independence, in 1995 he visited Australia to talk on the issue at the behest of the East Timorese Relief Association and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance. The lectures he gave on the subject were published as "Powers and Prospects" in 1996. As a result of the international publicity Chomsky generated, his biographer Wolfgang Sperlich opined that he did more to aid the cause of East Timorese independence than anyone but the investigative journalist John Pilger. After East Timor attained independence from Indonesia in 1999, the Australian-led International Force for East Timor arrived as a peacekeeping force; Chomsky was critical of this, believing it was designed to secure Australian access to East Timor's oil and gas reserves under the Timor Gap Treaty.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky was widely interviewed after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as the American public attempted to make sense of the attacks. He argued that the ensuing War on Terror was not a new development but a continuation of U.S. foreign policy and concomitant rhetoric since at least the Reagan era. He gave the D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in 2001, and in 2003 visited Cuba at the invitation of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists. Chomsky's 2003 "Hegemony or Survival" articulated what he called the United States' "imperial grand strategy" and critiqued the Iraq War and other aspects of the War on Terror. Chomsky toured internationally with greater regularity during this period.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002, but continued to conduct research and seminars on campus as an emeritus. That same year he visited Turkey to attend the trial of a publisher who had been accused of treason for printing one of Chomsky's books; Chomsky insisted on being a co-defendant and amid international media attention, the Security Courts dropped the charge on the first day. During that trip Chomsky visited Kurdish areas of Turkey and spoke out in favor of the Kurds' human rights. A supporter of the World Social Forum, he attended its conferences in Brazil in both 2002 and 2003, also attending the Forum event in India.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky supported the 2011 Occupy movement. He spoke at encampments and produced two works that chronicled its influence: "Occupy" (2012), a pamphlet, and "Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity" (2013). He attributed Occupy's growth to a perception that the Democratic Party had abandoned the interests of the white working class. In March 2014, Chomsky joined the advisory council of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an organization that advocates the global abolition of nuclear weapons, as a senior fellow. The 2015 documentary "Requiem for the American Dream" summarizes his views on capitalism and economic inequality through a "75-minute teach-in".


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In 2017, Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona in Tucson and was later hired as a part-time professor in the linguistics department there, with his duties including teaching and public seminars. His salary is covered by philanthropic donations.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins in 2018.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In March 2022, Chomsky called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a "major war crime", ranking alongside the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the German–Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, adding, "It always makes sense to seek explanations, but there is no justification, no extenuation." In October 2022, he called on the U.S. to stop "undermining negotiations" between Ukraine and Russia.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Since the 1960s Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages. He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a "poverty of the stimulus": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language. To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky referred to this difference in capacity as the language acquisition device, and suggested that linguists needed to determine both what that device is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute "universal grammar". Multiple scholars have challenged universal grammar on the grounds of the evolutionary infeasibility of its genetic basis for language, the lack of universal characteristics between languages, and the unproven link between innate/universal structures and the structures of specific languages. Scholar Michael Tomasello has challenged Chomsky's theory of innate syntactic knowledge as based on theory and not behavioral observation. Although it was influential from 1960s through 1990s, Chomsky's nativist theory was ultimately rejected by the mainstream child language acquisition research community owing to its inconsistency with research evidence. It was also argued by linguists including Robert Freidin, Geoffrey Sampson, Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara Scholz that Chomsky's linguistic evidence for it had been false.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Transformational-generative grammar is a broad theory used to model, encode, and deduce a native speaker's linguistic capabilities. These models, or "formal grammars", show the abstract structures of a specific language as they may relate to structures in other languages. Chomsky developed transformational grammar in the mid-1950s, whereupon it became the dominant syntactic theory in linguistics for two decades. "Transformations" refers to syntactic relationships within language, e.g., being able to infer that the subject between two sentences is the same person. Chomsky's theory posits that language consists of both deep structures and surface structures: Outward-facing surface structures relate phonetic rules into sound, while inward-facing deep structures relate words and conceptual meaning. Transformational-generative grammar uses mathematical notation to express the rules that govern the connection between meaning and sound (deep and surface structures, respectively). By this theory, linguistic principles can mathematically generate potential sentence structures in a language.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: It is a common conception that Chomsky invented transformational-generative grammar, but his actual contribution to it was considered modest at the time when Chomsky first published his theory. In his 1955 dissertation and his 1957 textbook "Syntactic Structures", he presented recent developments in the analysis formulated by Zellig Harris, who was Chomsky's PhD supervisor, and by Charles F. Hockett. Their method is derived from the work of the Danish structural linguist Louis Hjelmslev, who introduced algorithmic grammar to general linguistics. Based on this rule-based notation of grammars, Chomsky grouped logically possible phrase-structure grammar types into a series of four nested subsets and increasingly complex types, together known as the Chomsky hierarchy. This classification remains relevant to formal language theory and theoretical computer science, especially programming language theory, compiler construction, and automata theory.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Following transformational grammar's heyday through the mid-1970s, a derivative government and binding theory became a dominant research framework through the early 1990s, remaining an influential theory, when linguists turned to a "minimalist" approach to grammar. This research focused on the principles and parameters framework, which explained children's ability to learn any language by filling open parameters (a set of universal grammar principles) that adapt as the child encounters linguistic data. The minimalist program, initiated by Chomsky, asks which minimal principles and parameters theory fits most elegantly, naturally, and simply. In an attempt to simplify language into a system that relates meaning and sound using the minimum possible faculties, Chomsky dispenses with concepts such as "deep structure" and "surface structure" and instead emphasizes the plasticity of the brain's neural circuits, with which come an infinite number of concepts, or "logical forms". When exposed to linguistic data, a hearer-speaker's brain proceeds to associate sound and meaning, and the rules of grammar we observe are in fact only the consequences, or side effects, of the way language works. Thus, while much of Chomsky's prior research focused on the rules of language, he now focuses on the mechanisms the brain uses to generate these rules and regulate speech.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition. He usually identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist. He views these positions not as precise political theories but as ideals that he thinks best meet human needs: liberty, community, and freedom of association. Unlike some other socialists, such as Marxists, Chomsky believes that politics lies outside the remit of science, but he still roots his ideas about an ideal society in empirical data and empirically justified theories.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In Chomsky's view, the truth about political realities is systematically distorted or suppressed by an elite corporatocracy, which uses corporate media, advertising, and think tanks to promote its own propaganda. His work seeks to reveal such manipulations and the truth they obscure. Chomsky believes this web of falsehood can be broken by "common sense", critical thinking, and understanding the roles of self-interest and self-deception, and that intellectuals abdicate their moral responsibility to tell the truth about the world in fear of losing prestige and funding. He argues that, as such an intellectual, it is his duty to use his social privilege, resources, and training to aid popular democracy movements in their struggles.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Although he has joined protest marches and organized activist groups, Chomsky's primary political outlets are education and publication. He offers a wide range of political writings as well as free lessons and lectures to encourage wider political consciousness. He is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World international union.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has been a prominent critic of American imperialism and believes that World War II is the only justified war the U.S. has fought in his lifetime. He believes that the basic principle of the foreign policy of the United States is the establishment of "open societies" that are economically and politically controlled by the United States and where U.S.-based businesses can prosper. He argues that the U.S. seeks to suppress any movements within these countries that are not compliant with U.S. interests and to ensure that U.S.-friendly governments are placed in power. When discussing current events, he emphasizes their place within a wider historical perspective. He believes that official, sanctioned historical accounts of U.S. and British extraterritorial operations have consistently whitewashed these nations' actions in order to present them as having benevolent motives in either spreading democracy or, in older instances, spreading Christianity; criticizing these accounts, he seeks to correct them. Prominent examples he regularly cites are the actions of the British Empire in India and Africa and the actions of the U.S. in Vietnam, the Philippines, Latin America, and the Middle East.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's political work has centered heavily on criticizing the actions of the United States. He has said he focuses on the U.S. because the country has militarily and economically dominated the world during his lifetime and because its liberal democratic electoral system allows the citizenry to influence government policy. His hope is that, by spreading awareness of the impact U.S. foreign policies have on the populations affected by them, he can sway the populations of the U.S. and other countries into opposing the policies. He urges people to criticize their governments' motivations, decisions, and actions, to accept responsibility for their own thoughts and actions, and to apply the same standards to others as to themselves.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has been critical of U.S. involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, arguing that it has consistently blocked a peaceful settlement. Chomsky also criticizes the U.S.'s close ties with Saudi Arabia and involvement in Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, highlighting that Saudi Arabia has "one of the most grotesque human rights records in the world".


title: Noam Chomsky

text: In his youth, Chomsky developed a dislike of capitalism and the pursuit of material wealth. At the same time, he developed a disdain for authoritarian socialism, as represented by the Marxist–Leninist policies of the Soviet Union. Rather than accepting the common view among U.S. economists that a spectrum exists between total state ownership of the economy and total private ownership, he instead suggests that a spectrum should be understood between total democratic control of the economy and total autocratic control (whether state or private). He argues that Western capitalist countries are not really democratic, because, in his view, a truly democratic society is one in which all persons have a say in public economic policy. He has stated his opposition to ruling elites, among them institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and GATT (precursor to the WTO).


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky highlights that, since the 1970s, the U.S. has become increasingly economically unequal as a result of the repeal of various financial regulations and the rescinding of the Bretton Woods financial control agreement. He characterizes the U.S. as a "de facto" one-party state, viewing both the Republican Party and Democratic Party as manifestations of a single "Business Party" controlled by corporate and financial interests. Chomsky highlights that, within Western capitalist liberal democracies, at least 80% of the population has no control over economic decisions, which are instead in the hands of a management class and ultimately controlled by a small, wealthy elite.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Noting the entrenchment of such an economic system, Chomsky believes that change is possible through the organized cooperation of large numbers of people who understand the problem and know how they want to reorganize the economy more equitably. Acknowledging that corporate domination of media and government stifles any significant change to this system, he sees reason for optimism in historical examples such as the social rejection of slavery as immoral, the advances in women's rights, and the forcing of government to justify invasions. He views violent revolution to overthrow a government as a last resort to be avoided if possible, citing the example of historical revolutions where the population's welfare has worsened as a result of upheaval.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky sees libertarian socialist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas as the descendants of the classical liberal ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, arguing that his ideological position revolves around "nourishing the libertarian and creative character of the human being". He envisions an anarcho-syndicalist future with direct worker control of the means of production and government by workers' councils, who would select temporary and revocable representatives to meet together at general assemblies. The point of this self-governance is to make each citizen, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a direct participator in the government of affairs." He believes that there will be no need for political parties. By controlling their productive life, he believes that individuals can gain job satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment and purpose. He argues that unpleasant and unpopular jobs could be fully automated, carried out by workers who are specially remunerated, or shared among everyone.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has written prolifically on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, aiming to raise public awareness of it. He has long endorsed a left binationalist program in Israel and Palestine, seeking to create a democratic state in the Levant that is home to both Jews and Arabs. He has called the adoption of the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine "a very bad decision." Nevertheless, given the realpolitik of the situation, he has also considered a two-state solution on the condition that the nation-states exist on equal terms. Chomsky was denied entry to the West Bank in 2010 because of his criticisms of Israel. He had been invited to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University and was to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman later said that Chomsky was denied entry by mistake.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's political writings have largely focused on ideology, social and political power, the media, and state policy. One of his best-known works, "Manufacturing Consent", dissects the media's role in reinforcing and acquiescing to state policies across the political spectrum while marginalizing contrary perspectives. Chomsky asserts that this version of censorship, by government-guided "free market" forces, is subtler and harder to undermine than was the equivalent propaganda system in the Soviet Union. As he argues, the mainstream press is corporate-owned and thus reflects corporate priorities and interests. Acknowledging that many American journalists are dedicated and well-meaning, he argues that the mass media's choices of topics and issues, the unquestioned premises on which that coverage rests, and the range of opinions expressed are all constrained to reinforce the state's ideology: although mass media will criticize individual politicians and political parties, it will not undermine the wider state-corporate nexus of which it is a part. As evidence, he highlights that the U.S. mass media does not employ any socialist journalists or political commentators. He also points to examples of important news stories that the U.S. mainstream media has ignored because reporting on them would reflect badly upon the country, including the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton with possible FBI involvement, the massacres in Nicaragua perpetrated by U.S.-funded Contras, and the constant reporting on Israeli deaths without equivalent coverage of the far larger number of Palestinian deaths in that conflict. To remedy this situation, Chomsky calls for grassroots democratic control and involvement of the media.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky considers most conspiracy theories fruitless, distracting substitutes for thinking about policy formation in an institutional framework, where individual manipulation is secondary to broader social imperatives. While not dismissing them outright, he considers them unproductive to challenging power in a substantial way. In response to the labeling of his own ideas as a conspiracy theory, Chomsky has said that it is very rational for the media to manipulate information in order to sell it, like any other business. He asks whether General Motors would be accused of conspiracy if it deliberately selected what it used or discarded to sell its product.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has also been active in a number of philosophical fields, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. In these fields he is credited with ushering in the "cognitive revolution", a significant paradigm shift that rejected logical positivism, the prevailing philosophical methodology of the time, and reframed how philosophers think about language and the mind. Chomsky views the cognitive revolution as rooted in 17th-century rationalist ideals. His position—the idea that the mind contains inherent structures to understand language, perception, and thought—has more in common with rationalism (Enlightenment and Cartesian) than behaviorism. He named one of his key works "Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought" (1966). This sparked criticism from historians and philosophers who disagreed with Chomsky's interpretations of classical sources and use of philosophical terminology. In the philosophy of language, Chomsky is particularly known for his criticisms of the notion of reference and meaning in human language and his perspective on the nature and function of mental representations.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's famous 1971 debate on human nature with the French philosopher Michel Foucault was symbolic in positioning Chomsky as the prototypical analytic philosopher against Foucault, a stalwart of the continental tradition. It showed what appeared to be irreconcilable differences between two moral and intellectual luminaries of the 20th century. Foucault's position was that of critique, that human nature could not be conceived in terms foreign to present understanding, while Chomsky held that human nature contained universalities such as a common standard of moral justice as deduced through reason based on what rationally serves human necessity. Chomsky criticized postmodernism and French philosophy generally, arguing that the obscure language of postmodern, leftist philosophers gives little aid to the working classes. He has also debated analytic philosophers, including Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Willard Van Orman Quine, and John Searle.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's contributions span intellectual and world history, including the history of philosophy. Irony is a recurring characteristic of his writing, as he often implies that his readers know better, which can make them more engaged in the veracity of his claims.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky endeavors to separate his family life, linguistic scholarship, and political activism from each other. An intensely private person, he is uninterested in appearances and the fame his work has brought him. He also has little interest in modern art and music. McGilvray suggests that Chomsky was never motivated by a desire for fame, but impelled to tell what he perceived as the truth and a desire to aid others in doing so. Chomsky acknowledges that his income affords him a privileged life compared to the majority of the world's population; nevertheless, he characterizes himself as a "worker", albeit one who uses his intellect as his employable skill. He reads four or five newspapers daily; in the US, he subscribes to "The Boston Globe", "The New York Times", "The Wall Street Journal", "Financial Times", and "The Christian Science Monitor". Chomsky is non-religious, but has expressed approval of forms of religion such as liberation theology.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has attracted controversy for calling established political and academic figures "corrupt", "fascist", and "fraudulent". His colleague Steven Pinker has said that he "portrays people who disagree with him as stupid or evil, using withering scorn in his rhetoric", and that this contributes to the extreme reactions he receives from critics. Chomsky avoids attending academic conferences, including left-oriented ones such as the Socialist Scholars Conference, preferring to speak to activist groups or hold university seminars for mass audiences. His approach to academic freedom has led him to support MIT academics whose actions he deplores; in 1969, when Chomsky heard that Walt Rostow, a major architect of the Vietnam war, wanted to return to work at MIT, Chomsky threatened "to protest publicly" if Rostow were denied a position at MIT. In 1989, when Pentagon adviser John Deutch applied to be president of MIT, Chomsky supported his candidacy. Later, when Deutch became head of the CIA, "The New York Times" quoted Chomsky as saying, "He has more honesty and integrity than anyone I've ever met... If somebody's got to be running the CIA, I'm glad it's him."


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky was married to Carol () from 1949 until her death in 2008. They had three children together: Aviva (born 1957), Diane (born 1960), and Harry (born 1967). In 2014, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky has been a defining Western intellectual figure, central to the field of linguistics and definitive in cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, and psychology. In addition to being known as one of the most important intellectuals of his time, Chomsky carries a dual legacy as both a "leader in the field" of linguistics and "a figure of enlightenment and inspiration" for political dissenters. Despite his academic success, his political viewpoints and activism have resulted in his being distrusted by the mainstream media apparatus, and he is regarded as being "on the outer margin of acceptability". The reception of his work is intertwined with his public image as an anarchist, a gadfly, a historian, a Jew, a linguist, and a philosopher.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: McGilvray observes that Chomsky inaugurated the "cognitive revolution" in linguistics, and that he is largely responsible for establishing the field as a formal, natural science, moving it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics dominant during the mid-20th century. As such, some have called Chomsky "the father of modern linguistics". Linguist John Lyons further remarked that within a few decades of publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become "the most dynamic and influential" school of thought in the field. By the 1970s his work had also come to exert a considerable influence on philosophy, and a Minnesota State University Moorhead poll ranked "Syntactic Structures" as the single most important work in cognitive science. In addition, his work in automata theory and the Chomsky hierarchy have become well known in computer science, and he is much cited in computational linguistics.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's criticisms of behaviorism contributed substantially to the decline of behaviorist psychology; in addition, he is generally regarded as one of the primary founders of the field of cognitive science. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results; Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: ACM Turing Award winner Donald Knuth credited Chomsky's work with helping him combine his interests in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science. IBM computer scientist John Backus, another Turing Award winner, used some of Chomsky's concepts to help him develop FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level computer programming language. Chomsky's theory of generative grammar has also influenced work in music theory and analysis.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky is among the most cited authors living or dead. He was cited within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. Chomsky was also extensively cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index during the same period. The librarian who conducted the research said that the statistics show that "he is very widely read across disciplines and that his work is used by researchers across disciplines... it seems that you can't write a paper without citing Noam Chomsky." As a result of his influence, there are dueling camps of Chomskyan and non-Chomskyan linguistics, with the disputes between the two camps often acrimonious. Additionally, according to journalist Maya Jaggi, Chomsky is among the most quoted sources in the humanities, ranking alongside Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's status as the "most-quoted living author" is credited to his political writings, which vastly outnumber his writings on linguistics. Chomsky biographer Wolfgang B. Sperlich characterizes him as "one of the most notable contemporary champions of the people"; journalist John Pilger has described him as a "genuine people's hero; an inspiration for struggles all over the world for that basic decency known as freedom. To a lot of people in the margins—activists and movements—he's unfailingly supportive." Arundhati Roy has called him "one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time", and Edward Said thought him "one of the most significant challengers of unjust power and delusions". Fred Halliday has said that by the start of the 21st century Chomsky had become a "guru" for the world's anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. The propaganda model of media criticism that he and Herman developed has been widely accepted in radical media critiques and adopted to some level in mainstream criticism of the media, also exerting a significant influence on the growth of alternative media, including radio, publishers, and the Internet, which in turn have helped to disseminate his work.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Sperlich also says that Chomsky has been vilified by corporate interests, particularly in the mainstream press. University departments devoted to history and political science rarely include Chomsky's work on their undergraduate syllabi. Critics have argued that despite publishing widely on social and political issues, Chomsky has no formal expertise in these areas; he has responded that such issues are not as complex as many social scientists claim and that almost everyone is able to comprehend them regardless of whether they have been academically trained to do so. According to McGilvray, many of Chomsky's critics "do not bother quoting his work or quote out of context, distort, and create straw men that cannot be supported by Chomsky's text".


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky drew criticism for not calling the Bosnian War's Srebrenica massacre a "genocide". While he did not deny the fact of the massacre, which he called "a horror story and major crime", he felt the massacre did not meet the definition of genocide.


title: Noam Chomsky

text: Chomsky's far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy. A document obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the U.S. government revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) monitored his activities and for years denied doing so. The CIA also destroyed its files on Chomsky at some point, possibly in violation of federal law. He has often received undercover police protection at MIT and when speaking on the Middle East, but has refused uniformed police protection. German news magazine "Der Spiegel" described Chomsky as "the Ayatollah of anti-American hatred", while American conservative commentator David Horowitz called him "the most devious, the most dishonest and ... the most treacherous intellect in America", whose work is infused with "anti-American dementia" and evidences his "pathological hatred of his own country". Writing in "Commentary" magazine, the journalist Jonathan Kay described Chomsky as "a hard-boiled anti-American monomaniac who simply refuses to believe anything that any American leader says".