Robert F. Barsky in The Conversation:
Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most famous and respected intellectuals, will be 96 years old on Dec. 7, 2024. For more than half a century, multitudes of people have read his works in a variety of languages, and many people have relied on his commentaries and interviews for insights about intellectual debates and current events.
Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023 that has severely limited his movement, impaired his speech and impeded his ability to travel. His birthday provides an occasion to consider the tremendous corpus of works that he created over the years and to reflect on the many ways that his texts and recordings still critically engage with contemporary discussions all across disciplines and realms.
Chomsky’s vast body of work includes scientific research focused on language, human nature and the mind, and political writings about U.S. imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Central America, the Vietnam War, coercive institutions, the media and the many ways in which people’s needs are subjugated in the interest of profit and control.
As a scholar of humanities and law, I’ve engaged with Chomsky’s work from an array of perspectives and authored a biography called “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent” and a book on Chomsky’s influence called “The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower.”
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Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University’s 
Jim and Louise
This book review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled “Love, Joe,” written by the downtown 
JULIEN CROCKETT: You dedicate Playing with Reality to the next generation, writing, “If play is the engine of creation, I cannot wait to see what new worlds you build.” A recurring theme in your book is the primacy of play and games to what it means to be human—that playing games is universal, an instinct. What makes games and play so important to understanding ourselves?
I’m at DealBook Summit in NYC today and I just heard Sam Altman 
Cass Sunstein: Well, I think that one mistake is that people think that universities are covered by the same principles, regardless of whether they’re public or private. And as a legal matter, public universities are governed by the First Amendment and private universities just aren’t. There’s also a lot of talk about incitement without a lot of clarity about what that particularly entails. So if I say something like, “If you don’t buy my book there’s going to be a revolution,” that’s kind of hopelessly useless talk on the part of an author and that would not be regulable as incitement.
Nature’s survey — which took place before the US election in November — together with more than 20 interviews, revealed where some of the biggest obstacles to providing science advice lie. Eighty per cent of respondents thought policymakers lack sufficient understanding of science — but 73% said that researchers don’t understand how policy works. “It’s a constant tension between the scientifically illiterate and the politically clueless,” says Paul Dufour, a policy specialist at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
To wake up one morning
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Philosophers tend to tolerate a high degree of personal strangeness in one another. More specifically, they tend not to worry – at least explicitly or on the record – about whether the weird philosophical beliefs and the weird non-philosophical actions of a colleague might have a common source. The methodological norm rather is that ideas must stand or fall on their intrinsic merits; apart from anything else, this is probably good politics. Making the obvious psychological peculiarities of an author too operative a consideration within academic life might risk implicating an impractically large number of people. (And in that case, one probably wouldn’t trust most of them to apply the relevant criteria accurately anyway.) But this does make philosophy different from other areas of life, where we readily make informative connections, in both directions, between the strangeness of the person and the strangeness of his beliefs, often with a view to discrediting one or the other.
Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has devoted his career to examining how animal minds evolved. He blends formidable analytical skills with a deep curiosity about the natural world, mostly experienced at first hand in his native Australia. While writing his latest book, Living on Earth, he spent many hours scrutinizing noisy parrots and cockatoos in his back garden, weeks observing gobies building underwater towers made of shells and seaweed and years closely watching