Noam Chomsky maintained an open-door reputation, talking to anyone who knocked and answering letters. He taught at MIT and received his first email address around 1985. Letters were replaced by a torrent of emails, yet Chomsky continued answering nearly all correspondents and gave out a supposedly "secret" address widely. He engaged thoroughly even with repetitive questioners, and in 2015 Sam Harris pressed him for five days on defining terrorism; Chomsky reluctantly published the exchanges and called publishing personal correspondence "pretty weird, a strange form of exhibitionism." Chomsky stopped speaking in public after a stroke in June 2023. Documents recently released show years-long communication with Jeffrey Epstein, though Chomsky has not been implicated in Epstein's crimes.
"Chomsky earned a reputation early in his career as someone whose door was always open-who talked to anyone who knocked and answered any letter delivered. Then came e-mail. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Chomsky taught from 1955 to 2017, was an early adopter of electronic communication, and he received his first e-mail address, [email protected], around 1985. The stream of letters Chomsky received was largely replaced by a torrent of e-mails."
"I wrote Chomsky cold in the early 1990s, and within a week, I was in his Cambridge office. We spent an hour discussing Iran-contra and death squads, and before I left, he gave me his "secret" e-mail address, [email protected], which, as it turned out, wasn't so secret. He gave that address to everyone anyway. Chomsky stayed engaged no matter how tedious and repetitive his interrogator might be."
Read at The Nation
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