A young worker came to replace a light plug in my apartment the other day.  I’d complained about the switch before, but he’d never found the trouble.  This time, it sparked in his hands like a firecracker.  “See,” I laughed, amused by his startled expression. “I wasn’t

I met Noam Chomsky in graduate school.  I say “met” metaphorically.  His work was required reading for my degree.  He had an idea that language was natural to the human brain, then went about proving it with linguistics–an almost mathematical formulation of how languages