Most of the population in America is disenfranchised. It doesn't matter what they think. Just look at the passionate rhetoric about how we can't stand by when a country uses weapons to kill innocent civilians.

I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial.

Technology is usually fairly neutral. It’s like a hammer, which can be used to build a house or to destroy someone’s home. The hammer doesn’t care. It is almost always up to us to determine whether the technology is good or bad.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.

One should be cautious about "general conceptions." I think a strong case can be made that activism today is as high as ever, perhaps more so, and is also taking new and significant forms. There has never been anything like the international solidarity movements that began to take shape in the 1980s, right in the mainstream, or the global justice movements that have become a very powerful force in later years. It's true that the society is highly atomized, which does induce a sense of hopelessness often - quite mistakenly I think.

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.