The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

Capitalism would self-destruct in no time. So the business classes have always demanded strong, straight intervention to protect the society from the destructive effects of market forces because they don't want everything destroyed.

America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.

[ Republican Party] is correctly described as a "radical insurgency" by one of the leading conservative commentators, Norman Ornstein.

I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.

What happened in the following years? Well, I think that among the educated classes it stayed the same. You talk about humanitarian intervention, it's like Vietnam was a humanitarian intervention. Among the public, it's quite different.