Chomsky at the bit

(jamal saidi/reuters/file 2006)

Let's set aside the sticky little journalistic concept of objectivity for a minute, shall we? After all, when you listen to famed linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky, you're going to hear powerful arguments from one side: his. But you'll also get his thoughtful and impassioned reasons why he thinks he's correct.

Chomsky is a man of two careers. In the first, as a young researcher at MIT in the 1950s, he revolutionized linguistics with his theory of transformational grammar, which showed that humans have an innate ability to learn language. Hundreds of colleagues have built on his groundbreaking research in the decades since, and he is generally considered the father of modern linguistics.

In his second life, Chomsky has been an outspoken, left-leaning intellectual since the 1960s, opposing American wars from Vietnam to Iraq, as well as other incursions abroad. He deeply mistrusts the US government, business and, yes, the press, all of which he sees as serving the same back-slapping capitalist system. Nonetheless, he'll also tell you that America "is the best country in the world" because of its warm embrace of free speech in an open society. Clearly, this is a complicated, driven man, not prone to nuance.

For instance, here's what Chomsky told the BBC in September after the financial markets plummeted and the Federal Reserve rushed to stabilize them: "The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialize cost and risk, and privatize profit, without a public voice." In other words, he contends, the powers-that-be are again taking care of themselves. Chomsky will talk about "What's Next: The US and the World After George Bush" tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. at that longtime home of protesters and iconoclasts, the Arlington Street Church, 351 Boylston St., downtown Boston.

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE CAMERA

Photographer Sally Mann, whose work has spanned the gamut from controversial pictures of her sensualized children to moody landscapes of the Deep South, discusses her art and career on Thursday at 7 p.m. at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave.

UNDERPINNING THOSE SHAKY MARKETS

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has a new book, "The Ascent of Money," that traces how currency, markets, and even insurance developed over time to dominate the global economy. Ferguson, who's also a British intellectual and a conservative columnist, speaks at 7 p.m. tonight at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. JIM CONCANNON