Everything I do for a living traces back to two men.
One explained how words work. The other taught me my first ones.
The first man.
The field I work in, computational linguistics, was rebuilt from the ground up by Noam Chomsky. Before him, linguistics was mostly cataloguing. Recording what people said. Sorting sounds into boxes. In 1957 he argued that language is not a habit we pick up but a structure we are born with. That a child in Kuwait and a child in Chile are running the same machine with different settings.
That idea did not stay in linguistics. It built computational linguistics. It built natural language processing. It built the theoretical floor underneath every large language model working today, from Claude to ChatGPT.
And he did it twice. The same man rebuilt how people talk about power. Manufacturing Consent, written with Edward Herman in 1988, argued that in open societies control does not come from censorship. It comes from shaping what feels reasonable to say, so the boundaries feel natural instead of imposed. You do not need to ban an opinion if you can make it unthinkable.
Two fields. One Chomsky.
In June 2023 he had a massive stroke.
He is 97 now. He lives in Brazil. The right side of his body does not work. His assistant of twenty-four years said publicly that he is not communicating much, if at all.
His wife said something that has not left me since I read it. He still watches the news. And when images of Gaza come on the screen, he raises his left arm. The one that still works. A gesture of anger from a man who spent seventy years explaining exactly this, and now has one arm and no sentence.
Look at what arrived while he was quiet.
AI. The thing his own work made possible. He had already called it high-tech plagiarism. Whether he was right is the largest argument in my field right now, and it is being conducted in his absence. Both sides quote him. He cannot correct either one.
Trump and Mamdani. A president promising borders and a mayor promising free buses, and most commentary treats them as opposites. Chomsky’s framework says they came out of the same hole: an economic order that stopped delivering, and anger that had to go somewhere. Upward at corporations and landlords, or sideways and down at immigrants and whoever has less power than you. He said this out loud years ago about Trump and Sanders. Nobody can ask him about this pair.
Gaza. He described the siege for decades. Now he raises an arm at it.
And the Epstein files. Documents released over the past year showed a friendship far closer than his readers understood. He called Epstein a highly valued friend. Months before the arrest he was advising him on how to handle the press. His wife issued a statement admitting serious errors in judgment. She had to write it because he cannot. A man who spent his life mapping how elite networks protect each other cannot explain why he did not see one that walked into his own living room.
The one question that would actually require his voice is the only one he cannot answer.
The second man.
My father did not write books. He built things.
He turned an area that was sand into an area that is green. Trees that are older than my children now. He worked on the mosque. Not from an office. On site. He built things for neighbours who never asked him to, because he saw something broken and could not leave it. Half the people on that street have something in their home that my father made or fixed or paid for quietly.
And he raised me. Which is the accomplishment I use every single day, in every post on this blog, in every argument I win and most of the ones I lose.
He has dementia and Alzheimer’s.
He does not speak anymore. What is left is emotion. Laughter when something reaches him. Sadness when something else does. And silence most of the time.
He cannot say my little one’s name. He has never said it. My son will grow up knowing his grandfather as a man in a chair who sometimes laughs, and he will never hear his own name in that voice.
He cannot see what his grandchildren are becoming. He is in the room while they become it.
And he watches the news. That is the part that undoes me. When Gaza comes on the screen, something changes in his face. He cannot name the place. He cannot say what happened or who did it or what he thinks should be done. But he knows. The anger arrives without the vocabulary. He makes a sound. He turns away. Sometimes he lifts a hand.
Two men, seven thousand miles apart, in two different rooms, watching the same broadcast, raising the same hand at the same thing, and neither one able to say a single word about it.
Two silences. Different causes. Same result. The thoughts are still in there and there is no door.
And here is the irony sitting underneath all of it.
Both silences are described using the first man’s framework.
Aphasia, the loss of language after brain damage, is understood today through the model of grammar Chomsky built. When a neurologist maps which part of a sentence a patient can still produce and which part is gone, they are working inside his system. The language loss in dementia is measured the same way. He gave medicine the vocabulary for exactly this.
So the doctors examining Chomsky are using Chomsky’s tools to measure Chomsky’s silence.
And the doctors who examined my father used those same tools to tell me what he was losing, and in what order, and roughly when the next thing would go.
The man who explained how humans produce sentences also gave us the instrument for measuring their disappearance. He built it. Now it is pointed at both of them.
I sit with my father and watch him react to something on the screen and I know he understood it. I just cannot get to it and he cannot get out. Somewhere in São Paulo, a woman sits in the same room with the same problem, watching a man lift one arm at a news broadcast, knowing what he means and unable to ask him anything else.
One of them built the modern study of how humans make sentences.
The other one taught me my first.
Neither of them can make one now.
And the cruellest part is what the first man taught us.
Manufactured consent rests entirely on who gets to speak and who gets spoken for. He spent seventy years warning about people who are described rather than heard.
Now he is one. His wife speaks for him. His admirers explain what he would say. His critics explain what he really meant. And he sits in a room with the news on, raising one arm.
My father is one too. I speak for him at the hospital. I answer questions about his day that he is sitting right there for.
He explained the machine to us.
Then his own stopped. And so did my father’s.
