Just Announced Noam Chomsky to return to Orpheum Theatre on April 8

We often fancy ourselves “critical scholars” here at The A.V. Club, but we nonetheless feel dwarfed when it comes to famed linguist Noam Chomsky. The man has been critiquing U.S. domestic and foreign policy since the Vietnam era, covering everything from the use of propaganda to manufacture consent to the myth of American exceptionalism in the Obama era. In short, his work seems a tad more scholarly than our last scathing album review. Chomsky will receive the Havens Center Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship (a local honor whose past recipients include labor scholar Frances Fox Piven and the people’s historian himself, Howard Zinn) during an April 8 appearance at the Orpheum Theatre. Admission to the author’s acceptance speech, “The Role Of The Radical Intellectual: Some Personal Reflections” will be free, on a first-come, first-served basis. We'd suggest arriving early to get ahead of the libertarian-socialist groupies sure to pack the house.