These days it’s just annoying when a person is referred to as an “intellectual.” Most are pseudo-smarties with predictable and usually still-born thoughts regurgitated from some other pseudo-smarty. But if we had to name just one guy worthy of the honorific, it would be Noam Chomsky. Ever since he re-invented linguistics and moved onto bigger social-justice concerns, he’s been a political agitator nonpareil—an itchy thorn in the hoof of all things imperial. Chomsky’s the kind of guy who blows your mind when you’re in high school, and then does it all over again when you’re in your mid-forties—and looking back you wonder what else you’d been reading all that time and who else you’d been listening to. VBS’s Kate Albright-Hannah tracked him down in Belfast, Ireland, and this is what came of it.