In 2002 Steven Pinker spoke to a packed house at Kane Hall on the UW campus. He was on a nationwide book tour to promote his book The Blank Slate. I had just read a review of the book and its author and wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I was not disappointed. Pinker, who is on the faculty at Harvard, is a rock star in the academic world and variously described as an experimental psychologist, an evolutionary psychologist, a cognitive scientist, and a linguist depending on his subject matter or the speaker’s point of view.
