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Everyone dies eventually, and famed linguist Noam Chomsky will be no different \u2014 but at the time of this writing, he is alive. And, sadly, his wife is explaining to people that reports of his death are \u201cfalse,\u201d according to The Associated Press<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Chomsky, 95, has been hospitalized in Brazil as he recovers from a stroke he had last year, the AP<\/em> reported earlier this month<\/a>. He\u2019s having difficulty speaking, and \u201cthe right side of his body is affected.\u201d He is being tended to by various specialists. This is not in dispute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Two publications, Jacobin<\/em> and The New Statesman, <\/em>published what appeared to be obituaries. (The New Statesman<\/em> took its post down; Jacobin<\/em> changed its headline from \u201cWe Remember Noam Chomsky\u201d to \u201cLet\u2019s Celebrate Noam Chomsky<\/a>,\u201d and edited its promotional tweet<\/a>, though \u2014 notably \u2014 \u201cobituary\u201d is one of the key words in the article\u2019s URL.) Both The New Statesman<\/em> and Jacobin<\/em> appeared, at first glance, to be reliable sources. Chomsky has written for the former<\/a> and often given interviews to the latter<\/a>. But neither appears to have asked anyone who\u2019d know whether Chomsky was alive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some of the confusion around Chomsky\u2019s state is preserved on a Wikipedia Talk page<\/a>, as editors try to confirm reports of his death. Meanwhile, on social media, users posted old videos<\/a> and other tributes<\/a> in honor of Chomsky\u2019s supposed death<\/a>. Some of the reports of Chomsky\u2019s death were retweeted thousands of times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cInsofar as working people accepted the line fed to them by the media, he [Chomsky] never took it to be because of their docility or their credulousness, but because of the great effort it took to find alternative avenues of information,\u201d wrote Vivek Chibber in Jacobin, <\/em>which is, amusingly, an approving recap of Chomsky\u2019s media criticism. Certainly the media is not above critique, but it is unusual for a piece of media criticism to so thoroughly violate a very basic standard: making sure the subject of an obituary is actually dead before its publication.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Publications often prewrite obituaries of notable people. (For instance, one of the writers of Henry Kissinger\u2019s obituary in The New York Times <\/em>died before Kissinger himself<\/a> did.) Occasionally, those obituaries are accidentally published, as with a Bloomberg<\/em> obituary of Steve Jobs in 2008<\/a>. Typically, these mistakes are retracted, as The New Statesman<\/em> article was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n