George Orwell
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George Orwell’s Doublethink February 25, 2025
Craig and I are at our son’s third-grade parent-teacher interview. We sit on the miniature chairs, our knees just fitting under the laminex desks. The classroom is festooned with pictures, paintings, geography and maths projects, hanging from every w...
Let It Fly, Low and High January 21, 2025
Tuesday will be seventy-five years since the death of George Orwell. Quite minor a date, but so massive a figure – patron saint of English decency, balletic navigator of twentieth-century tides, nominative source of a new word for ‘bad’ – that we can...
Orwell’s Word to the Wise September 17, 2024
My father Leo is a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet city of Ufa. As his 19-year-old son, I left home for college last year well-versed in the evils of communist double-think, party propaganda, and the disastrous policies wedded to generations of...
In Search of the True Orwell July 17, 2024
In 2022, in the months after Russia’s President Putin announced his “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine, George Orwell’s 1984 rocketed up the charts to become the top-selling e-book in Russia—and no wonder! The verbal gymnastics employ...
1984 in 2024: Orwell Was Right June 14, 2024
Americans still read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 75 years after it was first published on June 8, 1949. At the time, the year 1984 was far in the future; now it’s 40 years in the past. Yet our present feels more than ever like Orwell’s dyst...
