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...
Cancellation At the Service of the Lie, Part I May 31, 2024
A striking feature of a debased democratic order is the alacrity by which long esteemed political figures, authors, works of art, and cultural practices can suddenly be subjected to vicious “cancellation” efforts. Fortunately, these attempts do not a...
Orwell's Arresting Ambiguities May 01, 2024
George Orwell said that Charles Dickens was an author well worth stealing, which is to say, attaching to one’s cause whatever it might be. If you can say “Dickens would have thought likewise,” you are claiming the approval not only of a genius, but o...
The Failed Saint: On George Orwell’s India January 23, 2024
WE TEND TO invoke George Orwell when discussing freedom of thought, opposition to tyranny, or the rights of the working class. These were recurring subjects in the author’s expansive oeuvre and preoccupations in his private life. What is often overlo...
‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ With a Female Face January 15, 2024
FICTION THAT REIMAGINES CLASSICS from a different point of view—fan fiction, essentially, albeit somewhat more respectable than what that term usually denotes—has a long pedigree. You could make the case for Paradise Lost being the great-great-grandd...
