Post Tagged 'George Orwell'

October 17, 2023

How Did George Orwell Know?

The collocation in the title captures the thoroughgoing exploration of the topic in a phrase: George Orwell and Russia. Masha Karp is not the first to ponder George Orwell’s relationship to Stalinist Russia—and the relationship of both Stalinist and post-communist Russia to Orwell—but she is the first to frame a comprehensive, well-researched study around them. Continue Reading...

June 07, 2022

Why Nineteen Eighty-Four still matters

June 8 marks the anniversary of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That a greater gap separates us from 1984 than 1984 from Nineteen-Eighty Four’s 1949 publication staggers. The book, at least in terms of pundits’ invoking it, seems so very 2022 even if the script dictated that its peak as a cultural touchstone would occur in 1984. Continue Reading...

June 19, 2021

Tyranny, by any other name

Many of us have noticed a trend toward the political misuse of words, both in legacy media and on social media. This isn’t a modern trend. In the 6th century B.C., Continue Reading...

September 26, 2016

What WALL-E and Wilhelm Röpke teach us about work and economics

Humans have a tendency to daydream about a day or a place where work is no more, whether it be a retirement home on a golf course or a utopian society filled with leisure and merriment. Continue Reading...

November 26, 2013

‘Catching Fire’ and the Call to Freedom

Last weekend the second film based on the immensely popular Hunger Games series of books, Catching Fire, opened in theaters. One interesting way to view the world of Panem, Suzanne Collins’ totalitarian society that serves as the setting for the drama, is as a synthesis of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Continue Reading...

June 14, 2013

We Are All The Problem

“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word– Man” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm We are clearly at a point where we are all to be treated as criminals. Continue Reading...

September 28, 2011

Arthur Koestler Here and Now

On The Freeman, PowerBlog contributor Bruce Edward Walker marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the essay “The Initiates” published a decade later in The God that Failed. Continue Reading...