On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, suggested that when Press Secretary Sean Spicer spouted falsehoods about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration during a Saturday press conference, he was not lying, but simply relying on “alternative facts.” If a portent of doom can have unintended positive consequences, that phrase…
“Thought can corrupt language,” George Orwell wrote in the 1943 essay I referred to in my column, “but language can also corrupt thought.” Gil Troy’s response to my piece offers a concise portrait of this process. But his critique is more than a helpful example of the rhetorical phenomenon I wrote to challenge. In form…
Illustration by Yoni Weiss In these pages, Daniel May’s “What Would George Orwell Say About the Gaza War?” used totalitarianism’s great enemy to criticize democratic Israel’s justified struggle against totalitarian Hamas. May’s argument, misreading Israel’s self-defense justification, and echoing Hamas’s propaganda points, peppered with clever quotations from George Orwell, was itself Orwellian. Deciding how dead…
Throughout the violence of the last three weeks in Israel and Gaza, one phrase has become ubiquitous among politicians and pundits. President Obama affirms his “strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself.” Secretary John Kerry states “Israel has every right in the world to defend itself.” Britain’s prime minister and foreign minister have both…
Things I Don’t Want to Know: A Response to George Orwell’s Why I Write By Deborah Levy Notting Hill Editions In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell identified four great motives for writing, including aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. The other, he observed, was that writers are “vain and self-centred,” motivated…
“One way of feeling infallible is not to keep a diary,” wrote George Orwell in December 1943. The man considered by many to be the English language’s most influential political essayist of the 20th century never tired of questioning himself and was indeed a prolific diarist. Next month, his diaries will be published in the…
Nom De Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms By Carmela Ciuraru Harper, 331 pages, $24.99 Writers are always looking for new ways to tell stories, and Carmela Ciuraru has found hers in “Nom De Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.” In her latest book, Ciuraru, editor of eight poetry anthologies, chronicles the role of the…
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