I am pleased to share the third and final conversation in our series on George Orwell's 1984. Our guest is D.J. Taylor—biographer, novelist, and literary critic. Taylor has produced not one but two definitive biographies of Orwell. The first, Orwell: The Life, was published in 2003.
George Orwell was deeply concerned about hypocrisy—but in the opposite way you might expect. That’s what struck me about halfway through writing my new book The Hypocrisy Trap. Orwell spent his career hacking away at humbug and falsehoods and famously warned how language gets corrupted by “a gap
This Friday, we look forward to seeing you for our conversation with psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker. We’ll discuss the hidden logic of common knowledge—essentially, how I know that you know that I know . . . and so on. It's fundamental to cooperation and coordination, but can also
This Friday, we look forward to seeing you for our conversation with psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker. We’ll discuss the hidden logic of common knowledge—essentially, how I know that you know that I know . . . and so on. It's fundamental to cooperation and coordination, but can also
This Thursday, we look forward to seeing you for our conversation with psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff. She is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and one of the leading thinkers about the effects of technology on democracy, privacy, and individual rights. ⭐Important: There are two parts to
Tomorrow, we look forward to seeing you for our group discussions. We'll host two, one hour discussions, with Eastern and Western Hemisphere options. You'll find the Zoom links to join below, along with some of the questions we'll consider during the discussion.
“Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which
The Summer Book Club’s event schedule is here. We have an exciting mix of group discussions and expert conversations, so be sure to add the events to your calendar. In future posts, I will share more about our expert guests, the themes for our conversations, and what we’ll
The Spark File is favorite tool of writers and readers alike. It's incredibly simple. It's a document of running bullet points containing ideas, questions, and connections. New idea? Add a bullet point. New question that might be worth thinking about later? Add a bullet point. (I
Editor’s note: In the column below, George Orwell asks us to examine what we mean when we speak about “science.” Do we mean a way of thinking critically about the world? Or, do we mean a specific kind of knowledge, such as that of chemistry or physics? “The word