In the year 2024, it’s a dark insult to describe something as “Orwellian.” But it’s a compliment to say that a thinker is like George Orwell. Seventy-five years after the release of “1984”—published on June 8, 1949—the language of the novel continues to echo across our politics and culture. Those who seem to accept lies and truths simultaneously are engaged in “doublethink.” “Big Brother,” still a synonym for a totalitarian surveillance state, has also been co-opted as the title of a reality show, soon to begin its twenty-sixth season on CBS. The world that Orwell prophesied in “1984” both has and hasn’t come to pass, an uncertain outcome that endows the novel with some of its enduring power. Orwell wrote the book—about a pair of Londoners seeking truth, freedom, and connection in a merciless police state—in the years after the Second World War, and the novel extends and diverges from the ideas that drove his earlier work. In 2009,The New Yorker’sJames Woodrevisited Orwell’s life and writing, which encompassed a series of intellectual and biographical contradictions. The writer—“a socialist artist but utterly anti-bohemian” who “wanted England to change but stay the same”—may not have had time to work out these oppositions. (He died of tuberculosis at age forty-six, less than a year after the publication of “1984.”) Wood examines these tensions and emerges a defender. “So Orwell was contradictory,” he concedes. “Contradictions are what make writers interesting; consistency is for cooking.” | 
