John Rodden has recently written about such topics as "1984 Tops Bestseller List in Putin's Russia," "Russia vs. Ukraine: The Battle for Nikolai Gogol," and "Putin, Ukraine, and the Culture War." He can be reached at [email protected].
Posts by John Rodden
October 30, 2024
The 2024 election campaign has been unprecedented in numerous ways, but one of the less expected ways has been the number of presidential debates between the two candidates. Only one debate has occurred, and for the first time in presidential history, the vice-presidential debate looks to be the last one that will be held before the November election.
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June 20, 2024
“You have no real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston.”
—Syme to Smith,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
For 75 years, the number “1984” has represented a numerical nightmare. Those four digits have been brandished in screaming headlines, blaring soundbites, a BBC teleplay that resulted in heart attacks and even deaths of viewers (in December 1954), and the Washington hotline of the John Birch Society, the far-right American advocacy group.
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April 12, 2024
He would, of course, have blanched—or barfed—if you had ever addressed him that way (probably the only blasphemy he’d refuse to utter). Yet is it really any more outlandish than the conversations we had about another adamantly avowed atheist?
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October 17, 2023
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.
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