The Democrat-Gazette published today my review of What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, Andras Szanto, editor. I was so excited by this book, even though it was disappointing, that I wrote three Bricks referring to George Orwell. Two of them were on revelations about today from his 1949 novel [...]
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Only some of the essayists in What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, edited by Andras Szanto for PublicAffairs Books, which I will review soon, think George Orwell (1903-1950) is the man for 2008. After all, their thesis is in the title. Any other George you can think of already [...]
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No, not that George, the other one. Not that George, either. It’s not fair to say if George Orwell were alive today, he’d be totally yada yada yada on creation science and intelligent design. But what if Orwell actually wrote about the subject, even though those two terms were not invented yet? 1984, Book 3, [...]
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Hats off to the organizers of National Novel Writing Month. This group began in 1999 with 21 participants who challenged one another to write 50,000 words of a novel (which makes for a short but complete novel, Gatsby length) in 30 days. The month chosen is November. The word count is conducted electronically via the [...]
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Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Humorist Richard Allin died Thursday in Little Rock. He was 77. The following is why he’s important. It’s from the acknowledgments page of my journalism master’s thesis, spring 2003. At the family breakfast table in Fort Smith, 30 to 35 years ago, Dad laughing would read aloud paragraphs from the [...]
The Nobel folks awarded its 2007 literature prize Thursday to Doris Lessing. The wire service story was the usual. It began with the summary lede. Then it had a sliver of who she is — elderly and English but with first-hand knowledge of the Near East and southern Africa, prolifically writing fiction often sci fi, [...]
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Corrections: For the Record An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial in the case. The trial is expected to begin by February, not by ‘Feb. 30.’ The error occurred [...]
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You can read here the last, first: He had no further intercourse with
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From today’s Democrat-Gazette The site currently under construction isn’t a replica of the original building, but a ‘faithful facsimile.’” – Tommy Jameson, project architect for Little Rock’s new Mosaic Templars black history museum. I’m not trying to advocate more drinking. I’m trying to get more tax revenue for our county.” – Richard Hodo, owner of [...]
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Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Commodity. I didn’t know that was a bad word. During the early years when I covered business while reporting a lot of subjects, I learned that one invested in commodities. It is an article of trade or commerce, especially a product that can be processed and resold, such as in [...]
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