Mike S Blog Round Thursday (opens in new tab)

On this day in 1903 Eric Blair was born. You probably know him better by his pen name -- George Orwell -- which he adopted when publishing his first major book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933: Orwell remains one of the most important writers of the twentieth century because he understood that political language can be used to disguise oppression, manipulate reality, and make the unacceptable seem normal. Through works such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell warned that...