Huh, Would You Look At That: George Orwell’s 1984 Is Once Again a Best Seller

By this morning, George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has become the top-selling book on Amazon. Published in 1949, the novel—which explores themes of government surveillance, manipulation of media, and subjugation of freedom of speech—has seen a resurgence in popularity after Donald Trump’s inauguration and Kellyanne Conway’s appearance on Meet the Press, in which she used the term “alternative facts” during her response on an inaccuracy about Trump’s inauguration crowd size.

After Conway introduced that baffling term, critics quickly drew comparisons to what in 1984 is called “newspeak,” Orwell's fictional government's misinformation-minded language used to ostensibly tell the public what is true and what is false. Others, like Merriam-Webster’s Twitter account, sub-tweeted Conway by sending out the definition of a fact (“a piece of information presented as having objective reality”)—an, ahem, textbook of “shade.”

Noticing the uptick in book sales, the novel’s publishing house, Penguin, has ordered 75,000 new copies to be reprinted, this week in order to keep up with demand. It would serve us all well to dust up on our high school curriculums (Animal Farm, It Can’t Happen Here, are worth revisiting as well!), but in case you have a short attention span, The New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani is among those who've been tweeting out some of Orwell's more prescient passages this week. Now aren’t you wishing you’d paid more attention in English class?