1984 meets 2017.

• Position: BOOKS - Brief article

George Orwell's novel 1984 has long been required reading in many high schools, but last month it shot to the top of Amazon's best-seller list. Why the surge of interest in a 68-year-old book? Some pundits, like Ron Charles of The Washington Post, point to anxieties about the current political climate. He sees parallels between White House adviser Kellyanne Conway's phrase "alternative facts" and "newspeak"-the language the all-seeing government in 1984 uses to brainwash citizens into accepting lies as truth. Orwell, a British author, originally published his novel in 1949, just as the Soviet Union was S becoming a repressive force across Eastern Europe. I Penguin USA, the book's American...