In news that should be doubleplusgood for the online retailer and its attendant publishers, bookwatchers have noticed that George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984 has shot up Amazon’s bestseller charts in the last few days. Orwell’s tale of a society in which information is edited, replaced, and dictated by the government is currently sitting pretty at No. 2 on the retailer’s global list of English books, presumably spurred on by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, and her on-air invention of the concept of “alternative facts.”
The amateur stand-up comic coined the phrase on Sunday, while describing the inaccurate numbers White House press secretary Sean Spicer put out about the new president’s inauguration. The media and internet quickly grabbed hold of the handy phrase, with many noting the similarities with Orwell’s Newspeak, the artificial language that encourages ideas like “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime” to successfully colonize the human mind.