I have a big one-volume Everyman’s Library edition of George Orwell’s essays that I dip into every so often. A lot of it is taken up with installments of “As I Please,” a newspaper column for which he pretty much wrote whatever popped into his head. Usually there were two or three topics per column, each a few paragraphs long.

Something about “As I Please” seemed familiar to me from a different context. I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Then one day it hit me: Regularly updated prose chunks… short, briefly developed, and sometimes half-assed observations… idiosyncratic topics, often politics, sometimes returned to in back-and-forth exchanges with his readers…

George Orwell had a blog.