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January 23, 2021 By the time his play “RUR” (which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) premiered in Prague in 1921, Karel Čapek was a well-known Czech intellectual. Like many of his peers, he was appalled by the carnage wrought by the mechanical and chemical weapons that marked World War I as a departure from previous combat. He was also deeply skeptical of the utopian notions of science and technology. “The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands,” Čapek told the London Saturday Review following the play’s premiere. “This is the comedy of sci...

Adam Hunger/AP Images for Target Customers online at Target for Black Friday January 23, 2021 The notion of human beings as consumers first took shape before World War I, but became commonplace in America in the 1920s. Consumption is now frequently seen as our principal role in the world. People, of course, have always “consumed” the necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing—and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption among the mass of people before the 20th century. Quite the reverse: Frugality...