"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw
Jonathan Bolton uses the occasion of a new edition and translation of Karel Čapek’s play “R.U.R.,” first published in Prague in 1920, to revisit the origins of the word “robot,” and explore the play’s uncannily prescient vision of artificial life.
Tom Zoellner talks to Erika Marie Bsumek about one of the worst boondoggles in the Southwest, which she explores in her recent book “The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau.”
Anthony Alessandrini reviews Adam Shatz’s “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.”
Thomas Elrod reviews Francesca Peacock’s “Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish.”
LARB presents an excerpt of Lauren Markham’s new book “A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.”
Laurent Dubois reviews two new books on Haiti’s past and present: Marlene L. Daut’s “Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History” and Jake Johnston’s “Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti.”
Deborah Coen shows how historians miss a great deal when they rely on the quantitative tools of scientists.
Yael Friedman speaks with Wim Wenders and provides a review of his work with sculptor Anselm Kiefer in the wake of Wenders’s new documentary, “Anselm.”
Ian Ellison reviews Sarah Watling’s “Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War.”
Jarrod Shanahan reviews Orisanmi Burton’s “Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.”
Mike Rodelli considers John Keahey’s “Following Caesar: From Rome to Constantinople, the Pathways That Planted the Seeds of Empire.”
Julie Park reflects on the process of bringing out her book on the 18th-century camera obscura.
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