Matthew Weinberg

By Professor Matt W. “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The line is usually handed to Mark Twain, as so many good lines are. Twain has become the patron saint of things we wish someone clever had said. But whether Twain said it or not matters less than the truth hiding inside it: the past rarely returns wearing the same coat, but it does come back humming the same tune. I have been thinking about this lately, not in the grand way historians do, with maps and kings and wars...

By Professor Matt W. Sometimes the most important questions do not emerge from political debates or philosophy seminars. They arise from the ordinary work of everyday life. Mine began while searching for an elementary social studies curriculum for my school. What should have been a routine educational decision quickly became something far more unsettling. I found myself asking a question that reaches far beyond publishers, legislatures, or school boards: How did we become a country that can...

There is a strange thing that happens when modern medicine sees a child before the child is born. The child becomes data. Not entirely, of course. Not to the mother. Not to the father. Not to the grandparents waiting with names, blankets, arguments over middle names, and the dangerous optimism of people who have already fallen in love with someone they have not yet met. But somewhere in the machinery of prenatal care, the child can become a scan, a probability, a possible syndrome, a possible...