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"Smart women have always been able to achieve amazing things, even when the odds were stacked against them. In Wonder Women, author Sam Maggs tells the stories of the brilliant, brainy, and totally rad women in history who broke barriers as scientists, engineers, mathematicians, adventurers, and inventors. Plus, interviews with real-life women in STEM careers, an extensive bibliography, and a guide to women-centric science and technology organizations--all to show the many ways the geeky girls of today can help to build the future"--Jacket

In 2016 Wonder Woman served, briefly, as an honorary UN ambassador. Her appointment was met with protest and a petition that argued, among other complaints, that Wonder Woman's sexualized appearance made her unsuitable as a representative of the UN. This paper seeks to argue the contrary. It charts the use of the character as a political figure, both on and off the page, noting that her role as UN ambassador has significant historical precedent. While recognizing the often problematic representation of women in many iterations of the superhero genre, this paper also seeks to understand complaints over Wonder Woman's mode of dress in the context of arguments that have historically been used to bar women's entry into politics.

The article considers the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher. Wonder is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect. It shades into curiosity, horror, fascination, disgust, and monstrosity. But the price paid for the ruin caused—to epistemic certainty or the comforts of a well-wrought coding scheme—is, after Massumi (2002, p. 19), the privilege of a headache. Not the answer to a question, but the astute crafting of a problem and a challenge: what next?

The following text is the German original followed by the English translation of a previously unpublished essay by Julia Franck, winner of the 2007 German Book Prize. Although Franck has received critical acclaim most recently for her novel Die Mittagsfrau ( Lady Midday, 2007), she came to the attention of the mainstream German media with the publication of her second novel, Liebediener (Love Servant, 1999), which coincided with the Fräuleinwunder craze. The Fräuleinwunder , or "Girl Wonder" phenomenon, existed briefly at the turn of the millennium, when Volker Hage first observed in Der Spiegel that many of the young, female authors writing at the time had a matter-of-fact approach to representing love and sex. When the newspaper Die Welt asked several of the authors included in the Fräuleinwunder to write essays about the popularity of German women authors, Franck penned "Das Wunder Frau," or "The Wonder (of) Woman." Here she strongly criticizes the Fräuleinwunder label, yet she does find some truth in Hage's assertion that women write differently than men. Franck proposes the term "weibliche Nüchternheit," or "Female Sobriety," which both acknowledges Hage's observation and provides an alternative way to talk about the writing style of female authors. Deeming "Das Wunder Frau" too feminist for publication, Die Welt declined to print it. Julia Franck has expressly given her permission to the Women in German Yearbook to publish the German original as well as the English translation of the essay. (AMH)

Cory Albertson on a resurgence of "courageous womanhood."

Sweden projects an unrealistic image to the world. It is a small country with a thriving cultural export industry that sells whatever the outside world will pay for, which is mostly escapism. Sweden has another influential export industry of policy wonks: people who sell the idea that what makes these countries special and delightful are their governments and the laws they pass. This might be called escapism for executives -- it is a fantasy of a country where all the really hard problems melt away under the pressure of decisive rationality and where spreadsheets work like magic to remodel the world into tidy boxes. Adapted from the source document.