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Kinetic Joy  

In Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, a young woman explores her racial identity through a love of dance—and finds a different kind of history, one that is barely written down.



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Returning to Maidan  

In the early days, the Maidan protests had been something like a people’s national liberation festival. But by 2014, with war erupting in the east, euphoria and solidarity had been replaced by grief and anger.









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China’s Feminist Five  

China’s younger generation of feminists pose a unique threat to the Communist Party. By celebrating single, queer, and often child-free women, they are challenging government edicts that marriage and families are the foundation of the country’s political stability.



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Rethinking Populism  

Donald Trump’s candidacy may have peaked. But, from the United States to Britain and beyond, the discontent fueling the far right won’t fade so quickly. Can a new, left-wing populism seize on it—and rebuild democracy in the process?



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Gender Trouble in Poland  

Poland’s proposed abortion ban is part of a broader attack on women by the right-wing PiS government, which has sought to banish the word “gender” itself from the country’s vocabulary. But Polish feminists and their allies are fighting back.







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Freedom from Abstraction  

The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea by Jeffrey A. Engel Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp. The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey …





The Breadwinner-Homemaker Trap  

Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict by Heather Boushey Harvard University Press, 2016, 360 pp. What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet Harvard University Press, 2016, 400 pp. [contentblock id=3 img=html.png] To illustrate the tensions between work …



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Steady Work  

When left activists divide their energies between the immediate present and the distant future, we miss the necessary political work between now and then.