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September 2021, no. 435

September 2021, no. 435

From Plato to plutocrats, the September issue of ABR brings together the best and worst of the cultural moment. In our cover feature, Joel Deane casts his eye over the ‘ugly truth’ of Facebook’s contemptuous exploitation of users, while in a thought experiment inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, Elizabeth Oliver identifies more worthy candidates for space travel than Branson and Bezos. Megan Clement reports from Paris on the pass sanitaire and Diane Stubbings reviews Peter Doherty’s plague-year dispatches. Sheila Fitzpatrick is our Critic of the Month and was a judge in this year’s Calibre Prize, for which Anita Punton’s ‘May Day’, printed in this issue, came runner-up. We also feature reviews of new fiction by Jennifer Mills, Colm Tóibín, and Laurent Binet, and new poetry by Toby Fitch, John Hawke, and Song Lin – as well as much, much more!

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Full Contents

Neuroscience

This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Gender

The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

Science and Technology

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

Poetry

Whirlwind Duststorm by John Hawke

Poetry

What We Carry: Poetry on childbearing edited by Ella Kurz, Simone King, and Claire Delahunty

Poetry

The Gleaner Song by by Song Lin, translated by Dong Li & Vociferate | 詠 by Emily Sun

Poetry

Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch

Feminism

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed

Non-fiction

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man by Thomas Mann, translated by Walter D. Morris

Literary Studies

Walter Scott at 250: Looking forward by Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Matthew Wickman

Literary Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Dante by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden

Calibre Prize

May Day

Fiction

Civilisations by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor

Fiction

In Moonland by Miles Allinson

Fiction

Believe in Me by Lucy Neave

Fiction

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Fiction

The Airways by Jennifer Mills

India

To Kill a Democracy: India’s passage to despotism by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane

Pandemic

An Insider’s Plague Year by Peter Doherty

Technology

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s battle for domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

Letters to the Editor

by Josh Stenberg, Ken Ward, Clare Rhoden, Norma Pilling, and Suzanne Jill Levine