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Spectrum : a collection of engaging essays

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Uploaded by station38.cebu on May 28, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

A Book of Essays

31 st Edition 2023

ISBN: 81-7930-851-0

Binding: Paperback

Price:  495

ISBN: 9788179308516

Hindi Edition Available

Essay-writing is nothing but the way one interprets a particular topic, the way one thinks about an issue. An essay, more than any other form of writing, calls for a personal touch. An essay presents one’s response to an issue or a thought. So, one might ask, why a book of essays? This book has been written to show the reader how an essay may be written, as many candidates of competitive examinations requiring essays to be written are not too confident about what is required. The essays in this book will certainly give the reader ideas on each topic, besides knowledge of stylistic features... Know More

Click Here for Contents

Rs. 495.00 Original price was: Rs.495.00. Rs. 297.00 Current price is: Rs.297.00.

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Daniel Bowman, Jr. – On the Spectrum [Feature Review]

A Feature Review of

On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, and the Gifts of Neurodiversity Daniel Bowman, Jr.

Paperback: Brazos Press, 2021. Buy Now:  [ IndieBound ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]  [ Audible ]

Reviewed by Katie Karnehm-Esh

My little brother Caleb was diagnosed with autism in 1998, when he was five. Insurers in Ohio refused to give him medical insurance; kids at church threw rocks at him on the playground. He spoke very little, screamed in restaurants, and told us over and over again that he didn’t want to grow up, or sometimes, even live. All we could see was a child who seemed 30% charmingly quirky, and 70% miserable; all we wanted was for him to be better, and happy. From our perspectives, he couldn’t tell us what he needed himself. Scores of book authors and publishers apparently felt the same thing. Many books on autism written in the early years of the 2000s fell into the “voice for the voiceless category:” stories about autism told by someone with the language skills to write it. Exceptions to these memoirs certainly existed ( Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day come to mind), but most of these memoirs were written by parents or doctors. I wish that in 2003 (or even 2013) Daniel Bowman’s On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith and the Gifts of Neurodiversity had been in the landscape of autism memoirs and advice books we were reading. This book of essays and meditations on autism demonstrates and advocates for “passing the mic” to the supposedly voiceless, and realizing they have voices—clear, creative, insightful, humorous voices—after all.

On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith and Neurodiversity deviates from the autism memoir in both form and content. First, Bowman’s story stands out by its somewhat ordinariness—he is an Upstate New York-raised, Midwest-based professor at a small college; he also came to his diagnosis as an adult, not a child. He is not a savant, or nonverbal, but someone who might “pass” for ordinary while seeing and experiencing the world from a distinctly neurodiverse perspective.  As for form, his book is written in standalone essays, rather than traditional chapters, and these essays range from childhood narratives to placemaking in the Midwest to spiritual community building. This latter point is particularly interesting, as On the Spectrum is the first book about autism I’ve read with an overtly spiritual lens. Pastors and community members will particularly benefit from reading “Community, Worship, and Service” which shows both how churches and community can overwhelm as well as bless autistic people.

But don’t skip straight to those chapters—read the whole book, and pay attention. In “Why you Should Read This Book (and How), Bowman writes, “there are no shortcuts to learning how to love your neighbor. There is no list of action items . . . What you can do is inhabit the whole story—and see the autistic heart, mind, body, and spirit at work.” Bowman uses his book to invite neurotypical readers into this inhabiting. Sometimes, the invitation is more like a command; in “A Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man,” he makes a simple request in response to reports of parents killing or abandoning their autistic children: “Dear parent or guardian, First things first: I know it can be hard, but please don’t abandon or murder the autistic kid in your life. Hear me out.” In “The Neurodiversity Paradigm,” he provides useful analysis of the language neurotypical people use to describe autism—“Abnormal Body Posturing, Abnormal Tone of Voice, Poor Eye Contact”—versus the language the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network uses: “We think differently: [ . . . ] We process our senses differently: [ . . .] We move differently.” This language demonstrates autistic people seeing themselves not as flawed, or wrong, or in need of being fixed, but simply different. He shows us how stressful and sometimes overwhelming the world looks and feels to an autistic child—and what the neurodiverse can do to make the world kinder and safer.

Bowman’s advocacy is rooted in #OwnVoices—“nothing about us without us.” In other words, pass the mic. The issue, he writes, is not about the “pen being in the correct person’s hand” but about accurate representation. Writing about autistic people without their input can lead to flawed narratives, unhelpful pity, and dangerous stereotypes of autistic people being violent, unreachable, or hopelessly difficult. While sometimes Bowman verges on overstating the degree of acceptance and self-advocacy other minority groups have in comparison to autistic people, his point remains: autistic people can tell their own stories. They can give input. They also tell different stories from each other. Bowman’s other maxim—“if you’ve met one autistic person you’ve met one autistic person”—reminds readers of the nuance of autistic experience. The story of Bowman is not the story of my brother, which is not the story of the college students who end up in our classrooms and workplaces.

Finally, there’s the writing. Bowman’s clear prose pays attention to what many writers might skim over (the beauty of Midwestern corn and soybean fields, as in “Living Maps”) or choose to ignore (his embarrassing childhood anxieties). Always his writing is rooted in utter truth, as well as place—a writing conference in Florida, a backroad in Indiana, a monastery in Kentucky. Bowman begins “Prelude” with a story of a family crisis a few years ago that set him on the path of finding his diagnosis. I will let the reader come to this story themselves, but I was startled by Bowman’s honest account: “I don’t want to write this down, now or ever. This is not a story I want to tell myself or anyone else. I want to protect my kids from it, whatever that means. But I need to tell the truth.” Bowman is equally as blunt about his childhood ailments and anxieties, his academic underperformance, and his foibles as an adult. But the text is not just unflinchingly honest, but beautiful. In “Living Maps” Bowman writes about preparing for his move from Upstate New York to Indiana by reading narratives of place, particularly ignored, overlooked places, like the Midwest. He quotes Simone Weil on the land of God being “difficult but possible to love” and makes the connection to his new home: “What is rural Indiana if not just that: difficult yet possible to love, seemingly resistant to our efforts?” Bowman’s careful study of the Midwest, and particularly Indiana, bring to mind John Tarrant’s quote: “Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed.”

On the Spectrum reminds one, finally, that the neurotypical person looking from the outside cannot predict the present and future sufferings or joys of the autistic person. When my brother was five or ten, we hoped for a medical miracle; we mourned he would never have independence, community, or friends. To our detriment, we resorted to telling his story ourselves. Yet at twenty-eight he is healthy, employed part-time, and finding ongoing success as a Special Olympics athlete. He loves to chop wood and stack rocks he finds in the field and call me to tell me about both. His life has been difficult, but not lacking in joy. With thanks to books like Bowman’s, neurotypical friends, relatives, coworkers, and community members can make life better for an autistic person simply by starting with one simple step: letting them speak for themselves.

Katie Karnehm-Esh

Katie Karnehm-Esh earned her MA and PhD in creative writing at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and currently teaches English at Indiana Wesleyan University. Her writing interests include travel, yoga, holistic health, and forgiveness.

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Writing, Grade 1 (Spectrum) Paperback – December 11, 2006

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Spectrum; Revised, Updated, Workbook edition (December 11, 2006)
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Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024 shortlist: Book experts on the surprises and likely winner of Australia's biggest literary award

The shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award has now been announced, with six authors selected from the longlist to vie for Australia's most prestigious literary award.

The shortlist is:

• Hossein Asgari, Only Sound Remains (Puncher & Wattmann)
• Jen Craig, Wall (Puncher & Wattmann)
• Andre Dao, Anam (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House)
• Gregory Day, The Bell of the World (Transit Lounge)
• Sanya Rushdi, Hospital (Giramondo Publishing)
• Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing)

The list includes a previous winner (Wright), a previous shortlistee (Day) and three (!) debut novelists (Asgari, Dao and Rushdi).

Along with last year's, it's the most culturally diverse Miles Franklin shortlist ever, with four writers of colour in the running, and the third year in a row to feature more writers of colour than writers from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds.

And if Craig, Rushdi or Wright win, they'll become the eighth woman winner in a row (12 women have won in the 13 years since the controversial 2011 shortlist was entirely composed of men), and the 20th woman to win the $60,000 award since 1957.

Last year's winner was Shankari Chandran for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. This year's winner will be announced on August 1.

To take a closer look at the list, we've convened a literary cabal of The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange, The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and book critic Declan Fry.

Surprises and themes

Sarah L'Estrange: It's no surprise to see Alexis Wright there!

But I'm surprised at the uniformity of the shortlist. Often there'll be a bit of a range of more literary and then maybe more populist fiction, like last year's list, whereas this shortlist is absolutely singing the praises of high literary fiction.

Kate Evans: It's noticeable how many of the books are from smaller publishers, who, arguably, are able to take more risks and play around with the form. The shortlisted books do play around with form and are a bit more experimental.

And that, to me, is exactly what the Miles Franklin should be. It's supposed to be looking at novels of the highest literary merit — that's in their actual guidelines — "that presents Australian life in any of its phases".

Claire Nichols: I was disappointed that Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko didn't make the shortlist.

It's interesting what Kate was saying about how it's a very literary list. But I would argue that it shouldn't have to be literary at the expense of heart.

I think the best novels can do both, like when Lukashenko won the Miles in 2019 for Too Much Lip or when Tara June Winch won a year later for The Yield . These books had high literary merit, but also had characters you could really connect with and straddled that popular/literary divide.

I'm struggling a bit with this list to find those stories that I just love in that way.

KE: Hear, hear on Edenglassie: I also would have liked to have seen Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional there. I like the cleanness of the writing and the exploration of grief, it was really beautifully done.

SL: If we're talking about books that have heart, that also explore ideas, I felt like Angela O'Keeffe's The Sitter was able to do that. I would have happily seen that on the shortlist.

It's not that I don't think these shortlisted books are worthy, but they haven't fired me up like last year's list. I was really excited for Limberlost last year, I really thought Robbie Arnott was gonna win, although he didn't. But part of why we invest in prizes is the excitement, the disagreements, and I don't feel that with this list.

Declan Fry: I feel it's one of the most exciting shortlists in ages. I think that, actually, a lot of the books have so much heart.

Anam by André Dao , I really love. It explores how we make sense of time and displacement, what we might retrieve from the past or choose to forget, incorporating this meta-fictional weaving of the narrator's life as a human rights lawyer raising a family against his Vietnamese grandfather's dissidence and his forebears' migration, all of which inform the shape of a book he is struggling to write.

It reminds me of Javier Marías ; it's about time and memory. But it's very much about family too.

And of course, Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy. What a family! You've got a father on a quixotic quest to reinvigorate his community with the help of a donkey-powered transportation conglomerate, a mother seeking repatriation to China, their son, a kind of representative of the town's hopes and yearnings and anxieties, and his fallen-angel brother, who believes he belongs with the blonde power brokers dealing bread and circuses up in Canberra.

Plus a cast of cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances. A realist's view of colonisation if ever there was one, told in language that is roiling and choral and haranguing and acrobatic.

Wright is always willing to be paradoxical and contradictory, funny and serious, high and low, ridiculous and full of gravitas.

CN: Something that is really interesting in a lot of these books is how time is expressed.

For instance, the set-up of Gregory Day's The Bell of the World is that there's this small community on the south coast of Victoria. And some people in the community want to install a bell to measure out the time of the day. There’s a young poet and her uncle who reject this idea — they’re much more interested in listening to the music of the world around them.

It's about the colonial imposition of time on the natural world — which is an idea Alexis Wright is grappling with, too.

KE: This list shows how we've obviously moved away from an old-fashioned Anglo idea of Australian-ness (which, to be fair, has long been the case with the Miles Franklin). The shortlist includes stories of exile and displacement and refugees and voices in translation.

That is something to celebrate: the way in which not just fiction itself, but that this prize in particular, is making us think about what our ideas of Australian-ness and representation are.

Scaling walls of text

DF : Jen Craig's Wall is another shortlisted work that has a lot of heart.

You have this fierce, passionate interiority, a Thomas Bernhard -type monologist-narrator attempting to make sense of her life and familial anguishes and displacements, set against the absurdist comedy of her attempt to dispose of the Song Dong -inspired art installation she's made using her deceased father's possessions.

It's really all about familial angst and the horror of mundane life — something we felt very strongly during and after COVID-19.

I've been listening to music like Brian Eno , Richard Skelton and Hekla and their music has no entry or exit. It just surrounds you, encloses you. I feel that with Wall, you can enter and exit at any point. So it's actually very easy to get lost in.

I think you have to let yourself go and give yourself up to these novels, which is really exciting.

SL: I could relate to many aspects of Wall, especially the narrator's internal monologue and the problem of what to do with the family home after her father's death.

But while I also agree you can come in and out of Wall, that's a bit of a problem for me. I don't want to go in and out, I want to stay in a book.

KE: Yes, with that literal wall of text in that book, it means you're reading in very particular ways.

And one of the things about the shortlist is they're all sort of hard work. I think they all take effort and there's nothing wrong with reading taking effort. But while I could get swept up in Dao's book, I've not yet managed to read The Bell of the World. For various personal reasons to do with timing, I was a bit daunted by it — but will, of course, read it.

DF: We have a lot of dialogue happening about Craig's Wall and it's funny because to be troubled by something or haunted by something, or unsure, suggests a book is successful on some level — it's staying with you.

The difficulty of a work can be a way of growing to love it.

It's a matter of staying with what the work is doing and reading differently: A block of text can be intimidating but, by the same token, sometimes work that reads like a screenplay can also be intimidating and off-putting.

Having said all of this, the language of Anam, Praiseworthy or Wall is very accessible.

KE: I'm not scared of difficult work or even blocky ones. But comparing Wall to other books that offered a block of text, such as (say) Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song, they invited me in more readily.

But on Wall: I liked it when I read it and then, rather than being excessively troubled by it, to be honest, it didn't stay with me. And yet on revisiting it, there were images and issues of fragments, objects, houses and memory that I really liked. Even so, for me, Anam was doing something more interesting.

SL: Hossein Asgari's Only Sound Remains is a book that will stay with me. It's a really beautiful book, about Iranian immigrants in Australia and their troubled ties to Iran.

It's a story of obsession, father-son relationships and exile and is written in a confessional style, which parallels the subject of the book, a famous Iranian poet — Forough Farrokhzad — who died young, in the 1960s, and was known for baring her heart's deepest desires in her poetry.

It introduced me to a world I knew little about (I've read a lot about Iran post-1979 but not much in the decades before this major political change) and it also definitely has the heart Claire was talking about earlier, while engaging with politics, literature and religion.

CN: Sanya Rushdi's Hospital is also accessible, simple, slim and really compelling. It's a book in translation, translated from Bengali into English, which is a really cool moment for the shortlist.

It's also a very real story, a work of autofiction. Sanya is writing very directly about her own experience of psychosis. It's not histrionic, it's not like the stories we've read about mental illness in the past, it's coming from a very personal place.

OK, but who will win the 2024 Miles Franklin Award?

DF: As an author, you wouldn't want to be up against Wright when she has a novel like Praiseworthy in contention.

Wright's career reaches maybe an apex in Praiseworthy. It pulls together the form she nailed in Carpentaria [2007 Miles winner] with the non-fictional concerns of books like Tracker [2018 Stella Prize winner], and her ongoing project of cataloguing the dysfunctional nature of colonisation on this continent and the grievous effects it has on both the colonised and the coloniser.

CN: I have never got it right, but I will say I think Alexis Wright is going to win. It's literally twice the size of any other book on the shortlist, it's so hard to put anything next to it to compare it to. She's going for everything in Praiseworthy, which has already won this year's Stella Prize .

SL: Praiseworthy is kind of beyond a novel. I read it more as an incantation or epic that contains the universe. It's like Wright has consumed all the world's ills, injustices and absurdities and she's managed to put it all into this book.

CN: I do think it's important to note that Praiseworthy is a challenging book to read. And I don't think it's going to be a book for everybody. So while critics have loved it, I'm going to be interested to see how readers tackle it.

DF : Claire's right. It's a difficult work, and particularly some of the reflections on death and suicidal ideation and violence are, in a sense, a true block of text, a verbal scream or wall the reader has to confront.

KE: Alexis Wright is the obvious winner, which doesn't mean that she will win. I am not a gambler, I'm a terrible betting person. And I never get any of this right, just for the record.

DF: I would be very happy if Dao, Craig or Wright won.

SL: If it wasn't Alexis, I would be very happy for Anam to win because it is an interesting way of approaching your own broader biography, as in a family biography and ancestry, and how that shapes you, and how you then shape it.

KE: I would be quite delighted if Dao's Anam won. There's so many things I really like about that novel.

The Book Show will be airing interviews with all six shortlisted authors on Monday, July 22; and The Bookshelf will have a special review program on all shortlisted authors and the winner, on Saturday, August 10.

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Publisher Spectrum Books Exam CSAT ISBN-10 8179304760 Number of Pages 674 Pages Publication Year 2010 Language English ISBN-13 9788179304761 Binding Paperback

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The book presents essays, of about 1000-1500 words each on a wide range of topics – imaginative, current, controversial – and is designed to equip the reader with the necessary information on various topics. Besides, it directly and indirectly communicates to the reader the fundamental principles of essay writing. There is a long section of quotations for ready reference. Table of Contents Introduction to the Essay Paradoxes of Democracy Democracy implies tolerance of dissent The Role of Opposition in a Democracy Role of Judiciary in a Democracy Judicial Activism Elections—Lacunae and Remedies Corruption in Public Life Politics and Religion Communalism The Politics of Communalism The Rights and Wrongs of Conversion Should there be reservations? Women should have reserved seats in Parliament Is India ready for a uniform civil code? An Apolitical Defence Force India’s Defence Needs in a Technological Scenario United Nations—Role and Future Human Rights Can Human Rights be Universal Rights? Status of Human Rights in Independent India Human Rights and the Indian Armed Forces Torture : The Living Death The Changing Face of Terrorism Can Terrorism be Justified? Economic Liberalisation—Challenges before India Privatisation of the Economy Private Sector versus Public Sector India’s Population and Its Economic Implications Transforming our Huge Population into Human Resource Development and Population Control The Two-Child Norm for Population Control People’s Participation in Development Tourism : Potentials and Problems The Changing Face of Indian Society Changing Idea of Family The Problems of Old Age Law as an Instrument of Social Change Morality and Law Education in India—Lacunae and Remedies Privatisation of Education: Solution to Resource Crunch Child Labour Problems of Working Women Violence against Women Women need empowerment Ragging should be curbed The Rights and Wrongs of Free Expression Advertising and Social Responsibility Indian Cinema and Social Responsibility Challenge Before Television in India Television and Teenage Violence Foreign Media in India : Any Cause for Concern? The Politics of Information The Scientific attitude rather than science is the need of the day Moral Dilemmas Inherent in Scientific Progress Are science and art antithetical to each other? Science and Literature Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind Computers: A Silent Revolution Information Revolution Sustainable Development and Environment Pollution Humans are the worst culprits in environmental degradation Biodiversity Are human beings able to cope with natural disasters? What freedom means to me Euthanasia : Can death be a therapy? Non-Violence Leadership Leisure—Its Use and Abuse If the British had not colonised India... History repeats itself History needs to be rewritten On Good and Bad Neighbours Superstitions Sports sans Sportsmanship Ethics in Sports Why Ban English? Men have failed; let women take over India Today The Indian Republic Generation Gap The Child is the Father of Man Compassion is the basis of all morality The road to happiness is always under construction Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds Truth may be eclipsed but not extinguished Crime : New Dimensions Capital Punishment If human beings can be cloned Material Progress and Human Values Animals too have rights Growing Flexibility in Gender Roles of Men and Women Relevance of Gandhi Today  

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Emily Henry on Writing Best-Sellers Without Tours and TikTok

The author of “Funny Story” churned out five consecutive No. 1 best-sellers without leaving her comfort zone. How did she pull it off?

“Everything around release is really, really exciting,” Emily Henry said, “but it’s not the space I want to live in. I want to be at home writing.” Credit... Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times

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By Elisabeth Egan

Reporting from Cincinnati

• June 27, 2024

Emily Henry has never been on a book tour or done a traditional bookstore reading. She’s not on TikTok. Her Instagram features book covers and an occasional giveaway; there are no closet tours, rescue cats or elegantly plated snacks.

Henry doesn’t want to be, as she puts it, a “writer slash mini-celebrity.” She’s a romance novelist , full stop. It’s an uncommon, maybe even gutsy, approach in the era of the all-access pass, when readers of popular fiction expect a level of quasi intimacy with favorite writers.

Nevertheless, Henry — “EmHen” to fans — has launched five No. 1 best-sellers in four years. Her latest blockbuster, “Funny Story,” has been on the best-seller list for nine weeks. In its first two months, the book racked up almost 60,000 customer reviews on Goodreads and sparked a cottage industry of T-shirts, sweatshirts, candles, bookmarks and stickers.

All told, Henry has sold seven million copies of her books in the United States since 2020. Three of her novels are in development to become films. On Tuesday, Henry announced that another, “Happy Place,” is going to be a series on Netflix.

“It’s been kind of a whirlwind,” Henry said. “The last four years have felt like they were 35 seconds long.”

Chatting with Henry outside Coffee Emporium in leafiest Cincinnati, it was hard to imagine her retreating into quietude. She presented as an instant connector, parrying substantive conversation while perusing a menu that included a Brew Hoo, a Flying Piggie and an Orange Jillius. And while we’re in the vicinity of old school mall food courts: Imagine Elisabeth Shue in “ Adventures in Babysitting ” crossed with Carly Simon circa “You’re So Vain” and you have Henry’s blond, brown-eyed warmth.

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What it's like to be the autism consultant for ‘Love on the Spectrum’

" Love on the Spectrum " is like any other reality dating show ... but with one important distinction. Each cast member of the series is on the autism spectrum.

The people behind the cameras need to walk a delicate line to represent people with autism without exploiting them.

That's where Dr. Kerry Magro comes in.

Magro , an author , professional speaker and entertainment consultant who is autistic, was bowled over when he watched the first season of “Love on the Spectrum: Australia” on Netflix. Because the show touched on so many topics he had previously written about in his book, “ Autism and Falling in Love: To the One That Got Away ,” Magro reached out to the show’s production team to see if they could collaborate in some way.

“When they got the greenlight for the first U.S. season, the director reached out to me and said, ‘How would you like to be a consultant?’ And I was just over the moon,” Magro tells TODAY.com.

Magro didn’t realize that “autism consultant” was an actual job title until he was offered his first consulting opportunity on a 2012 film called “ Joyful Noise “ starring Queen Latifah, Dolly Parton and Keke Palmer.

The film’s director, Todd Graff, read a blog Magro wrote about doing theater therapy as an autistic child. Graff wanted Magro’s opinion of a teenager in the script who had Asperger’s syndrome. Because he happened to say, “Get this back to me as soon as possible if you can,” Magro, who happens to take requests extremely literally (a common characteristic among people with autism), stayed up until 3 a.m. to completely revise the script.

Later in the week, Graff asked Magro to be an autism consultant for the production.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is an actual thing? This is something that people actually get to do for a living?’” Magro recalls. “It’s been an amazing ride ever since.”

For “Love on the Spectrum,” which originated in Australia before coming to the U.S., Magro typically facilitates a training session with the entire crew before filming. The session covers topics like appropriate language, accommodations for autistic cast members and respecting everyone’s private therapeutic plans and techniques.

After the training session, Magro is on call for the season. He's available to any members of the crew or production team who have questions about anything, from scheduling plans to accurate portrayals of the autistic community.

Back in 2020, for example, Cian O’Clery , the show’s director, called Magro to ask about sensory considerations on dates. He wanted to know the best way to keep cast members from becoming overwhelmed.

Magro suggested giving the cast members frequent breaks and writing the break schedule down so that they would know how long the day would be and when they could look forward to downtime.

“In the show, you’ll notice that many of the dates are in restaurants because it’s very structured in nature. You have dinner, you have dessert, you have a sense of a routine,” says Magro. Structure of this kind helps cast members feel comfortable because they know what to expect.

Staying up to date with the current climate of the autism community is the most challenging part of the job for Magro. "I want to make sure to do my research," he says. "Especially in the editing process, I'm fact checking and fact checking to make sure that it stays as up to date as is humanly possible."

Magro has to be aware of mental health issues as well.

He recalls a scene in season two when Connor Tomlinson left a speed dating session to call his mother because he was having a hard time dealing with anxiety.

"That made me want to make sure that I was researching all the things around anxiety, mental health, just to make sure that it was up to date on the best way to consider representation of these topics," Magro says. He wanted to make sure it was OK for Connor to share those issues on screen; if not, he would have recommended striking them from the show to protect Connor's mental health.

“I’m just trying to be mindful of the spectrum of autism, especially around things like anxiety,” he says. “So many people go on their first dates on the show who have never been on a date before. I’m trying to meet them where they are at their level.”

Magro says the crew and production team have been extremely receptive to his suggestions for making the cast feel comfortable. Even though the majority of the team doesn’t have a direct connection to someone in the autism community, he says, “They’re always very sensitive and very engaged with the ideas that I put in place. And most importantly, they they have always come in with an open mind.” 

As both an employee on the show and a viewer, Magro says, "I am just blown away by this show and the opportunity to continue to have conversations about autism, dating and love. When I was a 18-year-old trying to be in my first relationship, it would have been amazing to have like a show like this, to show that it's possible."

Rosie Colosi lives in New Jersey and is a reporter for TODAY Parents. She has bylines in The Atlantic, The Week, MSNBC, and PureWow, and she has written 33 nonfiction children's books for Scholastic, Klutz, and Nat Geo Kids. Once upon a time, she played Mrs. Claus in "The Rockettes' Radio City Christmas Spectacular," but now she mostly sings songs from "Annie" to her two daughters … while they beg her to play Kidz Bop.

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The July 2024 issue of IEEE Spectrum is here!

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Ieee spectrum, follow ieee spectrum, support ieee spectrum, enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account, saving articles to read later requires an ieee spectrum account, the institute content is only available for members, downloading full pdf issues is exclusive for ieee members, downloading this e-book is exclusive for ieee members, access to spectrum 's digital edition is exclusive for ieee members, following topics is a feature exclusive for ieee members, adding your response to an article requires an ieee spectrum account, create an account to access more content and features on ieee spectrum , including the ability to save articles to read later, download spectrum collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. for more exclusive content and features, consider joining ieee ., join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more about ieee →, join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of ieee spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more about ieee →, access thousands of articles — completely free, create an account and get exclusive content and features: save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders — all free for full access and benefits, join ieee as a paying member., persona ai brings calm experience to the hectic humanoid industry, nic radford and jerry pratt are building a multipurpose commercial humanoid.

Evan Ackerman is IEEE Spectrum’s robotics editor.

New robotics startup Persona AI is teasing commercial humanoids that can fill multiple roles.

It may at times seem like there are as many humanoid robotics companies out there as the industry could possibly sustain, but the potential for useful and reliable and affordable humanoids is so huge that there’s plenty of room for any company that can actually get them to work. Joining the dozen or so companies already on this quest is Persona AI , founded last month by Nic Radford and Jerry Pratt , two people who know better than just about anyone what it takes to make a successful robotics company, although they also know enough to be wary of getting into commercial humanoids.

Persona AI may not be the first humanoid robotics startup, but its founders have some serious experience in the space:

Nic Radford lead the team that developed NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot , before founding Houston Mechatronics (now Nauticus Robotics), which introduced a transforming underwater robot in 2019. He also founded Jacobi Motors, which is commercializing variable flux electric motors.

Jerry Pratt worked on walking robots for 20 years at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition ( IHMC ) in Pensacola, Florida. He co-founded Boardwalk Robotics in 2017, and has spent the last two years as CTO of multi-billion-dollar humanoid startup Figure .

“It took me a long time to warm up to this idea,” Nic Radford tells us. “After I left Nauticus in January, I didn’t want anything to do with humanoids, especially underwater humanoids, and I didn’t even want to hear the word ‘robot.’ But things are changing so quickly, and I got excited and called Jerry and I’m like, this is actually very possible.” Jerry Pratt, who recently left Figure due primarily to the two-body problem , seems to be coming from a similar place: “There’s a lot of bashing your head against the wall in robotics, and persistence is so important. Nic and I have both gone through pessimism phases with our robots over the years. We’re a bit more optimistic about the commercial aspects now, but we want to be pragmatic and realistic about things too.”

Behind all of the recent humanoid hype lies the very, very difficult problem of making a highly technical piece of hardware and software compete effectively with humans in the labor market. But that’s also a very, very big opportunity—big enough that Persona doesn’t have to be the first company in this space, or the best funded, or the highest profile. They simply have to succeed, but of course sustainable commercial success with any robot (and bipedal robots in particular) is anything but simple. Step one will be building a founding team across two locations: Houston and Pensacola, Fla. But Radford says that the response so far to just a couple of LinkedIn posts about Persona has been “tremendous.” And with a substantial seed investment in the works, Persona will have more than just a vision to attract top talent.

For more details about Persona, we spoke with Persona AI co-founders Nic Radford and Jerry Pratt.

Why start this company, why now, and why you?

Nic Radford: The idea for this started a long time ago. Jerry and I have been working together off and on for quite a while, being in this field and sharing a love for what the humanoid potential is while at the same time being frustrated by where humanoids are at. As far back as probably 2008, we were thinking about starting a humanoids company, but for one reason or another the viability just wasn’t there. We were both recently searching for our next venture and we couldn’t imagine sitting this out completely, so we’re finally going to explore it, although we know better than anyone that robots are really hard. They’re not that hard to build; but they’re hard to make useful and make money with, and the challenge for us is whether we can build a viable business with Persona: can we build a business that uses robots and makes money? That’s our singular focus. We’re pretty sure that this is likely the best time in history to execute on that potential.

Jerry Pratt: I’ve been interested in commercializing humanoids for quite a while—thinking about it, and giving it a go here and there, but until recently it has always been the wrong time from both a commercial point of view and a technological readiness point of view. You can think back to the DARPA Robotics Challenge days when we had to wait about 20 seconds to get a good lidar scan and process it, which made it really challenging to do things autonomously. But we’ve gotten much, much better at perception, and now, we can get a whole perception pipeline to run at the framerate of our sensors. That’s probably the main enabling technology that’s happened over the last 10 years.

From the commercial point of view, now that we’re showing that this stuff’s feasible, there’s been a lot more pull from the industry side. It’s like we’re at the next stage of the Industrial Revolution, where the harder problems that weren’t roboticized from the 60s until now can now be. And so, there’s really good opportunities in a lot of different use cases.

A bunch of companies have started within the last few years, and several were even earlier than that. Are you concerned that you’re too late?

Radford: The concern is that we’re still too early! There might only be one Figure out there that raises a billion dollars, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. There’s going to be multiple winners here, and if the market is as large as people claim it is, you could see quite a diversification of classes of commercial humanoid robots.

Pratt: We definitely have some catching up to do but we should be able to do that pretty quickly, and I’d say most people really aren’t that far from the starting line at this point. There’s still a lot to do, but all the technology is here now—we know what it takes to put together a really good team and to build robots. We’re also going to do what we can to increase speed, like by starting with a surrogate robot from someone else to get the autonomy team going while building our own robot in parallel.

Radford: I also believe that our capital structure is a big deal. We’re taking an anti-stealth approach, and we want to bring everyone along with us as our company grows and give out a significant chunk of the company to early joiners. It was an anxiety of ours that we would be perceived as a me-too and that nobody was going to care, but it’s been the exact opposite with a compelling response from both investors and early potential team members.

So your approach here is not to look at all of these other humanoid robotics companies and try and do something they’re not, but instead to pursue similar goals in a similar way in a market where there’s room for all?

Pratt: All robotics companies, and AI companies in general, are standing on the shoulders of giants. These are the thousands of robotics and AI researchers that have been collectively bashing their heads against the myriad problems for decades—some of the first humanoids were walking at Waseda University in the late 1960s . While there are some secret sauces that we might bring to the table, it is really the combined efforts of the research community that now enables commercialization.

So if you’re at a point where you need something new to be invented in order to get to applications, then you’re in trouble, because with invention you never know how long it’s going to take. What is available today and now, the technology that’s been developed by various communities over the last 50+ years—we all have what we need for the first three applications that are widely mentioned: warehousing, manufacturing, and logistics. The big question is, what’s the fourth application? And the fifth and the sixth? And if you can start detecting those and planning for them, you can get a leg up on everybody else.

The difficulty is in the execution and integration. It’s a ten thousand—no, that’s probably too small—it’s a hundred thousand piece puzzle where you gotta get each piece right, and occasionally you lose some pieces on the floor that you just can’t find. So you need a broad team that has expertise in like 30 different disciplines to try to solve the challenge of an end-to-end labor solution with humanoid robots.

Radford: The idea is like one percent of starting a company. The rest of it, and why companies fail, is in the execution. Things like, not understanding the market and the product-market fit, or not understanding how to run the company, the dimensions of the actual business. I believe we’re different because with our backgrounds and our experience we bring a very strong view on execution, and that is our focus on day one. There’s enough interest in the VC community that we can fund this company with a singular focus on commercializing humanoids for a couple different verticals.

But listen, we got some novel ideas in actuation and other tricks up our sleeve that might be very compelling for this, but we don’t want to emphasize that aspect. I don’t think Persona’s ultimate success comes just from the tech component. I think it comes mostly from ‘do we understand the customer, the market needs, the business model, and can we avoid the mistakes of the past?’

How is that going to change things about the way that you run Persona?

Radford: I started a company [Houston Mechatronics] with a bunch of research engineers. They don’t make the best product managers. More broadly, if you’re staffing all your disciplines with roboticists and engineers, you’ll learn that it may not be the most efficient way to bring something to market. Yes, we need those skills. They are essential. But there’s so many other aspects of a business that get overlooked when you’re fundamentally a research lab trying to commercialize a robot. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’m not interested in making that mistake again.

Pratt: It’s important to get a really good product team that’s working with a customer from day one to have customer needs drive all the engineering. The other approach is ‘build it and they will come’ but then maybe you don’t build the right thing. Of course, we want to build multi-purpose robots, and we’re steering clear of saying ‘general purpose’ at this point. We don’t want to overfit to any one application, but if we can get to a dozen use cases, two or three per customer site, then we’ve got something.

There still seems to be a couple of unsolved technical challenges with humanoids, including hands, batteries, and safety. How will Persona tackle those things?

Pratt: Hands are such a hard thing—getting a hand that has the required degrees of freedom and is robust enough that if you accidentally hit it against your table, you’re not just going to break all your fingers. But we’ve seen robotic hand companies popping up now that are showing videos of hitting their hands with a hammer, so I’m hopeful.

Getting one to two hours of battery life is relatively achievable. Pushing up towards five hours is super hard. But batteries can now be charged in 20 minutes or so, as long as you’re going from 20 percent to 80 percent. So we’re going to need a cadence where robots are swapping in and out and charging as they go. And batteries will keep getting better.

Radford: We do have a focus on safety. It was paramount at NASA, and when we were working on Robonaut , it led to a lot of morphological considerations with padding. In fact, the first concepts and images we have of our robot illustrate extensive padding, but we have to do that carefully, because at the end of the day it’s mass and it’s inertia.

What does the near future look like for you?

Pratt: Building the team is really important—getting those first 10 to 20 people over the next few months. Then we’ll want to get some hardware and get going really quickly, maybe buying a couple of robot arms or something to get our behavior and learning pipelines going while in parallel starting our own robot design. From our experience, after getting a good team together and starting from a clean sheet, a new robot takes about a year to design and build. And then during that period we’ll be securing a customer or two or three.

Radford: We’re also working hard on some very high profile partnerships that could influence our early thinking dramatically. Like Jerry said earlier, it’s a massive 100,000 piece puzzle, and we’re working on the fundamentals: the people, the cash, and the customers.

• NASA JSC Unveils Valkyrie DRC Robot ›
• Figure Unveils Its Humanoid Robot Prototype ›
• Founding Team ›

Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum . Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.

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Against ‘Women’s Writing’

Rachel cusk’s gender fundamentalism fully surfaces in her latest novel, parade..

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In Outline, the first book in Rachel Cusk ’s astonishing trilogy of novels, the narrator, Faye, has dinner in Athens with a celebrated feminist author. Angeliki apologizes for arriving late: She has only just escaped from a reception plus a quick detour to put her son to bed. She has been away from him, she says, as a consequence of her international book tour. Her novel, which concerns a painter who feels torn between her children and her desire to be free, is very popular in Poland, where she met a journalist whose lifeless egalitarian marriage had left her so ugly and serious that she was barely recognizable as a woman at all. Angeliki has discovered that her own husband and son do not need her the way she once thought they did, and this distance from their need has made her reconsider her own freedom. She does not want childbirth to be her greatest act of creation, but neither does she wish to become a desexed professional who loses touch with her female essence. The painter in her novel fails to resolve this dilemma, ultimately diverting all her artistic energy to her children.

The scene unfolds like nearly every other scene in Outline : Someone talks, Faye listens. The latter, a divorced novelist of few biographical details, serves as a kind of Grecian urn into which her conversation partners eagerly pour the metaphors that rule their lives, delivering reflections on art, marriage, and family in the same tone of Spartan clarity. Critics hailed the Outline trilogy as a reinvention of the novel, though Cusk saw it as the natural evolution of her long-standing preoccupations. For the first 20 years of her prolific career, Cusk largely wrote domestic novels about young women who long to shelter in, and escape from, the trappings of bourgeois family life. Saving Agnes, Cusk’s debut from 1993, opens with the image of a house sinking into the earth. The same themes animate Cusk’s nonfiction from this period. Her 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work , was savaged by the British press for its frank portrayal of the desolation of early motherhood. Then, in 2009, Cusk divorced the father of her two daughters — an experience she later described as a devastating expulsion from the possibility of narrative. “We’re not part of that story any more, my children and I,” she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath , peering with envy and disgust into the lives of her suburban neighbors. “We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom.” Out of this dispossession emerged Faye, a recessed female presence whose exile from domesticity allows her — supposedly — to view life with greater objectivity.

The results are extraordinary. Faye is not absent, like Godot; she is withheld, like a judgment, and through Cusk’s ingenious structure of reported monologues, Faye becomes the most substantial of all the characters in the trilogy. But the claim to objectivity bears the bruise of exaggeration. Divorce or no, Faye is still a bourgeois British woman who quietly goes from having a loan on her countryside home to being an honored guest at literary festivals across Europe. The parallels with the author’s own life were both intentional and carefully repressed. In effect, Cusk wished to have it both ways. She wanted Faye’s emotional distance and biographical vagueness to place her in a more authentic relationship to truth. Yet she wrote Faye as specifically female voice, one which spoke through the narrative vacuum that Cusk had come, through divorce, to associate with all women.

Now Cusk’s gender politics have taken center stage. Her new novel, Parade, is a small clear prism of a book that refracts the lives of half a dozen artists all named G, most of whom are fictionalized versions of real artists like Louise Bourgeois and Norman Lewis. There is an abiding interest in formal experiment: Cusk flings abstract nouns onto the page with little mediation by plot or character, much as the action painters once did with their paints. The risk in this approach is producing what the art critic Harold Rosenberg once called “apocalyptic wallpaper,” on account of its cheap facsimile of depth. “In formlessness she discovered power, and also a freedom from limitation,” a narrator says about their mother in Parade — a beautiful sentence until one realizes that any of the nouns could be rearranged without injuring the impression that one is reading an awful truth. As in Cusk’s previous novel, the feverish melodrama Second Place , the old themes of domesticity and maternal guilt have returned in full force — but now their delivery is cold and explanatory, to the extent that much of Parade reads like catalogue copy for an unseen art exhibit. In a telling echo of Angeliki’s novel in Outline, the only G without a clear historical counterpart is a talented female painter whose professional success separates her from her young daughter. With this G, Cusk poses a question that has obsessed her for years: Can women make art?

It is a false question. Yet Cusk treats it with fatal solemnity. The artist Georg Baselitz , whose upside-down paintings appear in Parade, told an interviewer in 2013, “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.” One should call this what it is — crude misogyny — and crush it underfoot. Instead, Cusk obscures it under thick layers of weak mysticism, much as Baselitz once painted over his pictures with a deadening black paint. That, on balance, female artists face more institutional obstacles than male ones, that they are more likely to be unjustly reduced to their particularity by critics, that the gender division of labor continues to take an enervating toll even on many affluent white women — none of this can be denied. Nor is any of it the subject of Parade, which is given over to cryptic pronouncements about the “violence underlying female identity.” For years, Cusk has warned ominously of the “confusion of male and female values” that has accompanied women’s gains in political equality with men — a typical example of the inscrutable private language that has allowed her flatly essentialist views about gender to pass for the feminist avant-garde. We learn in Parade that the female condition is “unlasting yet eternal,” that behind its “volcanic cycles of change” there lies something “darkly continuous” yet “unknown.” The female artist, we are told, must reckon with “the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.”

What Cusk really means is that women must make art about being mothers. If they refuse to do this, they are effectively neutering themselves, disavowing their “female biological destiny” in the doomed pursuit of “male freedom.” The latter appears to be identical with regular freedom in every way except that, when exposed in a woman, it is proof of a grotesque and self-defeating identification with men. One cannot, I think, have a high opinion of women if one is to believe this. It is like defining the air as male and bravely refusing to breathe.

The wild young painter G marries a lawyer she meets at a gallery opening. He disapproves of her: In this, she recognizes a form of heterosexual authority that she craves. G adapts to his life, lets him rule over her, and becomes pregnant with his daughter. “A dreadful truth, the truth of her female caste, came slowly and inexorably into view, with its smouldering fires of injustice and servitude,” writes Cusk. G’s husband, taking off work, claims their daughter for his own, while G is marched back into the studio to pay the bills. She feels inferior to her male colleagues; she makes one female friend, another painter, noting with discomfort that this friend lacks any “desire for male freedom and prestige.” Then G’s husband goes away to care for his dying father, and for the first time G feels free of his influence. She becomes warmer, more maternal, making pancakes for her daughter and allowing her into her studio; she imagines what it would be like not to work. One day, G’s daughter looks up and casually asks why men need to exist at all. The question horrifies G, who realizes that a world without men would be a world without the freedom she desires. “Men are great,” she answers, though she cannot say why.

The story of G has the quality of a parable or a fairy tale. It contains the broad strokes of Cusk’s theory of the woman artist . It seems that, in claiming her freedom from the sphere of need, the woman artist must learn to pass as an “honorary man.” Yet she remains attached, as if by umbilical cord, to the home life she tries to leave behind; ultimately, she is consumed with rage at her emasculated husband and guilt over her abandoned children. Cusk regards this as a dead end for the female artist. “A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman,” she claims in a 2009 essay on Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf . “Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man.” But what such a “female sentence” would look like is deeply unclear. Genuine women’s writing, Cusk argues, would abandon any claim to “equivalence in the male world” and concern itself “with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life.” Evidently, to paint a female painting, the woman artist must integrate her need to express herself artistically with “the very roots of female identity : continuity, stability, the capacity to nurture.” In short, she must let her child into the studio.

That the female artist has a child is treated as an established fact in Parade. Of feminism, Cusk knows very little, and she is eager to prove it. In the essay on Woolf we encounter the preposterous claim that there is “no public unity among women”; more recently, Cusk has said that she is too old to think of gender as “ open to examination .” (She is 57.) In a baffling profile of the painters Celia Paul and Cecily Brown from 2019, Cusk is so convinced in advance that her subjects must be professionally crippled by their own biology that she takes it upon herself to break their legs. “Motherhood is an inextricable aspect of female being,” she declares after Brown quite sanely suggests that parenting and painting might make irreconcilable demands on one’s time. “It is one thing,” Cusk writes, “to choose not to have a child at all, but if you can do both, be both, then surely the possibility of formulating a grander female vision and voice becomes graspable.” The assertion is brittle and accusatory. How can one avoid concluding that any female artist who refuses motherhood as her subject, much less her life, is essentially betraying herself? (In general, Cusk is clueless on politics: An essay on Brexit ends with the idea that everyone should be more polite, like Jesus Christ.)

One senses that Cusk is berating herself. In one essay in Aftermath , she recounts how her ex-husband — like G’s husband, a lawyer turned photographer — performed the bulk of the domestic responsibilities while she, like G, wrote novels to pay the bills. In that arrangement she discovered a false equality: She gave up her “primitive maternal right over the children,” while her husband saw his contribution merely as “helping.” In her own assessment, the marriage was doomed because its egalitarian structure forced her to deny the “long pilgrimage of pregnancy with its wonders and abasements, the apotheosis of childbirth, the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed.” Instead, Cusk reverted to the “adulterated male values” she had learned from both her father and mother — professional ambition chief among them — while forcing her husband into the role of housewife. “My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female,” she writes. But Cusk grew to hate her husband’s dependence on her and influence over the children, and she began to feel like neither an honorary man nor an authentic woman. “I am not a feminist,” she concludes. “I am a self-hating transvestite.”

A startling metaphor! The essay in question was first published in 2011 — one of the last years before the idea of transvestism would be drained of any remaining metaphorical potential in English letters and reduced to a sheer monstrosity. Cusk has never told us what she thinks of her fellow transgender people, though one is free to guess. What we do know is that her fiction is chock-full of female characters who harbor, or are accused of harboring, a secret desire to be men. The desperate writer in Second Place admits to disguising herself in the “borrowed finery” of masculinity, to the extent that “some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male.” An overqualified teacher in Arlington Park had “forgotten she was a woman” until she met her husband, while the breadwinning wife of The Bradshaw Variations “craved it, her opposite, masculinity.” In The Lucky Ones, a feminist columnist tells a housewife that she wants to be “the same” as men; the housewife is disturbed. The erstwhile crush of In the Fold now has a “coarse shadow of black hair” on her upper lip; her sister-in-law speculates that she “doesn’t actually want to be a woman.” One night, the eponymous heroine of Saving Agnes has a dream: “She had found herself in possession of a giant penis like an elephant’s trunk and was forced to bundle it up beneath her skirt like a dark and terrible secret and walk around in mortal fear of its discovery.”

What to do with all these troubled hermaphrodites? “I always thought it was better to be a man, and I wanted to be a man my entire life,” Cusk told her fellow novelist Sheila Heti in 2020. There is nothing immoral, irrational, or even unusual about penis envy — it is generally better to be a man, as far as history is concerned — but Cusk has taken this desire and pathologized it so intensely that it has turned her into the paranoid custodian of an idiosyncratic gender fundamentalism. Men must be men; women must be women. A character in Parade remarks of the sculptor G that she “treats both sexes as doomed by gender, as almost interchangeable in that sense, so that a third sex emerges in which the man and woman have merged into each other and become neutral.” This G is clearly based on Bourgeois, who late in life created a series of sculptures of two nude human figures intimately embracing. In one such piece , made of polished aluminum, the two figures are almost entirely mummified in the tentaclelike coils of hair coming from one of their heads. This hermaphroditic mass with its suggestion of the simultaneous presence of male and female parts — this is the horrific fate that we are to believe awaits every female artist who tries to claim male freedom for herself.

There are so many poor assumptions here that the simplest may be the least obvious: It is not clear that Bourgeois’s couples always consist of a man and a woman. But Cusk can scarcely imagine a world beyond the heterosexual family. Divorce did not cure her of that weakness. The dissolution of a marriage is simply the closest that most middle-class women ever come to experiencing the social death of queerness. In Cusk’s case, it seems to have fed her belief that outside heterosexuality there lies only an unfathomable void. She regards her few gay characters with slow bewilderment. “It took Julian a long time to piece together the nature of their relationship, two grown men living in luxury together without a woman in sight,” she writes in Transit. This is the narrow sense in which Cusk can conceive of gay male life: as the absence of female dependency. Lesbians, meanwhile, are nearly unthinkable. In Outline, a famous lesbian poet reports an outlandish dream about a group of women who are too drenched in menstrual blood to go to the opera. Cusk has the poet conclude that the dream expresses the “disgust that exists indelibly between men and women” — and not, as one might also conclude, the cost of failing to imagine what women might have in common outside their biological destiny. The irony is that the poet, being a lesbian, should know perfectly well what else women might share.

Few readers will notice, I expect, that the titular parade of Parade is intended to be the Parisian equivalent of the Pride March. I myself would not know this had Cusk not volunteered it at a launch event recently. Yet now it is hard to miss the patronizing shift from march, with its residual connotations of political struggle and moral authority, to parade, which suggests frivolity and heavy traffic. As the sun sets on gay Paree, a groaning fleet of garbage trucks is dispatched to clean up the mess; behold, we are meant to think, the cost of freedom! Meanwhile, several heterosexual characters navigate their way through the chaos to a brasserie nearby, where they discuss whether the late artist G “missed the opportunity to love women.” What they mean by this, Cusk does not say. What is clear is that the queers, in their “fantastical costumes,” are now crowding up the restaurant. “It’s the parade,” says one woman apologetically, “that has confused everything.”

It is interesting to note that Cusk has looked to Beauvoir and Woolf for inspiration. Neither was heterosexual, and neither gave birth. Both pursued at certain points in their lives a kind of thwarted, ecstatic, sometimes tragic lesbianism that strongly informed their theories about female art. But there was an important difference between the two. When Beauvoir claimed that van Gogh could never have been born a woman, she meant that such a woman, having scarcely begun to posit herself as a free and authentic being, could never have taken the human condition onto her tender shoulders. When Woolf wrote that no woman in Shakespeare’s time could have possessed Shakespeare’s genius, she meant that a woman of the same raw talent and background would have lacked the money, education, and legal right to stride onto the stage of the Globe. Between these two arguments there lies an almost infinite gulf. The female van Gogh is the victim of an existential foreclosure, one that can be overcome only by a transcendent act of will that Beauvoir left perilously nebulous. By contrast, Shakespeare’s sister, as Woolf called her, is simply the victim of a shut door. It is no great mystery what keeps her on this side of it: Someone has gone and locked it.

Anyone genuinely invested in the fate of women artists must learn to separate, whenever possible, the material questions from the existential ones. To confuse them is disastrous. From the standpoint of history, there are many real reasons a woman might fail to be an artist — the unpaid reproductive labor she is often expected to perform within the home, for instance. From the standpoint of existence, however, there can be no barrier whatsoever: She is a human being. Early on in A Room of One’s Own , Woolf recounts a fictionalized encounter with the guardian of a university library who informs her that women are not permitted entry unchaperoned. “That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library,” Woolf tartly remarks. In this one sentence you will find more truth about the woman artist than in all of Parade. Cusk has surveyed those privileges historically appropriated from women by certain men — wealth, institutional power, freedoms of movement and expression — and mistaken them for the ontological enfeeblement of the female sex. Women have, I think, enough problems already; there is no reason to invent more.

The really challenging idea is not that female artists, when finally given all the advantages of male ones, will make art equal to that of any man but that women, when they are finally given all the advantages of men, may cease to be women altogether. One cannot say for sure: It has never been tried. But the metaphysics of sex will remain the pastime of fools and bigots until the full redistribution of wealth has taken place. I sympathize with Cusk’s fear: that material equality will result, even if only by accident, in the abolition of women. (I am surely fonder of them than she.) “Wouldn’t it be a bit boring if everyone was the same?” asks the skeptical housewife of The Lucky Ones. Even Woolf did not want to see the two sexes reduced to one — but this was because she longed for more sexual difference than the duality of male and female could provide. “If an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies,” she wrote, “nothing would be of greater service to humanity.” One remembers that Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own shortly after her novel Orlando, whose eponymous hero changes sex with a kind of blithe serenity that could not be more foreign to Cusk’s self-hating androgynes.

Now it is true that Woolf called for women to write “as women write, not as men write.” By this, she meant that the classical literary forms — epic poetry, for instance — had been so clearly shaped by male experience as to be more difficult for a woman to bend to her will. Hence the cleverness of a writer like Austen, who found the novel “young enough to be soft in her hands.” This is perfectly sound: To the extent that the lives of men and women still contain many generalizable differences, one may justly speak of male and female sentences. But to ask the female artist to make art that only a woman could make is to ask her to make no art at all. As Cusk herself has suggested, the novel is a kind of objet trouvé, mute as a slab of marble ; it takes a witness to make its cold neutrality catch fire. In itself, the sentence has neither sex nor gender — nor, for that matter, sexuality, race, class, religion, or nationality. Not a single blot of paint in the Tate Modern repels the female soul, though the £84 annual membership fee may dissuade some female wallets. “Literature is open to everybody,” Woolf writes. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

I know Cusk knows this. She has made no secret of her admiration of art by men; half the G’s in Parade are male artists in whose work she has discovered something real or true. When the first G’s wife sees his upside-down paintings , she instantly feels that they elucidate the tragedy of female being. The paintings crush her; they are acts of unbearable authenticity and theft. A female novelist who visits G’s studio feels the same, exclaiming with remorse that she wishes she could write novels upside-down. “G was not the first man,” Cusk observes, “to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.” But why should the theft go only one way? Cusk characterizes G’s breakthrough as casual and inadvertent, the product of a vague desire to “make sense of his time and place in history.” G’s wife consoles herself with the knowledge that the paintings would not exist if not for her own creation of a nourishing domestic environment. Yet it is G’s wife who, just by looking at them, impregnates the paintings with her own ideas about freedom and need. Even their annihilating force reflects the power of her mind. She steals the paintings every time she looks at them: They are hers.

To question the possibility of female art is, ultimately, to question the possibility of female thought. In both cases, one wonders how hard Cusk is really looking. She ends Parade by considering several oil paintings by the 17th-century Dutch painter Jacobus Vrel . In one, a black-clad woman sits in an otherwise empty room, hunched over a large tome in her lap, while through the dark window behind her one can just barely discern the beseeching face of a small child. For Cusk, it is a stunning portrait of female immanence, female withdrawal, female nonbeing — and painted by a man! “This woman was alone in a way that was nearly impossible to represent,” observe the narrators, who are mourning their late mother. But the woman’s chosen solitude, her indifference to the demands of domestic labor, has been represented quite clearly: She is reading a book. That we do not know what she thinks of it does not mean that female being is tragically excluded from the realm of freedom or narrative or identity. It just means she hasn’t told us.

Cusk, I’m afraid, is one of those rare writers whose genius exceeds the depth of her own experience. She has taken some fine observations about bourgeois motherhood under late capitalism and annealed them, through sheer intensity of talent, into empty aphorisms about the second sex. In so doing, she has wasted an enormous amount of energy on making the idea of female freedom unthinkable — an ironic choice for a writer who has achieved something like canonicity within her own lifetime. If Parade is women’s writing, let us hope it is the last of it. Another kind of novel is possible. When Angeliki tells Faye that she regrets not putting more about her characters’ “material circumstances” in her novel, I think we are meant to find this vaguely funny. But it’s a good idea! At least it would be better than banging on about female destiny while ignoring the lives of actual women. One must never mistake a defect of the imagination for a hole in reality.

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The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

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Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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