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Spectrum : a collection of engaging essays

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Spectrum 6th Grade Writing Workbooks, Ages 11 to 12, 6th Grade Writing, Informative, Argumentative, and Descriptive Story Writing Prompts, Writing Practice - 136 Pages Paperback – August 15, 2014

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Grade 6 Writing Workbook for kids ages 11-12

Support your child’s educational journey with the Spectrum Grade 6 Writing Workbook that teaches basic handwriting skills to 6th grade students.

Writing Books are a great way for students to learn basic writing skills such as writing stories, informative writing, argumentative writing, and more through a variety of creative writing prompts and writing practice that are both fun AND educational!

Why You’ll Love This 6th Grade Workbook

• Engaging and educational writing prompts. “Writing a personal narrative”, “Comparing characters”, and “Incorporating graphics and visual aids into writing” are a few of the fun kids writing activities that incorporate writing practice for kids into everyday settings to help inspire learning into your child’s curriculum.
• Testing progress along the way. Post-tests are included at the end of every chapter to test student knowledge. A writer’s handbook and answer key are included in the back of the 6th grade book to track your child’s progress along the way before moving on to new and exciting activities.

The 136-page writing activity book is sized at about 8 ½ inches x 11 inches—giving your child plenty of space to complete each exercise.

About Spectrum

For more than 20 years, Spectrum has provided solutions for parents who want to help their children get ahead, and for teachers who want their students to meet and exceed set learning goals—providing workbooks that are a great resource for both homeschooling and classroom curriculum.

• 4 chapters full of vibrant activities
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Perfectly sized at about 8 ½” x 11”

• Reading age 11 - 12 years
• Print length 136 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 4 - 6
• Dimensions 8.5 x 0.25 x 11 inches
• Publisher Spectrum
• Publication date August 15, 2014
• ISBN-10 1483812014
• ISBN-13 978-1483812014
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Spectrum; Workbook edition (August 15, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 136 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1483812014
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1483812014
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 11 - 12 years
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 4 - 6
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.25 x 11 inches
• #30 in Children's Grammar Books (Books)
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The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians review – unpicking the lexicon of America’s leaders

New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada examines the speeches, writing and linguistic tics of presidents and members of Congress to expose ‘inveterate deceivers’

P oliticians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes them artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise: in political jargon, a “narrative” is a storyline that warps truth for partisan purposes. Carlos Lozada, formerly a reviewer for the Washington Post and now a columnist at the New York Times , specialises in picking apart these professional falsehoods. Analysing windy orations, ghostwritten memoirs and faceless committee reports, the essays in his book expose American presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices as unreliable narrators, inveterate deceivers who betray themselves in careless verbal slips.

Lozada has a literary critic’s sharp eye, and an alertly cocked ear to go with it. Thus he fixes on a stray remark made by Trump as he rallied the mob that invaded the Capitol in January 2021. Ordering the removal of metal detectors, he said that the guns his supporters toted didn’t bother him, because “they’re not here to hurt me”. Lozada wonders about the emphasis in that phrase: did it neutrally fall on “hurt” or come down hard on “me”? If the latter, it licensed the rampant crowd to hurt Trump’s enemies – for instance by stringing up his disaffected vice-president Mike Pence on a gallows outside the Capitol.

Tiny linguistic tics mark the clash between two versions of America’s fabled past and its prophetic future. Lozada subtly tracks the recurrence of the word “still” in Biden’s speeches – for instance his assertion that the country “still believes in honesty and decency” and is “still a democracy” – and contrasts it with Trump’s reliance on “again”, the capstone of his vow to Make America Great Again. Biden’s “still” defensively fastens on “something good that may be slipping away”, whereas Trump’s “again” blathers about restoring a lost greatness that is never defined. Biden’s evokes “an ideal worth preserving”; Trump’s equivalent summons up an illusion.

At their boldest, Lozada’s politicians trade in inflated tales about origins and predestined outcomes, grandiose narratives that “transcend belief and become a fully formed worldview”. Hence the title of Hillary Clinton’s manifesto It Takes a Village , which borrows an African proverb about child-rearing and uses it to prompt nostalgia for a bygone America. Lozada watches Obama devising and revising a personal myth. Addressed as Barry by his youthful friends, he later insisted on being called Barack and relaunched himself as the embodiment of America’s ethnic inclusivity; his “personalised presidency” treated the office as an extension of “the Obama brand”. In this respect Trump was Obama’s logical successor, extending a personal brand in a bonanza of self-enrichment. The “big lie” about the supposedly stolen 2020 election is another mythological whopper. Trump admitted its falsity on one occasion when he remarked “We lost”, after which he immediately backtracked, adding: “We didn’t lose. We lost in the Democrats’ imagination.”

All this amuses Lozada but also makes him anxious. As an adoptive American – born in Peru, he became a citizen a decade ago – he has a convert’s faith in the country’s ideals, yet he worries about contradictions that the national creed strains to reconcile. A border wall now debars the impoverished masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty; the sense of community is fractured by “sophisticated engines of division and misinformation”. Surveying dire fictional scenarios about American decline, Lozada notes that the warmongers enjoy “a narrative advantage”: peace is boring, but predictions of a clash with China or an attack by homegrown terrorists excite the electorate by promising shock, awe and an apocalyptic barrage of special effects. Rather than recoiling from Trump, do Americans share his eagerness for desecration and destruction?

Changing only the names of the performers, The Washington Book has a shadowy local replica. Here in Britain, too, ideological posturing has replaced reasoned argument, and buzzwords are squeezed to death by repetition. Whenever Sunak drones on about “delivering for the British people”, I think of him as a Deliveroo gig worker with a cooling takeaway in his backpack, or a weary postman pushing a trolley full of mortgage bills.

Though such verbal vices are international, a difference of scale separates Washington from Westminster. In America, heroic ambition is brought low by errors of judgment or moral flaws that for Lozada recall “the great themes of literature and the great struggles of life”: Kennedy’s risky confrontations with Cuba, Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam, Nixon overcome by paranoia. To set against these tragic falls, we have only the comic spectacle of Boris Johnson gurning on a zip wire or Liz Truss vaingloriously granting an interview atop the Empire State Building; neither of them had the good grace to jump off. American politics is dangerously thrilling because it is so consequential for the rest of the world. In Britain we are doomed to sit through a more trivial show, an unfunny farce played out in a theatre that is crumbling around us.

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8 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our fiction recommendations this week include a “gleeful romp” of a series mystery, along with three novels by some heavy-hitting young writers: Téa Obreht, Helen Oyeyemi and Tommy Orange. (How heavy-hitting, and how young? Consider that Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue in 2010 — and she’s still under 40 today. So is Oyeyemi, who was one of Granta’s “Best Young British Novelists” in 2013, while Orange, at 42, has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize and the American Book Award. The future is in good hands.)

In nonfiction, we recommend a painter’s memoir, a group biography of three jazz giants, a posthumous essay collection by the great critic Joan Acocella and a journalist’s look at American citizens trying to come to terms with a divided country. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE MORNINGSIDE Téa Obreht

After being displaced from their homeland, Silvia and her mother move into the Morningside, a weather-beaten luxury apartment building in “Island City,” a sinking version of New York in the middle of all-out climate collapse. Silvia learns about her heritage through the folk tales her aunt Ena tells her, and becomes fascinated with the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse apartment.

“I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose. … Even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.”

From Jessamine Chan’s review

Random House | $29

A GRAVE ROBBERY Deanna Raybourn

In their ninth crime-solving tale, the Victorian-era adventuress and butterfly hunter Veronica Speedwell and her partner discover that a wax mannequin is actually a dead young woman, expertly preserved.

“Throw in an assortment of delightful side characters and an engaging tamarin monkey, and what you have is the very definition of a gleeful romp.”

From Sarah Weinman’s crime column

Berkley | $28

THE BLOODIED NIGHTGOWN: And Other Essays Joan Acocella

Acocella, who died in January, may have been best known as one of our finest dance critics. But as this posthumous collection shows, she brought the same rigor, passion and insight to all the art she consumed. Whether her subject is genre fiction, “Beowulf” or Marilynne Robinson, Acocella’s knowledge and enthusiasm are hard to match. We will not see her like again.

"Some critics are haters, but Acocella began writing criticism because she loved — first dance, and then much of the best of Western culture. She let life bring her closer to art."

From Joanna Biggs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35

WANDERING STARS Tommy Orange

This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.

“Orange’s ability to highlight the contradictory forces that coexist within friendships, familial relationships and the characters themselves ... makes ‘Wandering Stars’ a towering achievement.”

From Jonathan Escoffery’s review

Knopf | $29

PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE Helen Oyeyemi

In Oyeyemi’s latest magical realist adventure, our hero is a woman named Hero, and she is hurtling through the city of Prague, with a shape-shifting book about Prague, during a bachelorette weekend. But Hero doesn’t seem to be directing the novel’s action; the story itself seems to be calling the shots.

“Her stock-in-trade has always been tales at their least domesticated. … In this novel, they have all the autonomy, charisma and messiness of living beings — and demand the same respect.”

From Chelsea Leu’s review

Riverhead | $28

3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool James Kaplan

On one memorable occasion in 1959, three outstanding musicians came together for what may be the greatest jazz record ever, Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” Kaplan, the author of a Frank Sinatra biography, traces the lives of his protagonists in compelling fashion; he may not be a jazz expert but he knows how to tell a good story.

“Kaplan has framed '3 Shades of Blue' as both a chronicle of a golden age and a lament for its decline and fall. One doesn’t have to accept the decline-and-fall part to acknowledge that he has done a lovely job of evoking the golden age.”

From Peter Keepnews’s review

Penguin Press | $35

WITH DARKNESS CAME STARS: A Memoir Audrey Flack

From her early days as an Abstract Expressionist who hung out with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning at the Cedar Bar to her later success as a pioneering photorealist, Flack worked and lived at the center of New York’s art world over her long career; here she chronicles the triumphs, the slights, the sexism and the gossip, all with equal relish.

“Flack is a natural, unfiltered storyteller. … The person who emerges from her pages is someone who never doubts she has somewhere to go.”

From Prudence Peiffer’s review

Penn State University Press | $37.50

AN AMERICAN DREAMER: Life in a Divided Country David Finkel

Agile and bracing, Finkel’s book trails a small network of people struggling in the tumultuous period between the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. At the center is Brent Cummings, a white Iraq war veteran who is trying to cope with a country he no longer recognizes.

“Adroitly assembles these stories into a poignant account of the social and political mood in the United States. … A timely and compelling argument for tolerance and moral character in times of extreme antagonism.”

From John Knight’s review

Random House | $32

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Why Don Winslow’s ‘City in Ruins’ will be his last novel

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City in Ruins

By Don Winslow William Morrow: 400 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

It’s the end of the line for Danny and Don.

Don Winslow’s latest novel, “City in Ruins,” the final installment in the Danny Ryan series , will be his last. After 25 novels — seven New York Times bestsellers — Don Winslow is calling it quits.

In April 2022, Winslow announced that with the completion of the Danny Ryan trilogy, he would be turning his attention from the highly popular crime novels that have earned him fans around the world to the political arena. “It feels like my time and energy are better spent in that fight right now,” he said.

Winslow was in a reflective mood when I had lunch with him at Quecho, a Mexican restaurant in Julian, the small mountain town in the eastern part of San Diego County where he has lived for 26 years.

Novelist Don Winslow is out to save America from Donald Trump — and an existential crisis

Don Winslow stopped writing novels to wage war on politics: ‘I called Donald Trump a fascist in 2015, and the critique I got from people was, “You’re out of your mind.”’

April 3, 2023

“I’ve had such a bigger and better career than I ever dreamed of — or probably deserved,” Winslow said. “But I remember back when it wasn’t that way.”

Throughout much of Winslow’s career as a writer, he had to work two or three jobs to make ends meet. He worked for many years as a private detective, served as a photographic safari guide in Kenya and directed summer theater in Oxford, England, to name a few. Although many of these adventures never made their way into his crime stories, they helped him grow as a writer. For example, he said that working in the bush as a safari guide taught him the importance of “seeing things in detail,” but it was often a struggle to get people to pay attention to his work.

“I remember driving up to Laguna Beach,” Winslow recalled, “to go to a bookstore for a book that was set in Laguna Beach. I was supposed to be there for two hours. Nobody came. An hour in, the bookstore owner asked me to lock up and she left!”

Many writers have experiences like this when they are starting out, but Winslow was no longer a novice. After 15 books, widespread attention and acclaim remained out of reach. Even when his surf-noir novel “Savages” was adapted by Oliver Stone, it underperformed at the box office.

Instead of writing about Princess Diana, Chris Bohjalian opted for her Vegas impersonator

Author Chris Bohjalian discusses his 25th novel, ‘The Princess of Las Vegas,’ and how ancestral trauma from his Armenian heritage contributes to the dread in his work.

March 19, 2024

“I got told so often what I wasn’t, that I almost forgot what I was,” Winslow recalled. “I was told you’re not a bestselling writer. You’re not an airport author. You’re a cult author.”

Winslow’s reputation as a crime writer’s crime writer changed when he started working with writer, producer and literary agent Shane Salerno at the Story Factory . A string of bestsellers followed, including “The Cartel” and “ The Border ” from a series of books about the Mexican drug war that featured DEA agent Art Keller. Then came “City on Fire” in 2022 and “City of Dreams” in 2023 from the Danny Ryan series.

“Don is a true artist who wrote books in a beautiful, economic, clean prose style that should be taught in Writing 101,” said Adrian McKinty , the New York Times bestselling author of “The Island” and “The Chain” who also works with Salerno. “Don told his stories in his way and never compromised his ideals or his vision to sell books. But sell books he did. By holding true to his principles and producing gem after gem, he let the audience build and come to him.”

Although Winslow is concluding his long career with “City in Ruins,” the gangster Danny Ryan has been on his mind for a long time.

“I wrote that first sentence of that first book 30 years ago and it hasn’t changed by a syllable,” Winslow said. “And the opening scene hasn’t changed very much at all. I always had this image of this guy laying on that beach, and it’s a beach I’m on every afternoon for six months of the year. I grew up on that beach.”

The saga of Danny Ryan and his rise from small-time leg-breaker to Hollywood mogul parallels Virgil’s “The Aeneid.” The woman who appears on that beach and kicks off a gang war between the Irish and Italian mobs in Providence, R.I., represents Helen of Troy. Danny’s journey to Hollywood, Winslow explained, echoes Aeneas’ journey to Carthage.

Review: How Don Winslow found inspiration in Rhode Island mobsters for a new crime juggernaut

Novelist Don Winslow launches a new trilogy with ‘City on Fire,’ a story inspired by his roots and Homer’s ‘Iliad.’

April 18, 2022

“There’s an incident in ‘The Aeneid’ quite early on where Aeneas is shipwrecked at Carthage, and he walks into a cave. He sees murals of the Trojan War, paintings of his dead friends, his home, all of that is right there on the wall. What could the equivalent of that be? And then it became very obvious: it’s film.”

In “City in Ruins,” the parallels continue when Winslow’s headstrong hero finds himself in Las Vegas. For someone trying to go straight and leave the violence of his gangster past behind him, it’s a curious choice for a new beginning. That’s the charm of Danny Ryan. He’s never the smartest or strongest player in the room. He’s stubborn and loyal to a fault.

“Classically, the definition of a hero in literary terms is he has to have a fatal flaw,” Winslow explained. “The Achilles heel with Danny is loyalty. I get that having grown up in Rhode Island, which is a tiny state with a little bit of a chip on its shoulder. I grew up playing pond hockey and if somebody dropped the gloves on your friend, you dropped the gloves. You didn’t think about who’s right, who’s wrong, you just did it. So I think there’s a lot of that in Danny that leads him to some bad, even dumb decisions.”

Although it takes a while for Danny’s past to catch up with him, “City of Ruins” provides an explosive finish to the trilogy, and is an instant classic in the lexicon of Las Vegas gangster fiction. But it didn’t come easy. Thirty years in the making, Winslow still hadn’t figured out the ending when the first installment was published.

“The chronology was problematic,” Winslow admitted, “but I was very interested in starting the trilogy so that it ended up in Vegas as the mob was fading out and corporate America was taking over.”

‘The Border’ is Don Winslow’s final chapter in a chilling, timely and seminal drug war trilogy

A car stops on a hilltop. A man gets out. He walks a few paces and stands at the ridge.

Feb. 21, 2019

Tod Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author of the “ Gangsterland” series set in Las Vegas , was already a fan of Winslow, but thinks his most recent work will cement his reputation.

“It’s this last ‘City’ trilogy of mob novels that I think will change the way history views Don,” Goldberg said. “He’s not merely a great crime writer, he’s one of the finest chroniclers of this twisted American life, where we are defined not by the good guys, but by who got away with it.”

After working so hard to achieve the success that eluded him for so long, is this really the end of Winslow’s writing career?

Well, yes and no.

“I think I’m done publishing novels,” Winslow said, “but there’s a lot of research I want to do. There’s things I want to learn about. I’ll probably always write, but I’ve made this decision about publishing and it’s pretty firm.”

In addition to the political videos that he creates and shares on his social media accounts, many adaptations of his books are currently in development. “City on Fire,” for example, is getting a movie starring Austin Butler. Winslow and Butler are among the producers on the Sony pic. He will always be a storyteller — Winslow says every one of his novels has been either sold or optioned by Hollywood — just in different media.

Still, Winslow’s exit leaves a massive hole. “It’s a huge loss to the crime writing community,” McKinty said. “For me, Don Winslow and James Ellroy are the two greatest American crime novelists of the last 30 years. His legacy is a tremendous body of work that any novelist would be proud of and the certainty that he took American fiction into extraordinary places that it would never have gone but for him.”

Lou Berney, award-winning author of “November Road” and “ Dark Ride ,” echoes these sentiments. “Don’s retirement from the crime writing community is a gut punch. He’s been such an inspiration to so many writers for such a long time. Every time a new Don Winslow book comes out, it’s a sharp reminder of how good, and how important, crime fiction can be. That’s irreplaceable.”

Winslow, who estimates that he’s spent more time with his fictional characters than actual human beings, is more sanguine about stepping away.

“I don’t want to push it, and I mean it,” Winslow said. “I want to be grateful for where I’ve come and let it go.”

Winslow will be discussing the book during Live Talks Los Angeles on April 11 at 8 p.m. at Moss Theater in Santa Monica.

Ruland is the author of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records” and “Make It Stop.”

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Julia Alvarez wrote her new novel as if it were her last

‘the cemetery of untold stories,’ written as alvarez was going through a health crisis, grapples with the prospect of work left unfinished.

Julia Alvarez, 74, has been thinking a lot about what it means to be an elder. In her latest novel, “ The Cemetery of Untold Stories ,” the central character — a celebrated Dominican American author, like her creator — regards her literary reputation with skepticism: “The glow of celebrity now tinged with nostalgia might keep the fan fires going, but Alma didn’t want anyone’s condescension or pity. The time had come to stop beating herself up for not being able to finish anything. She was trying to hold on to the literary version of good looks, the plastic surgeries of astute agents and editors nipping and tucking the flagging work.”

Like “ How the García Girls Lost Their Accents ,” Alvarez’s pathbreaking novel from 1991, her new book explores sisterhood, immigration and return, and family secrets. But it also charts new, at times surreal, territory for Alvarez. Alma, unwilling to simply coast on readers’ nostalgia, resolves to build a little house on some inherited land in the Dominican Republic, where she literally buries her unfinished work. But the characters of these abandoned projects have their own ideas: They whisper their stories to Filomena, a local woman hired as the cemetery’s caretaker, and to Filomena’s nephew Pepito, an aspiring academic.

I spoke to Alvarez over video in late March. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What were the first seeds of this novel?

As I get older, I’m more and more interested in the landscape of aging. What does this experience — the end of your life, latter life — feel like? More specifically, what is it like for someone who has spent a lifetime in a craft? I didn’t have answers. I was just curious. My last novel, “ Afterlife ,” came out during the pandemic, in 2020. There was a sense of mortality — not just the aging of a population, but the aging of a planet. Everyone felt it was the last days. Also, a lot of attention was being focused on us, the vulnerables!

When I could wrap my head around writing at all, because we were all so shellshocked by what was going on, I started working on this novel. I realized, I have all these stories I want to tell, and I have boxes where I began novels that dead-ended or researched a historical figure or had these little jottings. It was so many boxes. You know, when you’re young, you think, Someday I’ll get to that . When you’re old [laughs] and getting older, you know, there’s not going to be time to get to all of them. How do you make peace with that? And how do you make peace with the characters that have been haunting you, and how do you exorcise them?

I started writing and in the midst of it, I had a health crisis. I lost vision in my right eye. And after two major surgeries and a long recovery and not being able to read — the other eye was seeing double — I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish. I was finally fitted with these prism glasses, and I worked very slowly, maybe an hour or two at a time, because of the strain. There was a new urgency to the novel — as if it were the last novel I would ever write.

I’m struck by the way you describe having to work in this more limited, very careful way. Was that a big change from the way you’ve typically written?

I think I’m a little impatient to get something written, usually. And I just had to be patient. It’s not that I didn’t want to grab [the characters] while I could and get it down; it’s just that I couldn’t. So maybe that forced me to be a little more like Filomena in the book — to listen more carefully. And there was, I have to say, ironically — not that it wasn’t hard, as writing is always hard, and bad days are hard — a new joy in the writing. Because I was doing the thing I love that I thought I would never get to do again.

Alma, Filomena and the other characters think a lot about the ethics of storytelling. There are many people in their lives who are angry or irritated by the way their stories have been shared. Has that been on your mind more than it has been in the past?

Of course, I do wonder — I’ve had a lot of flak, especially when she was alive, from my mother. I used to joke that I think every Latina of my generation could start their novel: “Mami told me to keep my mouth shut about this.” A woman wasn’t supposed to have a public voice or bring up certain tricky, sensitive issues. There was that sense of: Are you betraying caution and a sort of courtesy that you were supposed to have for your family? Are you being disloyal to that family, in order to be loyal to the story?

That is always a tension for any thoughtful writer — but also as a writer who comes originally from another homeland, a so-called Third World that has often been exploited for the ease and comfort and pleasure of the First World. Is there a literary version of that? I don’t have any answers; that would be death to the novel. I just have a lot of questions and inquiétudes.

But part of the reason that Alma, a.k.a. Scheherazade, takes her unfinished manuscripts back is to lay them to rest in their native land. It’s a way of bringing them back to where they maybe really belong — and at the same time, giving over the narrative to the storytellers who won’t get their tales told by the big megaphone of the First World.

She also gives that material to Pepito, this younger writer on an academic fellowship, which isn’t going so well, and who really wants her papers. I was so intrigued by this character, because you could have made him this figure of fun, or an interloper, but you didn’t. How did you think about this young writer in relation to the older one?

Well, Pepito is tenure track [laughs] and really sweating about getting this book out and making it acceptable. He’s writing about multicultural writers, ethnic writers and so forth, and has to tie that to canonical writers to boost his subject matter and get it accepted by the people who are going to be deciding his fate. And he experiences a kind of liberation: His encounter with Alma and with the stories buried in the graveyard liberate him to connect with what he was neglecting, out of survival instinct. He represents, as you said, the younger generation. There’s transmission going on. Alma, Julia Alvarez, any living older writer — we might not get the story told. But it’s not “après moi, le déluge.” Someone will come.

One of my events in New York will be with Elizabeth Acevedo and Angie Cruz — and me, la vieja. And in that audience there will be younger versions of all of us, coming forward with stories. I’m just thrilled by that generational unfolding.

I have a bit of a silly question to ask —

Curiosity is never silly.

Well, in an interview you mentioned that there is sometimes a secret soundtrack to which you write your novels. For “Afterlife,” it was a Leonard Cohen song, “Anthem.” Was there one for this book?

Huh. Well, I was listening to a lot of Dominican music, to hear what was going on in the barrio. But I’d have to think about that — and I really should, because I’m trying to develop my hearing intelligence. I’m now certifiably visually impaired, as we’re called. Through a program at the Library of Congress, you can get most books on tape, so that’s been wonderful. But I have to learn to really focus — not with my eyes, but with my listening. Because my mind will stray.

I’m a big birder, and now I’m not able to really make out the birds at the bird feeder, so in the morning, when I’m doing my yoga, I listen to a CD of birdsongs and calls.

In college, I had this professor who was the opposite: He was an expert in birdsong , but lost his hearing, so he started studying the structural color of feathers.

Gosh, doesn’t God have a sense of humor? At the beginning, I said, “Why not my hearing? Why not something else? I need my eyes!” As if we can cherry-pick our afflictions. But when you love something passionately, you’ll find a way. If worse comes to worst, somebody just get me a little chair and prop me up in our small town of Middlebury, [Vt.], and I’ll just be a storyteller. Instead of playing an instrument, I’ll tell stories.

On April 5, at 7 p.m., Julia Alvarez will discuss her new novel with Marie Arana at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW) in Washington.

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Author Interviews

Don winslow ends trilogy, and his writing career, with final novel 'city in ruins'.

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks to best-selling suspense author Don Winslow about what he says is his final novel, "City in Ruins."

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Danny Ryan, who's been a Rhode Island mobster, dockworker and fugitive from the law, is now a pillar of the community in Las Vegas. He's got a palatial home to which good citizens come to pay homage and enjoy his hospitality, his young son he loves and the companionship - well, three times a week, anyway - of an accomplished and compelling woman he respects. What could possibly go wrong? "City In Ruins" is the third and final novel in the bestselling Danny Ryan trilogy by Don Winslow. It follows "City On Fire" and "City Of Dreams," and Don Winslow says quite explicitly, "City Of Ruins" is my final book - no loopholes I could detect. He joins us now from Julian, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us.

DON WINSLOW: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

SIMON: The book opens with an implosion, a famous old Las Vegas hotel, now owned by Danny Ryan, being brought down from the inside. Is implosion a kind of theme for Danny Ryan's life, too?

WINSLOW: Yeah, it sure is. Looking over the arc of these three books, I think we're looking at a certain kind of self-destruction with dynamite, if you will, or explosives that were laid many years earlier on a long fuse, to torture the metaphor, and so implosion's definitely a theme.

SIMON: In earlier books, Danny had used what I'll just refer to as ill-gotten gains from a criminal enterprise to buy his way into a respectable hotel and gaming enterprise. He's got a dream. In fact, a hotel - I guess it's called the Dream in Italian.

WINSLOW: It is. Yeah, Il Sogno.

SIMON: Tell us about this place he wants to bring into being.

WINSLOW: Well, he wants to bring into being a new kind of megahotel where people walk in and it's literally a dream with images shifting constantly on the walls of beauty and action and all kinds of things. And I think it's reflective of his own dream of trying to create a new kind of life for himself and for his son.

SIMON: What stands in the way?

WINSLOW: Well, a number of things. For one thing, this valuable piece of real estate that this old hotel sat on is critical to power on the Las Vegas Strip. And he basically undermines a rival in order to acquire it. And then it turns out that both Danny and this rival have mob ties from the past that each of them is trying to escape and trying to leave behind him, and neither one of them can. And so those things really get in the way of Danny's dream.

SIMON: You've written so many other books over the years, including "Savages," "The Force," "The Cartel," bestsellers made into screen properties. What's kept you coming back to Danny Ryan?

WINSLOW: You know, it took me almost 30 years to complete this trilogy. You know, it's funny. You look back on your life. When I started the Danny Ryan books, my now-adult and married son was a toddler. What I was - set out to do was to write a fully contemporary crime epic that took its stories and characters, however, from the Greek and Roman classics, principally the Aeneid, but also the Odyssey and the Iliad and certain Greek tragic dramas. I kept failing at it. I would write some of the book, and some of it worked, and a lot of it didn't. And so at times, I was discouraged, thinking that either, A, it was a bad idea, or, B, it was a good idea and I didn't have the chops to carry it out. But I kept coming back to it 'cause I couldn't leave it behind. And then later on, a couple of decades down the road - you know, I live mostly in California - I started to go back to Rhode Island, where a lot of the first book is set, and I fell in love with the place again, and I felt that I could write it, perhaps in a better and more mature way than I could have done 20 years earlier.

SIMON: Did you feel a kinship with Danny?

WINSLOW: I think so. You know, I grew up with a lot of Danny'. I played pond hockey with them. I went to the beaches with them, you know, to the bars and restaurants and all kinds of things. So it's funny how little self-awareness you can have. The second volume of this book, "City Of Dreams," is basically Danny wandering the country trying to find a place to set his feet. I was deep into writing the third book before I looked back on the second book and realized how connected I was to Danny in that regard. You know, I left Rhode Island when I was 17 and spent decades wandering not only the country but the world, doing various kinds of jobs trying to make a living, trying without a notable degree of success to become a writer and finally kind of made that happen and found a place, if you will, to set my feet.

SIMON: You mentioned all the jobs you had. You were a private eye in Times Square.

WINSLOW: Yes, sir.

SIMON: Is that as exciting as it sounds, or is it a lot of keyhole peeping?

WINSLOW: (Laughter) Not too much keyhole peeping, thank God. You know, I didn't do what they call matrimonial work. But, no, it was not romantic at all. I was basically what is known as a street rat. And so I started that by investigating embezzlement and thefts in cinemas and legit movie theaters on Times Square - there were a few in those days - and then graduated, if you want to call it that, to being a troll. I would walk around Times Square trying to get mugged, and there were big tough guys, which I am not, behind me jumping in like riders at the rodeo and then eventually chasing runaways and trying to get to them before the pimps did.

SIMON: By the way, not that I'm interested in doing this, how do you arrange to get mugged?

WINSLOW: (Laughter) Well, for one thing, you arrange to be 5'6 and 130 pounds. That helps. And then you walk around looking like you don't know where you're going, like you're a tourist, with a wallet prominently in your back pants pocket.

SIMON: Wow. Sounds like it was indispensable to your literature.

WINSLOW: In some ways. You know, I mean, I think that being a PI, and then later I did it out in California, out here, on a much higher kind of level. But it got me in that world. I got to know cops and crooks and street people and lawyers and judges and courtrooms and all of that. But I think the most important influence it had on my work was in terms of investigation itself. I learned how to do research. I learned how to interview people. And the same skills that I would have used as an investigator are the skills that I brought to researching the novels.

SIMON: All of this steers us to asking about your goodbye. The acknowledgments you write include hundreds of people, parents...

WINSLOW: Yes.

SIMON: ...readers, old teachers...

WINSLOW: Sure.

SIMON: ...Even your agent.

WINSLOW: Especially my agent. Yeah.

SIMON: And as you say, goodbyes are hard. So why are you retiring?

WINSLOW: It's the confluence of two streams, if you will. One is that having finished this trilogy felt like an ending to me. It felt like, yeah, kind of my life's work. The second, though, major stream, and probably more important one, is that I just think that we're at a time in this country of crisis and a time where democracy is under a severe threat. And I think that the response to that needs to be more immediate than one can do in a novel, you know? You know, I'm not young. I'm 70. And I think whatever energies and time I have are better spent in that fight.

SIMON: Don Winslow, his new and insists his last novel, "City In Ruins." Thanks so much for being with us, and thanks for everything.

WINSLOW: Thank you very much. That's gracious of you to say.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CASCADE")

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Bill Belichick planning to write book, nature of which still unknown: Sources

Bill Belichick is planning on writing a book, according to officials briefed on his plans.

The nature of the book is not yet fully known. In light of how he was represented in Apple TV’s recent Patriots documentary , his side of his legendary nearly quarter-century run would be of great interest. However, Belichick may just write about his views on leadership or a topic in that genre.

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The publisher considered the favorite, Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press, has produced Patriots books previously.

“We’re going to respectfully decline comment,” David Kass, the imprint’s director of publicity said when asked specifically about Belichick’s forthcoming book.

Belichick’s representative did not return calls.

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After nearly a quarter century as the Patriots coach, Belichick, 71, was a candidate for the Atlanta Falcons’ job that went to Raheem Morris.

While Belichick may eventually return to coaching, he is talking to networks about broadcasting jobs. In meetings, he has told executives he is disinclined to be on a weekly pregame set.

Why Bill Belichick, perhaps the greatest coach in NFL history, didn't land a job

A deal with ESPN, Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions and NFL Films is one media combination that may work out. Pat McAfee has also expressed public interest in having him on his program. McAfee has paid people, like Aaron Rodgers and Nick Saban, seven figures for weekly appearances in the past.

Apple TV’s recent documentary about the Patriots, “The Dynasty,” has received criticism because of how it portrayed Belichick, including from ex-players like Devin McCourty and Rodney Harrison. New England owner Robert Kraft expressed disapproval of the series for not focusing enough on the winning.

While Kraft didn’t point it out, many reviews have mentioned that Belichick failed to receive the credit for being the coach of the incredible run that included six Super Bowls.

Belichick and the Patriots’ dynasty have already been chronicled in many books. Most notably, Ian O’Connor’s New York Times best-seller, “Belichick,” authoritatively detailed the legendary coach’s life. Belichick did not participate with O’Connor on the book.

Required reading

• Patriots ‘Dynasty’ documentary reveals how bad Brady-Belichick relationship had gotten
• Julian Edelman, Matthew Slater among former Patriots unhappy with ‘The Dynasty’s’ portrayal of Bill Belichick
• Inside Bill Belichick’s downfall after 24 years, 6 titles with the Patriots

(Photo: Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty Images)

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Andrew Marchand is a Sr. Sports Media Columnist for The Athletic. He previously worked for the New York Post and ESPN, where he predominantly covered sports media and baseball. In 2023, Marchand was named one of five finalists for The Big Lead's "Insider of the Year" in all of sports.

The April 2024 issue of IEEE Spectrum is here!

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Mark Liu is chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

H.-S. Philip Wong is a professor in the school of engineering at Stanford University and chief scientist at TSMC.

In 1997 the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was a groundbreaking demonstration of supercomputer technology and a first glimpse into how high-performance computing might one day overtake human - level intelligence. In the 10 years that followed, we began to use artificial intelligence for many practical tasks , such as facial recognition, language translation, and recommending movies and merchandise.

Fast-forward another decade and a half and artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where it can “synthesize knowledge.” Generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion , can compose poems, create artwork, diagnose disease, write summary reports and computer code , and even design integrated circuits that rival those made by humans.

Tremendous opportunities lie ahead for artificial intelligence to become a digital assistant to all human endeavors. ChatGPT is a good example of how AI has democratized the use of high-performance computing, providing benefits to every individual in society.

All those marvelous AI applications have been due to three factors: innovations in efficient machine-learning algorithms, the availability of massive amounts of data on which to train neural networks, and progress in energy-efficient computing through the advancement of semiconductor technology. This last contribution to the generative AI revolution has received less than its fair share of credit, despite its ubiquity.

Over the last three decades, the major milestones in AI were all enabled by the leading-edge semiconductor technology of the time and would have been impossible without it. Deep Blue was implemented with a mix of 0.6- and 0.35-micrometer-node chip-manufacturing technology. The deep neural network that won the ImageNet competition, kicking off the current era of machine learning, was implemented with 40-nanometer technology . AlphaGo conquered the game of Go using 28-nm technology, and the initial version of ChatGPT was trained on computers built with 5-nm technology. The most recent incarnation of ChatGPT is powered by servers using even more advanced 4-nm technology . Each layer of the computer systems involved, from software and algorithms down to the architecture, circuit design, and device technology, acts as a multiplier for the performance of AI. But it’s fair to say that the foundational transistor-device technology is what has enabled the advancement of the layers above.

If the AI revolution is to continue at its current pace, it’s going to need even more from the semiconductor industry. Within a decade, it will need a 1-trillion-transistor GPU—that is, a GPU with 10 times as many devices as is typical today.

Relentless Growth in AI Model Sizes

The computation and memory access required for AI training have increased by orders of magnitude in the past five years. Training GPT-3 , for example, requires the equivalent of more than 5 billion billion operations per second of computation for an entire day (that’s 5,000 petaflops-days), and 3 trillion bytes (3 terabytes) of memory capacity.

Both the computing power and the memory access needed for new generative AI applications continue to grow rapidly. We now need to answer a pressing question: How can semiconductor technology keep pace?

From Integrated Devices to Integrated Chiplets

Since the invention of the integrated circuit, semiconductor technology has been about scaling down in feature size so that we can cram more transistors into a thumbnail-size chip. Today, integration has risen one level higher; we are going beyond 2D scaling into 3D system integration . We are now putting together many chips into a tightly integrated, massively interconnected system. This is a paradigm shift in semiconductor-technology integration.

In the era of AI, the capability of a system is directly proportional to the number of transistors integrated into that system . One of the main limitations is that lithographic chipmaking tools have been designed to make ICs of no more than about 800 square millimeters, what’s called the reticle limit. But we can now extend the size of the integrated system beyond lithography’s reticle limit. By attaching several chips onto a larger interposer—a piece of silicon into which interconnects are built—we can integrate a system that contains a much larger number of devices than what is possible on a single chip. For example, TSMC’s chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) technology can accommodate up to six reticle fields’ worth of compute chips, along with a dozen high-bandwidth-memory (HBM) chips.

How Nvidia Uses CoWoS Advanced Packaging

CoWoS, TSMC’s chip-on-wafer-on-silicon advanced packaging technology, has already been deployed in products. Examples include the Nvidia Ampere and Hopper GPUs. Each consists of one GPU die with six high-bandwidth memory cubes all on a silicon interposer. The compute GPU die is about as large as chipmaking tools will currently allow. Ampere has 54 billion transistors, and Hopper has 80 billion. The transition from 7-nm technology to the denser 4-nm technology made it possible to pack 50 percent more transistors on essentially the same area. Ampere and Hopper are the workhorses for today’s large language model ( LLM ) training. It takes tens of thousands of these processors to train ChatGPT.

HBMs are an example of the other key semiconductor technology that is increasingly important for AI: the ability to integrate systems by stacking chips atop one another, what we at TSMC call system-on-integrated-chips (SoIC) . An HBM consists of a stack of vertically interconnected chips of DRAM atop a control logic IC. It uses vertical interconnects called t hrough- s ilicon- v ia s (TSV s ) to get signals through each chip and solder bumps to form the connections between the memory chips. Today, high-performance GPUs use HBM extensively .

Going forward, 3D SoIC technology can provide a “bumpless alternative” to the conventional HBM technology of today, delivering far denser vertical interconnection between the stacked chips. Recent advances have shown HBM test structures with 12 layers of chips stacked using hybrid bonding, a copper-to-copper connection with a higher density than solder bumps can provide. Bonded at low temperature on top of a larger base logic chip, this memory system has a total thickness of just 600 µm.

With a high-performance computing system composed of a large number of dies running large AI models, high-speed wired communication may quickly limit the computation speed. Today, optical interconnects are already being used to connect server racks in data centers. We will soon need optical interfaces based on silicon photonics that are packaged together with GPUs and CPUs . This will allow the scaling up of energy- and area-efficient bandwidths for direct, optical GPU-to-GPU communication, such that hundreds of servers can behave as a single giant GPU with a unified memory. Because of the demand from AI applications, silicon photonics will become one of the semiconductor industry’s most important enabling technologies.

Toward a Trillion Transistor GPU

How amd uses 3d technology.

The AMD MI300A Accelerated Processor Unit leverages not just CoWoS but also TSMC’s 3D technology, silicon-on-integrated-circuits (SoIC). The MI300A combines GPU and CPU cores designed to handle the largest AI workloads. The GPU performs the intensive matrix multiplication operations for AI, while the CPU controls the operations of the entire system, and the high-bandwidth memories (HBM) are unified to serve both. The 9 compute dies built with 5-nm technology are stacked on top of 4 base dies of 6-nm technology, which are dedicated to cache and I/O traffic. The base dies and HBM sit atop silicon interposers. The compute part of the processor is composed of 150 billion transistors.

As noted already, typical GPU chips used for AI training have already reached the reticle field limit. And their transistor count is about 100 billion devices. The continuation of the trend of increasing transistor count will require multiple chips, interconnected with 2.5D or 3D integration, to perform the computation. The integration of multiple chips, either by CoWoS or SoIC and related advanced packaging technologies, allows for a much larger total transistor count per system than can be squeezed into a single chip. We forecast that within a decade a multichiplet GPU will have more than 1 trillion transistors.

We’ll need to link all these chiplets together in a 3D stack, but fortunately, industry has been able to rapidly scale down the pitch of vertical interconnects, increasing the density of connections. And there is plenty of room for more. We see no reason why the interconnect density can’t grow by an order of magnitude, and even beyond.

Toward a Trillion Transistors

Vertical connection density in 3D chips has increased at roughly the same rate as the number of transistors in a GPU.

Energy-Efficient Performance Trend for GPUs

So, how do all these innovative hardware technologies contribute to the performance of a system?

We can see the trend already in server GPUs if we look at the steady improvement in a metric called energy-efficient performance. EEP is a combined measure of the energy efficiency and speed of a system. Over the past 15 years, the semiconductor industry has increased energy-efficient performance about threefold every two years. We believe this trend will continue at historical rates. It will be driven by innovations from many sources, including new materials, device and integration technology, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography , circuit design, system architecture design, and the co-optimization of all these technology elements, among other things.

Largely thanks to advances in semiconductor technology, a measure called energy-efficient performance is on track to triple every two years (EEP units are 1/femtojoule-picoseconds).

In particular, the EEP increase will be enabled by the advanced packaging technologies we’ve been discussing here. Additionally, concepts such as system-technology co-optimization (STCO) , where the different functional parts of a GPU are separated onto their own chiplets and built using the best performing and most economical technologies for each, will become increasingly critical.

A Mead-Conway Moment for 3D Integrated Circuits

In 1978, Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, and Lynn Conway at Xerox PARC invented a computer-aided design method for integrated circuits . They used a set of design rules to describe chip scaling so that engineers could easily design very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits without much knowledge of process technology.

That same sort of capability is needed for 3D chip design. Today, designers need to know chip design, system-architecture design, and hardware and software optimization. Manufacturers need to know chip technology, 3D IC technology, and advanced packaging technology. As we did in 1978, we again need a common language to describe these technologies in a way that electronic design tools understand. Such a hardware description language gives designers a free hand to work on a 3D IC system design, regardless of the underlying technology. It’s on the way: An open-source standard, called 3Dblox , has already been embraced by most of today’s technology companies and electronic design automation (EDA) companies.

The Future Beyond the Tunnel

In the era of artificial intelligence, semiconductor technology is a key enabler for new AI capabilities and applications. A new GPU is no longer restricted by the standard sizes and form factors of the past. New semiconductor technology is no longer limited to scaling down the next-generation transistors on a two-dimensional plane. An integrated AI system can be composed of as many energy-efficient transistors as is practical, an efficient system architecture for specialized compute workloads, and an optimized relationship between software and hardware.

For the past 50 years, semiconductor-technology development has felt like walking inside a tunnel. The road ahead was clear, as there was a well-defined path. And everyone knew what needed to be done: shrink the transistor .

Now, we have reached the end of the tunnel. From here, semiconductor technology will get harder to develop. Yet, beyond the tunnel, many more possibilities lie ahead. We are no longer bound by the confines of the past.

Mark Liu is chairman of TSMC . From 2013 to 2018 he was president and co-CEO of the foundry giant.

H.-S. Philip Wong is an IEEE Fellow and Willard R . and Inez Kerr Bell professor in the School of Engineering. He is chief scientist at TSMC.

This phenomenal growth in computing is ofcourse bringing down the computing cost that will in turn drive a lot of innovation erstwhile deemed too expensive to be taken up.

Excellent overview. With silicon crystal lattice parameter of 0.543 nm how much of transistor shrinking (Moore's Law) left is up to debate. The next phase is to shrink the PCB- that is what CoWoS appears to be doing. Giant LLM's have 1-2 trillion parameters - each parameter requires 16 bit for accuracy currently - hence the need for large memory and larges compute. DRAM (HBM) cells sizes have stagnated as they are limited by physics. Compute capability has leapfrogged memory capability (capacity and bandwidth) by orders of magnitude, and no longer the bottleneck.

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