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    Because it is locked away inside the skull, the brain is hard to study. Looking at it requires finicky machines which use magnetism or electricity or both to bypass the bone. There is just one tendril of brain tissue that can be seen from outside the body without any mucking about of this sort. That is the retina. Look into someone’s eyes and you are, in some small way, looking at their brain.

    This being so, a group of researchers decided to study the structure of the eye for signs of cognitive decline. Changes in the brain, they reasoned, might lead to changes in the nervous tissue connected to it. They focused on a part of the eye called the retinal nerve-fibre layer (RNFL). This is the lowest layer of the retina and serves to link the light-sensitive tissue above to the synapses which lead to the brain. The team’s results show that people with a thin RNFL are more likely to fail cognitive tests than those with a thick one. They are also more likely to suffer cognitive decline as they age.

(www.economist.com, 30.06.2018. Adaptado.)

Stephen King’s First Book Is 50 Years Old, and Still Horrifyingly Relevant

    Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon
an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s
career. It has sold millions, made millions,
inspired four films and passed from generation
[5] to generation. It was, and continues to be, a
phenomenon.
    “Carrie” was King’s first published
novel. Failing to convince himself, King
scrunched up the few pages he’d written and
[10] tossed them into the garbage. But his wife,
Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a
curious temperament — fished them out,
uncrinkled them, read them, and famously
convinced King to continue the story. She

[15] wanted to know how it would come out, and
such desires on the part of readers are perhaps
the best motivation a writer can have.
    King proceeded. The novel grew into
a book with many voices. First, of course, there
[20] is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious
fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school
students and by the entire town of
Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning,
pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully
[25] telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-

door neighbor who witnessed a violent display
of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic
manifestations; from various journalistic
pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about
[30] Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of
the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s
Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an
article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis:
Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the
[35] only one of Carrie’s female classmates to
attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to
her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow
Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific
Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta
[40] White.”
    Then there are the inner voices of
various other characters, as overheard by
Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes
telepathic and can listen in on the silent
[45] thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her
inner life to them. Together, the many voices
tell the horrifying tale.
    What is it about “Carrie” that has
intrigued me? It’s one of those books that
[50] manage to dip into the collective unconscious
of their own age and society.
    Female figures with quas-

isupernatural powers seem to pop up in
literature at times when the struggle for
[55] women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider
Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of
the 19th century, when pressure for more
equality was building; its electrically gifted
heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a
[60] thought, and much verbiage is expended on
male anxieties about what might happen —
especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-

Obeyed train her sights on world domination.
    “Carrie” was written in the early
[65] 1970s, when the second-wave women’s
movement was at full throttle. There are a
couple of nods to this new form of feminism in
the novel, and King himself has said that he
was nervously aware of its implications for men
[70] of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,”
Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering
hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s,

which is seen as already outmoded, though still
dangerous.
[75]     “Carrie White” is an interesting
combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to
point out, is not a nickname for Carol or
Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an
unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from
[80] “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving
kindness, the most important virtue in the
Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This
kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most
of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there
[85] is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how
its inhabitants felt when they discovered in
1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the
year in which “Carrie” is set.)
    Most particularly, charitable loving
[90] kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s
mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who
knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes
she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-

bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes
[95] them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus
viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own
child. Carrie herself wavers between love and
forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the
hatred of the town that channels itself through
[100] her, tips her over the edge and transforms her
into an angel of destruction.
    As for “White,” you might be inclined
to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns,
or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed
[105] sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent
— but also please consider “white trash.” The
white underclass has existed in America from
the beginning, and white trashers going back
generations are thick on the ground in Maine,
[110] Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he
has mined extensively over the course of his
career.
     He based the situation of Carrie on
two girls from that underclass whom he knew
[115] at school, both of them marked by poverty and
decaying clothing, both of them taunted and
despised and destroyed by their fellow
students. Everyone in the town was an
underdog in the carefully calibrated class
[120] structure of America — not for them the fancy
private schools and university educations,
unless they got really, really lucky.
    King is a visceral writer, and a master
of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the
[125] literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real
toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of
toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the
most literary of forms, especially when it
comes to the supernatural, which must 

[130] perforce be inspired by already existing tales
and books.
    But underneath the “horror,” in King,
is always the real horror: the all-too-actual
poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that
[135] exists in America today. The ultimate horror,
for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty,
and especially cruelty to children. It is this that
distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature,
the side that prompts us to take care of others.

Adapted from: www.nytimes.com /2024/03/25

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Virginia Hall

by Sonia Purnell

    When Gina Haspel became the first female director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
2018, she talked of how she had stood “on the shoulders of heroines who never sought public acclaim”.
She was “deeply indebted”, she said, to women who had served the agency and its wartime predecessor
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for making her appointment possible by challenging stereotypes
[5] and breaking down barriers. Perhaps no woman is a better illustration of that history than Virginia Hall, a
one-legged socialite from Baltimore, USA, whom the CIA Museum would later hail as the office’s most
successful American female spy of the Second World War.
    Despite her record behind enemy lines in wartime France, it nevertheless took Hall years to land
the post-war job she longed for at the heart of the CIA. It has only been comparatively recently that the
[10] agency has publicly acknowledged her as an unqualified war heroine and a devoted officer, giving her a
citation in the CIA Museum catalogue on the OSS. The agency has also now named a training building
after her. Yet she has remained little known outside intelligence circles and her agency career suffered
from prejudice and misunderstanding until she retired in 1966.
    Born to a wealthy banking family in 1906, Hall lost her left leg after a hunting accident at the
[15] age of 27 and thereafter was dependent on a wooden prosthetic she named Cuthbert. Despite her raft
of languages and extensive knowledge of Europe her dreams of becoming an ambassador had been
repeatedly thwarted by State Department prejudice against women as well as the disabled.
    So, as war loomed in 1939, she resigned in disgust from her clerk role at the American legation
in the Baltic state of Estonia to embark on what would become a Homeric tale of adventure, action and
[20] seemingly unfathomable courage. Long before the U.S. joined the war after Pearl Harbor, she volunteered
to drive ambulances for the French army on the front line during the bloody Nazi invasion of May 1940,
persevering in picking up the wounded even when fighter planes swept over to pepper the roads with
machine gun fire. Yet this was merely an apprenticeship.
    When Hall was demobilized after France capitulated, she decided to travel to London to offer
[25] her services to the British war effort. On her journey, she was spotted in a Spanish railway station by
an undercover agent who in a brief conversation with her quickly realized that here was a woman of
exceptional resolve and burning desire to free France from Hitler’s tyranny. He put her in touch with a
“friend” in Britain, a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the new secret service set up by
Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of spying, subversion and
[30] sabotage.
    SOE top brass were not keen on employing women, especially foreign ones, and were specifically
barred from sending them into enemy territory. Yet after six months of trying, they had failed to infiltrate
a single agent into France to embark on what Churchill branded a most “ungentlemanly” new form of
undercover warfare. The search for rule-breaking recruits of “absolute secrecy”, “fanatical enthusiasm”
[35] and unimaginable courage was proving unsurprisingly difficult. Few were willing to take the estimated 50-
50 chance of survival against the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich. When Hall once again volunteered,
her obvious qualities saw the old prejudices being abandoned. She was one of the first SOE officers to be
dispatched from London and became, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the
war, “amazingly successful”.
[40]    Even then she was patronized and underestimated until she proved herself capable of eluding the
Gestapo longer than any of her male Allied colleagues and particularly adept at recruiting and organizing
useful assets in the nucleus of what would become the Resistance armies of the future. She also
masterminded spectacular jailbreaks for fellow agents who had been captured. For a whole year, she was
SOE’s only Allied female agent in France but after 12 months of marveling at her derring-do, the service
[45] decided to dispatch more women into the field. This “gallant lady”, her SOE commanders concluded, was
almost single-handedly changing minds about the role of women in combat.
    When she later switched to SOE’s American counterpart, OSS, she once again had to break out of
her subordinate role by stealth and simply by being better than anyone else. Even the notion of dispatching
a woman on a paramilitary operation was still controversial in the U.S., let alone giving her command. So,
[50] she was deployed as the mere assistant and wireless operator to an older – but inexperienced – male
officer. She soon branched out on her own, leaving him flailing in her absence. Once shot of him, Hall quickly
emerged as a fearless guerrilla leader who helped liberate whole swathes of France by arming, organizing
and sometimes commanding Resistance units when blowing up bridges and attacking German convoys.
Hall was rewarded by becoming the only civilian woman of the war to be decorated with the Distinguished
[55] Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism”. CIA officers have said that the techniques she developed 80
years ago to build up the French Resistance still inform the agency’s missions today, including Operation
Jawbreaker in Afghanistan before and after 9/11.
    The extreme exigencies of war had finally given Hall the chance to show what she could do;
the return of peace saw the return of the old barriers. Internal personnel papers and the recollections
[60] of fellow agents reveal how she was undermined, sidelined and belittled by some of her superiors at
the CIA – with her supporters saddened by her “reduced status” and angered by the fact that her track
record was viewed as an “embarrassment” by the agency’s “noncombat types”. Hall never received the
recognition she deserved during her lifetime, but since then her formidable legacy has gradually become
better understood. And as Gina Haspel made clear, her formidable legacy lives on. 

Disponível em: https://time.com/5566062/virginia-hall/. Acesso em: 17 fev. 2022. (Parcial e adaptado.)