Leia o texto para responder à questão abaixo.

    Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with The Beatles, a rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. He has collaborated with countless artists over his 60-year career, from Rihanna to Michael Jackson. Now, the former Beatle has teamed up with artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent interview, the 80-year-old revealed that AI has made it possible to release one “last Beatles record.”

    McCartney said that during the creation of the docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”, produced in 2021 by Peter Jackson, they found an old demo tape that John Lennon had recorded. Through the use of artificial intelligence, they were able to start the process of taking the decades-old recording and turning it into something usable.

    “Peter Jackson was able to extricate John’s voice from an old cassette tape,” McCartney said. “He could tell the machine ‘That’s the voice. This is the guitar. Lose the guitar.’ We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney continued. “Then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

    Though McCartney called recent uses of AI in music “kind of scary” — in April, a rap song featuring AI-generated voices mimicking Drake and The Weeknd was yanked from streaming services — the “Let It Be” singer admitted that the technology is “exciting, because it’s the future. There’s a good side to it, and then a scary side. And we’ll just have to see where that leads,” he said.

(Nicolas Vega. www.cnbc.com, 14.06.2023. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão abaixo.

    Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with The Beatles, a rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. He has collaborated with countless artists over his 60-year career, from Rihanna to Michael Jackson. Now, the former Beatle has teamed up with artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent interview, the 80-year-old revealed that AI has made it possible to release one “last Beatles record.”

    McCartney said that during the creation of the docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”, produced in 2021 by Peter Jackson, they found an old demo tape that John Lennon had recorded. Through the use of artificial intelligence, they were able to start the process of taking the decades-old recording and turning it into something usable.

    “Peter Jackson was able to extricate John’s voice from an old cassette tape,” McCartney said. “He could tell the machine ‘That’s the voice. This is the guitar. Lose the guitar.’ We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney continued. “Then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

    Though McCartney called recent uses of AI in music “kind of scary” — in April, a rap song featuring AI-generated voices mimicking Drake and The Weeknd was yanked from streaming services — the “Let It Be” singer admitted that the technology is “exciting, because it’s the future. There’s a good side to it, and then a scary side. And we’ll just have to see where that leads,” he said.

(Nicolas Vega. www.cnbc.com, 14.06.2023. 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

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018