HOW JOE BIDEN CHANGED, AND CHANGED, AND CHANGED — AND MADE IT TO THE WHITE HOUSE JOE BIDEN, EXPLAINED.

By Ezra Klein@ezraklein

American flags seen in Ballina, Ireland, where Joe Biden’s distant relatives hail from. Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential election. He will be the 46th president of the United States. And — counting the votes of people — it won’t be close. If current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004.

Commentary over the past few days has focused on the man he beat, and the incompetent coup being attempted in plain sight. But here I want to focus on Biden, who is one of the more misunderstood figures in American politics — including, at times, by me.

Part of the difficulty of understand Biden is, ironically, the length of his time in office. He has been in national politics for almost five decades. So people tend to fixate on the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the young widower, the brash up-and-comer, the centrist Senate dealmaker, the overconfident foreign policy hand, the meme-able vice president, the grieving father. But Biden, more so than most politicians, changes. And it’s how he changes, and why, that’s key to understanding his campaign, and his likely presidency.

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, a sharp biography of the next president. In this podcast, Osnos and I discuss:

The mystery of Joe Biden’s first political campaign

Why the Joe Biden who entered the Senate in 1980 is such a radically different person than the Joe Biden who ran for president in 2020

What the Senate taught Biden

Biden’s ideological flexibility, and the theory of politics that drives it

The differences between Biden’s three presidential campaigns — and what they reveal about how he’s grown

The way Biden views disagreement, and why that’s so central to his understanding of politics

How Biden’s relationship with Barack Obama changed his approach to governance

The similarities — and differences — between how Obama and Biden think about politics

Why Biden is “the perfect weathervane for where the center of the Democratic Party is”

Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell

How Biden thinks about foreign policy

Why Biden has become more skeptical about the use of American military might in the last decade

https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast/2020/11/7/21554198/joe-biden-evan-osnos-president-2020-election-white-house-donald-trump

V.O. COMPLETA , " L' UTILITÀ DELL'INUTILE NELLA NOSTRA VITA". NUCCIO ORDINE, PROFESSORE E SCRITTORE CALABRESE

 AprendemosJuntos

In questo video il professore di letteratura italiana Nuccio Ordine, rivendica la costruzione di una società migliore attraverso valori umanistici. Sostiene che "discipline come la musica, la letteratura, l'arte, sono oggi considerate inutili perché non producono profitti, e tuttavia sono la conoscenza di cui abbiamo più bisogno, perché possono rendere l'umanità più umana". Ordine riflette sulle grandi trasformazioni della scuola, della ricerca scientifica e della società

#AprendemosJuntos

THE ACTRESS KRISTEN STEWART WAS THE ONLY GUEST IN ATTENDANCE

The actress sat on a bench against the wall by herself to watch the show at the Château de Chenonceau in France

By Georgia Slater

CREDIT: COURTESY CHANEL

Kristen Stewart is taking the meaning of VIP status to a whole new level.

On Tuesday, the actress was the sole guest at Chanel's elaborate Métiers d’Art fashion show which took place at Château de Chenonceau in France's Loire Valley.

In footage from the show, Stewart, 30, is seen posing against a wall before the models enter the room and she begins to watch the private show.

The Happiest Season star dressed chic for the occasion wearing an all-black, head-to-toe Chanel ensemble including

black velvet pants, a black wool pullover sweater, and Chanel boots.

But the pièce de résistance of the look was the Chanel High Jewelry necklace set with 1 round cut 2-carat diamond, 980 brilliant-cut diamonds weighing in at 24 carats and 268 Akoya pearls all set in 18k white gold.

Guests for the fashion show had to be cut back due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to Nylon.

RELATED: Kristen Stewart Talks Playing Princess Diana in New Film: 'It's Hard Not to Feel Protective of Her'

The show totaled 301 people, 300 of whom were cast and crew members, and Stewart as the one private viewer.

Stewart will be featured in ads for the upcoming collection photographed by Juergen Teller.

The actress had a front-row seat to watch as the models showed off the mostly black-and-white collection from creative director Virginie Viard.

"Showing at the Château de Chenonceau was an obvious choice," Viard said in a statement, as both Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de’ Medici — who inspired Coco Chanel — designed and lived in the castle, according to The Cut.

Stewart told WWD that she prepared for the private show by binge-watching episodes of the CW series Reign, which was about the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.

RELATED: Kristen Stewart Reveals Late Designer Karl Lagerfeld Wasn't as 'Intimidating' as He Seemed

"I was learning about who’s lived here and who’s loved this place, and it’s shifted hands primarily between women. And I was just telling Virginie, it felt like the story was folding in on itself," she explained. "The women who lived here before were really into art, and promoted a lot of creativity, and loved to be inspired and inspire other people to come create, and I was imagining who our characters were while watching the show."

"I’m always proud of her, but it felt very personal this time," she said of Viard's work.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

At the end of the show, Stewart can be seen standing up and giving Viard a round of applause as she enters the room after the final walk-around.

The actress was last in attendance at Chanel's Fashion Week show at Le Grand Palais last October.

Reporting by Peter Mikelbank

https://people.com/style/kristen-stewart-only-guest-chanel-show/

A MUSEUM AT THE BOURSE DE COMMERCE - PINAULT COLLECTION, PARIS

A truly unique monument and collection.

Located in the very heart of Paris, the Bourse de Commerce is the new exhibition space for the Pinault Collection. This historic building has been fully restored and transformed into a museum by famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando, by creating a dialogue between heritage and contemporary creation, between the past and the present.

To get as many people as possible seeing, understanding and sharing the collector's perspective on the art of our time, this new venue offers temporary exhibitions, orders, 'cartes blanches' and more. The Bourse de Commerce is open to all audiences and artistic disciplines, with the aim to curious art fans looking to discover something new: to this end, there will also a programme of conferences, film screenings, concerts and performances.

Guided tours, planned routes and workshops will give all visitors the tools to understand contemporary artistic expression of all kinds and will make art and creation more accessible even as they constantly reinvent themselves.

Viewpoint

The Bourse de Commerce’s third floor overlooks the Jardin Nelson Mandela and presents new points of view of the Saint Eustache church, the Canopée, the Centre Pompidou, and the Paris rooftops

https://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/176761/Bourse-de-Commerce-Pinault-Collection

HOW REBECCA SOLNIT, BECAME THE VOICE OF THE RESISTANCE.

Rebecca Solnit, the essayist-turned-progressive-icon, at home in San Francisco.Credit...Trent Davis Bailey

By Alice Gregory

Subjects that the author and essayist Rebecca Solnit has written about, some at considerable length, include Irish history, atlases, Alzheimer’s, a traveling medical clinic, natural disasters, urban planning, tortoises, walking, gentrification, Yosemite National Park and Apple Inc.

‘‘There’s something interdisciplinary at best and wildly wandering at worst about how I think,’’ she told me recently over the phone from San Francisco, where she lives and works. ‘‘I am interested in almost everything, and it can sometimes seem like a burden.’’ She cited Virginia Woolf and Henry David Thoreau as the writers most important to her: ‘‘Each of them wrote exquisitely about experiential, immediate encounters with the tangible world but could also be very powerful political polemicists. And the arc of their work describes a space in which you can be both.’’

Those who have been reading her idiosyncratic writing since it was first published, in the mid-1980s, would agree that Solnit’s work is roaming, and would also say that it is rigorous and admirably self-directed in its scope and engrossments. She's written several books about the American West, for example, including 1994’s ‘‘Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West’’ and 2003’s ‘‘River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.’’ But in the past few years, Solnit has acquired a new audience — younger, mostly female, more likely to read an article online than in print, and largely unaware of the strangeness or scale of her career.

It began with her 2008 essay ‘‘Men Explain Things to Me,’’ which was born of a now-famous anecdote: In 2003, Solnit was at a party in a chalet above Aspen, Colo., when the host of the party, upon learning that Solnit was an author, insisted on summarizing a book he had read a review of, ignoring her friend’s efforts to inform him that Solnit herself had written it. The essay is credited with inspiring the hashtag-ready term ‘‘mansplaining,’’ which is now used around the world; it’s on T-shirts, on Twitter, in the most casual of conversations. In 2014, Solnit turned ‘‘Men Explain Things to Me’’ into a book, which has, to date, sold about 90,000 copies. In a series of personal but unsentimental essays, she gave succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized. Like Tom Wolfe’s ‘‘radical chic’’ or Nathan Rabin’s ‘‘manic pixie dream girl,’’ ‘‘mansplaining’’ quickly became a term as illuminating as it was descriptive.

In addition to Solnit, a handful of other writers are being newly celebrated for work written years ago, much of which now seems eerily ahead of its time.Credit...Joshua Scott

Not two years later, Solnit surfaced again, this time as a cultural consoler. In March, 2016, Haymarket Books, her small, nonprofit publisher, reissued ‘‘Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,’’ which had originally been published in 2004, to relatively little fanfare, as a response to the Bush administration. Part history of progressive success stories, part extended argument for hope as a catalyst for action, the slim book became a kind of bible for people heartbroken by last year’s election outcome. On Nov. 10, 2016, she took to Facebook, opening with the line, ‘‘Got hope? Mine is free to you here,’’ and including a link to a download of the book, an offer that was taken up over 30,000 times in one week. ‘‘Hope in the Dark’’ contains discussion of everything from the Zapatistas to weather forecasting to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and is written in an especially epigrammatic prose that reads like self-help for intellectuals: ‘‘People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.’’

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/t-magazine/entertainment/rebecca-solnit-writer-resistance.html

NEW: PUCCINI: HIS LIFE AND WORKS, AND: PUCCINI: A BIOGRAPHY (REVIEW). NOW, SPANISH TRANSLATION

 

The Opera Quarterly 19.4 (2003) 785-790 Any scholar writing the biography of an opera composer must choose between emphasizing the life and stressing the music. Two Puccini biographers have solved that dilemma in disparate ways. Mary Jane Phillips-Matz focuses on Puccini the man. Julian Budden tries to strike a balance between the life and the works but ends up devoting more than half of his book to an analysis of Puccini's operas. Despite their differing approaches, Phillips-Matz and Budden, taken together, present a fuller and more rounded portrait of Giacomo Puccini than previous writers. Both Phillips-Matz and Budden bring to Puccini methods forged in their prior studies of Giuseppe Verdi. 

In Verdi: A Biography, Phillips-Matz showed herself to be a biographical sleuth, as adept at poring through parish registers and municipal archives as she was skilled at culling important facts from forgotten letters and faded newspapers. During decades of research for Puccini: A Biography, Phillips-Matz explored the byways of the composer's beloved Tuscany and visited the cities, towns, and villages that shaped his personality. 

She interviewed Puccini's relatives—chief among them, the composer's step-granddaughter Elvira Leonardi—and singers like Gilda Dalla Rizza who created leading roles in his operas. Synthesizing her many sources, she fashions a balanced portrait of this enigmatic figure. From her biography emerges a talented but complicated man filled with doubts and contradictions. Phillips-Matz's Puccini is at once humble and shy, sensitive to criticism, restless and moody, indolent and vacillating. Balancing his shortcomings, Phillips-Matz portrays Puccini as a loyal and generous friend, a talented musician and painstaking artist, who created a gallery of great operas from the cosettine or "little things" that fired his creative fantasy (p. 4). 

Puccini: His Life and Works is Budden's second contribution to the Master Musicians series published by Oxford University Press. His 1985 biography of Giuseppe Verdi was preceded by his masterpiece, The Operas of Verdi, a rigorous study of Verdi's music. Budden, who serves as the president of the Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini in Lucca, brings the same analytical tools—and an elegant prose style—to bear on Puccini. Treating each opera in a separate chapter, Budden touches on Puccini's life as he describes the composer's search for a subject and his interaction with librettists. He explores the literary and dramatic sources before plunging into a summary of the plot and critical analysis of the music. 

Budden also surveys Puccini's nonoperatic works, from songs and chamber works to symphonic and choral works like the Capriccio sinfonico, Preludio sinfonico, and Inno a Roma. Throughout this engrossing book, Budden sets Puccini's career within a larger context by incorporating discussions of musical life in Milan, the music publishing business in Italy, the scapigliatura movement that flourished in Italy in the 1860s, the development of verismo opera, and other larger issues. Anyone looking for a judicious survey of Puccini's stage works will find one in this splendid book. Puccini the man springs more vividly to life in Phillips-Matz's biography. Treating her subject with an almost motherly concern, she brings not only understanding but sympathy to her portrait. With some care, she documents Puccini's family history and brings to light character-revealing incidents from his childhood. She fashions an affectionate picture of the spoiled and naughty boy who became Italy's most popular composer. 

Puccini, she notes, was a cocco di mamma ("mama's boy") surrounded by older sisters and an indulgent mother who solicitously guided her son's development and nurtured his musical ambitions (p. 15). Phillips-Matz feels the humiliation of the composer's family when Puccini failed to pass his exams and advance to a diploma. 

Relying on letters and other contemporary accounts, the author depicts in colorful detail Puccini's student days at the Milan Conservatory and his struggles to establish his career. And she conveys an understanding—if not approval—of Puccini's...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236727639_Puccini_His_Life_and_Works_and_Puccini_A_Biography_review

ALICIA PERRIS ENTREVISTA A SHARON FRIDMAN, EL COREÓGRAFO DEL MARAT-SADE DE PETER WEISS, EL DÍA DE SU ESTRENO EN MADRID.

Al borde de su estreno, charlamos telefónicamente con el coreógrafo israelí de Marat-Sade, Sharon Fridman,  La sala Fernando Arrabal de Naves del Español en Matadero, espacio del Área de Cultura, Turismo y Deporte del Ayuntamiento de Madrid, acoge una nueva producción del Teatro Español, que recupera uno de los textos fundamentales del teatro del siglo XX: Marat-Sade, persecución y asesinato de Jean Paul Marat representados por el grupo teatral de la casa de salud de Charenton bajo la dirección del señor de Sade, del dramaturgo judío Peter Weiss. En la dirección, Luis Luque.

Este espacio se convertirá así, durante unas semanas, en una gran casa de salud mental donde un grupo de pacientes/actores representan parajes acerca de un tiempo posterior al comienzo de la Revolución francesa. El espectáculo, que estará en cartel hasta mediados de febrero, presenta la obra cumbre de Weiss –Marat-Sade en su título abreviado–, escrita en los años 60 y aborda los años posteriores al comienzo de la Revolución francesa.  En esta historia metateatral de “teatro dentro del teatro”, un grupo de pacientes de la casa de salud de Charenton, dirigidos por su residente más ilustre, el Marqués de Sade, representan los hechos históricos que condujeron al asesinato del revolucionario Jean Paul Marat, apuñalado por la joven campesina Charlotte Corday. Una representación que suscita un intenso debate filosófico entre las ideas del propio Sade y las del revolucionario Marat.

Es una propuesta de un gran equipo de creadoras, actores y actrices que, junto a la arriesgada visión del coreógrafo israelí Sharon Fridman, aporta cierta distorsión poética a un texto sin duda formidable y completamente contemporáneo. Un espectáculo que confiere una relevancia especial a la música, el movimiento y la luz. Luis Luque, el director de la producción, opina que “Nos encontramos ante una obra con gran carga poética sobre el poder de lo colectivo frente al pensamiento nihilista. Este texto bebe del Teatro de la Crueldad de Artaud, se inspira en del Teatro Pobre de Grotowski y tiene una clara influencia de Bertolt Brecht”.

Una nueva oportunidad para hablar con Sharon Fridman de danza, pero también de historia, de filosofía y del hecho irrevocable y dramático de, ser humanos y formar parte del territorio, a veces “ancho y ajeno”, que nos rodea. Los acompaña la música de Edith Piaf, incluida en el montaje. Disfrútenlo y cuídense, para cuidar a los demás. 

Alicia Perris

AUDIO

alicia · SHARON FRIDMAN.MP3