Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution

In the mid-1960s, the rigid and colourless British way of life was irrevocably transformed by the emergence of the underground movement, a loose collective of young radicals who introduced new social, sexual and aesthetic perspectives. Operating out of the heart of London, their various activities, from the newspaper the International Times, to the psychedelic club UFO, promoted alternative lifestyles and values and sparked a cultural revolution. The Underground drew its inspiration from America's Beat Poets; among them Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; who espoused an impossibly attractive Bohemian culture - a hedonistic lifestyle of art and free love and all that went with it. The counterculture was also invigorated by the fearlessness of such pioneers of free jazz as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor; drawn, in its search for a ‘spiritual elixir’, to India and her classical music, embodied initially by Ravi Shankar. Then thrilled at the audacity of an international avant-garde - including such giants as György Ligeti, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio - which pushed courageously at the limits of sound itself and who, in turn, would propose to all mediums of popular art in Britain a new palette of musical colours and techniques to work with.

In the mid-1960s, the rigid and colourless British way of life was irrevocably transformed by the emergence of the underground movement, a loose collective of young radicals who introduced new social, sexual and aesthetic perspectives. Operating out of the heart of London, their various activities, from the newspaper the International Times, to the psychedelic club UFO, promoted alternative lifestyles and values and sparked a cultural revolution. The Underground drew its inspiration from America's Beat Poets; among them Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; who espoused an impossibly attractive Bohemian culture - a hedonistic lifestyle of art and free love and all that went with it. The counterculture was also invigorated by the fearlessness of such pioneers of free jazz as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor; drawn, in its search for a ‘spiritual elixir’, to India and her classical music, embodied initially by Ravi Shankar. Then thrilled at the audacity of an international avant-garde - including such giants as György Ligeti, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio - which pushed courageously at the limits of sound itself and who, in turn, would propose to all mediums of popular art in Britain a new palette of musical colours and techniques to work with.

The colour of money is changing to crypto. With the regulatory environment struggling to keep up, there has been prolonged ambivalence on the legality of cryptocurrencies. This has led to chaos but has also allowed a few to make unprecedented gains. Like all bubbles, there is a looming threat of a big-bang bust and with stories emerging of people losing lifetimes' savings, there are serious fallouts that should be considered.

In 1948 the Quebec artist Paul-Emile Borduas published his famous manifesto Refus global—a plea on behalf of the powers of imagination and sensibility in society and a revolt against rationalization, mechanization, and other restraining influences, including the church. Borduas and his consigners were bitterly attacked. But the message of Refus global had far-reaching and revolutionary effects on the culture of Quebec and ultimately on its politics.

The executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal chronicles the astonishing rise, climax, and decline of one of the great political movements in American history—the forty-year reign of the conservative movement, from the election of Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party's takeover by Donald Trump.