Новости за 27.11.2017

On July 15, 1971, Richard Nixon made the stunning announcement that he would be the first U.S. president to visit Mao Zedong’s China. “There can be no stable and enduring peace without the participation of the People’s Republic of China,” Nixon said. The fact that Nixon had made battling communism a hallmark of his political career up to that point made the news all the more shocking. But the summit, which took place six months later, altered history. It upended the balance of power in Asia and... Читать дальше...

President Donald Trump’s attacks on prominent African-Americans just before the Thanksgiving break—in which he dubbed LaVar Ball, father of one of the three UCLA basketball players who had been released from custody in China, an “ungrateful fool”—prodded the mainstream news media to once again consider a long-percolating question: Why is he so obsessed with using famous African-Americans as political foils? Trump, of course, is an aggressive combatant against enemies of all sorts, but there is... Читать дальше...

Marijuana permeated every aspect of hippie culture in 1960s: Think of Merry Pranksters sitting atop a Volkswagen bus smoking a branch-sized doobie. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Janis Joplin—all smoked marijuana. Joints, supplied by Bob Dylan, “turned on” the Beatles in 1964 at the same time that their music was shifting from the saccharine pop of the 1950s to the sitar-laced grooviness of the 1960s. Marijuana was not just the iconic substance of a decade, like absinthe in 1920s Paris, or tea in Victorian England. Читать дальше...