Category Archives: History

On Aug. 12, 2011, Sonic Youth played the Williamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn; it would be the band's final concert in the United States. Chris Gersbeck for NPR hide caption

On Aug. 12, 2011, Sonic Youth played the Williamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn; it would be the band's final concert in the United States.

No one knew Sonic Youth was making its last stand not even Sonic Youth itself.

"It was a period of regrouping. But in spite of some personal problems, it was still business as normal: 'We're going out to do a summer show in our hometown,' " admits co-founder Lee Ranaldo from his New York apartment.

This cycle was not either for Sonic Youth or its fans: Despite a period of relative inactivity, with nearly no shows in eight months, most members of one of American indie rock's most beloved, raucous and best bands assumed they'd be back to work soon enough. Their Friday night show on a sprawling outdoor stage alongside the East River in Brooklyn on Aug. 12, 2011, was simply the latest in their decadelong string of summertime New York sets. They had, as always, recruited an excellent cast of openers: Kurt Vile & the Violators, the emerging pride of Philadelphia, and Wild Flag, a Sleater-Kinney offshoot still a month from releasing its debut LP. Sensing nothing unordinary, especially that they were on the precipice of the end, the band issued only one photo pass to a short-lived New York music blog.

But two months and two days after that concert, the night would become the stuff of legend and history, not only for an unorthodox set list where Sonic Youth performed several songs for the first time in decades but also because it was, indeed, the end. The personal problems Ranaldo sensed exploded into public view: After three decades as bandmates and 27 years of marriage, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore the first couple of indie rock, a pair whose creative partnership had given countless Gen X disciples life goals were splitting. With their marriage's fracture, the band would also end. In the years to come, through interviews and memoirs and gossip columns, the source of that split would become clear: a common middle-aged affair.

Sonic Youth played five more shows that November, fulfilling a contractual obligation for a festival swing through South America. Those were hard and perfunctory gigs, so that night in Brooklyn remained special. "I always refer to it as the last show, because it was the last one where we weren't cognizant that we were going to stop playing," says Ranaldo, sighing. "There's a lot of complicated feelings in the aftermath, but we all left that concert feeling like we did a wonderful job."

For that final moment, at least, Sonic Youth's future seemed wide open. As Rose Flag, a superfan who had driven down that day from western Massachusetts, reckoned of the night: "Sonic Youth had lasted 30 years, so what was another 30 years?"

This week, Silver Current Records will release a remixed version of the concert, previously issued online as a pandemic-era Bandcamp exclusive. In retrospect, it is almost impossible not to hear the strange set of non-hits as an onstage conversation about the scandal that would soon engulf Sonic Youth. Moore sings of cheating cads during "Psychic Hearts," a relative obscurity from a solo album. Gordon commands the crowd to "support the power of women / use the power of man." But in real time, it wasn't like that. This was just a show meant to stand out for the songs the band played, not what those songs signified.

For the first time, the band members, their crew and their fans remember that concert and its aftermath in a series of candid interviews about the end of one of America's great rock institutions. (Gordon and Moore declined interview requests; their memoirs, both of which address the band's end, have been quoted.) This is a history of what might have been one night in a busy band's long career, and what it came to represent.

Sonic Youth debuted in the spring of 1981, a young New York band chasing the vapors of the no-wave scene. That December, the band appeared at CBGB for the first time. But 30 years later, by the summer of 2011, one of rock's most consistent bands both as a touring and recording unit seemed strangely inert from the outside. They had recorded a soundtrack during the months prior, but they had not performed a full set since a pair of British shows to end 2010. Most of the band, at least, considered that less a reason for alarm than consequences of relocation, circumstance and age.

Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth co-founder and guitarist): We were not a band in freefall or anything. The Eternal and our last self-released SYR album, a soundtrack for this French movie called Simon Werner a Disparu, were really strong. Thurston and Kim had moved to Northampton, Mass., so our schedules didn't work as consistently. We took more time off because we were in separate places, but it wasn't a factor, really.

"I always refer to it as the last show, because it was the last one where we weren't cognizant that we were going to stop playing," says guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Chris Gersbeck for NPR hide caption

"I always refer to it as the last show, because it was the last one where we weren't cognizant that we were going to stop playing," says guitarist Lee Ranaldo.

Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth co-founder): Sonic Youth was regarded as a "heritage act" a gentle way of saying we were long in the sonic tooth. But I liked that. I liked being the older folks in a world where the young and new constantly took the spotlight. For all the dismissiveness, I sometimes felt we were at the top of our game. [from Sonic Life: A Memoir]

Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth drummer since 1985): It was fun to have Mark Ibold in the band then. Kim could play guitar more often if she wanted to or be a standalone vocalist, unencumbered by her bass. We had a different kind of rhythm section when Mark played.

Mark Ibold (Pavement bassist and Sonic Youth bassist since 2006): I'm not a Bass Player Magazine-featured bass player. Sonic Youth asking me to join had more to do with being friends, just getting along. They also knew I was a huge Sonic Youth fan. I went to Sonic Youth shows from the moment I moved to New York in the early '80s. It was their energy and their presence. They, to me, were the ultimate working New York band.

Lee Ranaldo: When we were in a room together as a band, Kim and Thurston didn't present themselves as a bloc. Whether it was the structure of a new song or whether or not to do these gigs, there were many times they were on the opposite side of an issue.

Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth co-founder and bassist): Our fights mostly centered around how Thurston treated or spoke to me. ... It was probably hard for Lee and Steve to figure out the boundaries of where Thurston and I started as a couple and stopped as bandmates. I was allergic to making scenes and did everything possible to maintain an identity as an individual within the band. I had no interest in being just the female half of a couple. [from Girl in a Band: A Memoir]

Mark Ibold: I was so incredibly nervous about just being able to play the songs and fit in. It was an incredible relief because everybody was so laid back. I thought they would be very intensely serious about all of their music, but it wasn't that way at all. They were all nicer people than I even had imagined that they were.

Aaron Mullan (Sonic Youth sound engineer and studio manager since 2000): It was very much the family vibe. There was no tension. I never even saw anybody yell at another person. When we were touring in the U.S., you would get to a place, and everybody would meet up with friends. When we would travel overseas, we would all stick together a big group meal almost every day. It was just fun.

Dan Mapp (Sonic Youth tour manager since 2003): They were good people that liked to hang out together. It wasn't "hit the ground and split up." I'm not saying we were a cult.

"For hardcore Sonic Youth fans, that set list must have been amazing," says bassist Mark Ibold, seen here "doubling" on the instrument with Kim Gordon at the Williamsburg Waterfront. Chris Gersbeck for NPR hide caption

Lee Ranaldo: Our last gigs had been in October 2010, and then we played again the last weekend of the year. There were months there that we worked on the Simon Werner soundtrack, until January 2011, and it was a very awkward time working on that record. There was definitely something going on that was not being stated openly between the two of them, Kim and Thurston.

Kim Gordon: Before we left for that U.K. concert, I had come across an incredibly disturbing photo of [Thurston's girlfriend] in Thurston's junk mail. Thurston assured me the photo had been taken a long time ago, but something about the way he was acting made me believe it had special significance to the two of them, and that if I ever found out the truth, I'd end our marriage then and there. Our entire London trip had been painful and strained. [from Girl in a Band: A Memoir]

Lee Ranaldo: There was a lot of tension in the studio. The only time there wasn't tension was when we were actually playing, and everything seemed pretty close to normal. But whenever we were in the mixing room or watching the movie to figure out what to do, it was unstable. There was this intense unhappiness and tension that had us scratching our heads.

Steve Shelley: It felt like not everyone wanted to be at those sessions and I wasn't sure why. "Did I upset someone?" I'm usually like that "What did I do now?" Or did someone else upset someone? You just could tell that there was an unhappiness in the room.

Summertime Sonic Youth shows in New York had become a ritual of sorts during the previous decades. The band's 1992 Central Park show with the Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra was pivotal, affirming its avant-garde inclinations three years after signing to Geffen. And in Aug. 2010, they played Prospect Park. Kurt Vile, who happened to be working in town, remembers it as his favorite Sonic Youth show ever. "Lee Ranaldo literally played this one note," Vile remembers, "and it was the most perfect note I'd ever heard." This time, the group decided to try something new.

Lee Ranaldo: It's basically eight months since our last show. We did this benefit thing with Yoko Ono and some other people earlier in 2011 at Columbia University. But that was it.

"For this Williamsburg Waterfront show, I brought in songs I really enjoyed playing on those first tours with Sonic Youth," Steve Shelley says, pictured in the band's rehearsal space in Hoboken, N.J. Courtesy of Lee Ranaldo hide caption

Steve Shelley: I didn't always write the set lists. Thurston and I shared that responsibility through the years, and maybe I took over when Coco [Gordon Moore] was born. But when I joined the band in '85, the set was very much focused on Bad Moon Rising material. By the time we got into the next year, we would mostly focus on the new album. So the new albums became the set lists, and those previous songs would get "retired." For this Williamsburg Waterfront show, I brought in songs I really enjoyed playing on those first tours with Sonic Youth: "Brave Men Run," "Death Valley '69." "Brave Men Run" was really exciting because that was my favorite tune from my first tours. Almost half the tune goes by before the lyric comes in.

Leah Singer (writer and artist, married to Lee Ranaldo): Lee and I were in Lecce, in the heel of the boot of Italy, doing an artist residency in late July. We presented a show that we do together of film and music that we've been doing since the early '90s, since we met. We presented that show on Aug. 7. The idea was that he was going to fly home on the ninth for a few days of rehearsal. I would go to Venice with our kids, Sage and Frey, who were 12 and 10, to see the Venice Biennale.

Lee Ranaldo: We hadn't played "I Love Her All the Time" in a long time. It had some very specific stuff going on in the tunings, and I play most of it with a screwdriver under the strings all this stuff. And when it was first suggested, it was, like, "Wow, how are we going to learn how to play that one again?"

Steve Shelley: Everybody just kind of went with it. I was surprised there wasn't, like, "I'm not playing that one." Everybody just said, "OK, let's give it a shot."

Mark Ibold: Old songs are a gift to the hardcore fans and Sonic Youth are definitely aware of that. In Pavement now, we try to play older songs, songs that people aren't expecting to hear. But Sonic Youth was more diligent. In different cities, Steve would do the research and find out what they had played the last time they were in a city so they wouldn't do it again. For hardcore Sonic Youth fans, that set list must have been amazing.

Aaron Mullan: When the set was being developed for this show, it was very surprising. "Tom Violence," a bunch of stuff from Bad Moon Rising I'd never seen them play. It was cool to see that was going to happen. Because I ran the studio for the band, I was the person who would get them set up to rehearse. It was making sure we had lyrics available and making sure people had the ability to hear their parts for certain songs. Like when they played Daydream Nation as an album live, I made each person an individual stereo mix, with the whole rest of the album on one side and their part on the other side. Preparing for an unusual set list like this, you had to make sure people had the ability to hear the song and their part.

Mark Ibold: We tried to practice the songs at their rehearsal space in Hoboken a couple of times before the show. I remember being pretty freaked out about playing all those songs because a lot of them had a very nebulous low end in them I couldn't hear. I wasn't really sure what I was doing or how good it was. But it was kind of a thrill.

Lee Ranaldo: It was a testament to how deep our catalog was. We weren't always great about learning old songs because we always had the most enthusiasm for the current songs. That was really a strong point for Sonic Youth: We were never a band that wanted to rest on the popular songs. We were always fully engaged in our latest works. I was so happy we were playing this cross-section of our careers.

Aaron Mullan: The mood in the rehearsal was very strange. It was clear something wasn't right, that things weren't the way they'd always been. It was really unclear what was happening or was going to happen. It was like Mom and Dad were fighting, you know?

Lee Ranaldo: But I was not going into that show, at all, feeling like, "Oh, we're going to play our last show."

After the start of the decade, a popular if controversial series of concerts in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood shifted from McCarren Park Pool to the waterfront, along the East River. It was an unlikely space in an erstwhile industrial zone then known as the East River State Park. The audience gathered along the riverbank as the band gazed at the Manhattan skyline. The summer had been busy at the ad hoc venue, dubbed "Williamsburg Waterfront," with recent shows by Stone Temple Pilots, Death Cab for Cutie and They Might Be Giants. But none of them were a hometown institution quite like Sonic Youth, which, according to tour manager Dan Mapp, had sold nearly 3,000 tickets for $32.50 each some 10 days before the show.

Chris Gersbeck (photographer and founder, F****** Nostalgic Blog / comedy producer): They were doing concerts at Williamsburg Waterfront constantly New Order, David Byrne, so many for free. There would always be chaos outside the park, with all these cops. One cop car outside the venue before the show was blasting "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants, and everyone got a kick out of that.

"For all the dismissiveness, I sometimes felt we were at the top of our game," Thurston Moore says of Sonic Youth being called a "heritage act," per Sonic Life: A Memoir. Chris Gersbeck for NPR hide caption

"For all the dismissiveness, I sometimes felt we were at the top of our game," Thurston Moore says of Sonic Youth being called a "heritage act," per Sonic Life: A Memoir.

Will Schmiechen (family friend of Kim Gordon / manager of Brooklyn venue Union Pool): Going to see Sonic Youth was always so much fun, especially an outdoor show like that. It was almost like a festival because people's energy was up. They weren't just stuck in a greenroom. Plus, it's a waterfront.

Dan Mapp: It was kind of a pop-up venue, so, as tour manager, you have to figure out what the facilities are going to be, what you can do for catering, what you have for a production office. But they created a nice stage. Everybody had enough space. It was wonderful and beautiful that it looked out on New York, out on the river.

Rose Flag (Sonic Youth superfan): I grew up in a small farm town outside of Buffalo, where not a whole lot was happening. When I was 14, I was really into The Velvet Underground. I read somewhere that Sonic Youth was like their generation's Velvet Underground. I got Daydream Nation and it blew my head wide open. I was pretty much this Sonic Youth obsessive after that. So I lied to my parents and my guidance counselors, and said, "Oh, I want to go to school in western Massachusetts, because they have really good schools." But I knew Kim and Thurston lived there, and I just wanted to be close to them, to that music scene.

Kurt Vile (musician and longtime Sonic Youth fan): In my mid-20s, I definitely awkwardly chased anybody around associated with Sonic Youth. I had a friend who was a fan of my music and he would pass CD-Rs of it to Thurston. And then, signing to Matador was my big dream. When I finally signed to Matador, they had just signed Sonic Youth. It was like, "Oh my gosh." I got invited to open for Sonic Youth at the Electric Factory, where I'd seen them growing up in Philly. What that meant for me in Philly, in my scene and my friend's circle, was the start of my slow, steady career.

Leah Singer: No one ever wants to miss a Sonic Youth show because they were so great. I'm sure, historically, I've missed many Sonic Youth shows for whatever reasons, but I had a very strange feeling I could not miss that show. I was forfeiting the idea of being in Brooklyn for the show by staying in Venice. But once I got to Venice, I had this nagging feeling I had to get home on the 11th for the show. It's not like I had any inkling of what was going to happen it was really more of a very strange unexplained intuition that I needed to be there. And I really kept thinking that the kids had to see it. At the last minute, we came to New York.

"For the most part, the tension slips away while we were playing that show," says Steve Shelley. "You get caught up in the emotion of music." Chris Gersbeck for NPR hide caption

"For the most part, the tension slips away while we were playing that show," says Steve Shelley. "You get caught up in the emotion of music."

Dan Mapp: We had to organize parking for everybody, and Kim drove herself. She had just gotten a different car, a Subaru with four-wheel drive.

Leah Singer: I'm Canadian, originally, and a former boyfriend from Montreal was at that show. He and I went to our first Sonic Youth shows together, in the '80s. It seemed so unlikely that he would be there. It did have a kind of homecoming feel.

Kurt Vile: I brought my daughter, Awilda, and she was really young maybe 2. Lee was giving me new fatherly advice. That's what I always liked about Lee; he's sort of fatherly. I look up to that man. I hung out with Kim a lot that night. All these girls were running up to her, swarming her. She's such an icon and she's just trying to be a normal person, which she does so coolly. Everybody was really sweet.

Aaron Mullan: We had sound check earlier in the day. I went home and got my son, Milo, and we were coming down to hang out backstage before the show, his first Sonic Youth show.

Rose Flag: We hopped in my car and drove down. We got there pretty early, before Kurt Vile played. His songs drifted out into the wind. It's later summer, almost golden hour. The temperature that day wasn't too hot, not too humid.

Kurt Vile: The beginning of our tour that summer was opening for Thurston's solo project and our final gig, after a few days off, was to open this Sonic Youth show. Adam Granduciel, my bandmate in the Violators, had left tour early to get ready for a War on Drugs tour. He was running behind and he literally jumped on stage to play with us. That was the last show of his last tour as a Violator. I had just picked up this phaser at the Moog factory in North Carolina and I didn't know how to work the thing. It sounded like a jet engine taking off. It was haphazard, but maybe it just cosmically added some noise, which felt appropriate for Sonic Youth.

"Brave Men Run (In My Family)" "Death Valley '69" "Kotton Krown" "Kill Yr Idols" "Eric's Trip" "Sacred Trickster" "Calming the Snake" "Starfield Road" "I Love Her All the Time" "Ghost Bitch" "Tom Violence" "What We Know" "Drunken Butterfly"

Encore 1: "Flower" "Sugar Kane"

Encode 2: "Psychic Hearts" "Inhuman"

Rose Flag: I'm a big Sonic Youth nerd, so I know what guitars and what tunings are for which songs. Before the set, they put out Lee's Travis Bean aluminum neck guitar and I'm like, "Oh, that's the 'Death Valley '69' and 'Kool Thing' tuning!" So I'm taking bets with my friend Jason "Kool Thing" or "Death Valley"? And "Brave Men Run" is the same tuning: F#F#F#F#EB. But there was no way that was going to happen. And then the set started: "Brave Men Run," "Death Valley '69," "Kotton Krown." And you look back at the Manhattan skyline and feel like you're in this sonic world they construct on their records. It was like, "This is 1985. This is insane!"

Chris Gersbeck: Maybe halfway through, I realized they were not going to play any of their better-known stuff, that it was some weird career retrospective. I'm sure there were a lot of people that didn't recognize a single song they played that night. It was awesome.

Will Schmiechen: After seeing them so many times, I didn't know the first song at all. I was really confused. And that segued into this whole set that was unlike anything I'd ever seen. When they normally played old stuff, Mark Ibold wasn't involved. But he was there, ripping it.

Mark Ibold: There were maybe four songs I had probably never played before and, on a lot of those songs, Kim and I were "doubling." I was playing a bass line and she was, too. It would have seemed awkward for me to walk off stage and back on, but I don't know if Aaron would mix both of the basses or just turn me down. If I was him, I would mix me out.

Aaron Mullan: I tried to give them equal amounts of volume! If he's going to be there on stage, I wouldn't dock him.

Will Schmiechen: I remember that someone threw a ukulele at Lee. Sonic Youth isn't like a band people throw stuff at especially a ukulele because you have to, like, take it on the train. He pushed it against his guitar to make feedback. He handled it in style.

Lee Ranaldo flanked by a Spanish ukulele duo. He says that "before the encore, they threw one of those ukuleles on stage," which Ranaldo improvised on. Courtesy of Dan Mapp hide caption

Lee Ranaldo flanked by a Spanish ukulele duo. He says that "before the encore, they threw one of those ukuleles on stage," which Ranaldo improvised on.

Lee Ranaldo: Mostly what would get thrown at us would be like people's burned CDs, just indie-rock dudes wanting us to hear their bands. We didn't generally get bras or panties or joints. There were these two Spanish girls there; the band had met them before in Spain. They had some strange project where they were traveling around the world with ukuleles. They showed up in flamenco dresses, red with black crepe. Before the encore, they threw one of those ukuleles on stage. We still have that instrument here in our living room, and every once in a while one of us will strum it.

Steve Shelley: For the most part, the tension slips away while we were playing that show. You get caught up in the emotion of music. That took over. It was like, "Well, things are feeling better today. Maybe things are OK?"

Lee Ranaldo: We were playing during the sunset. We had the happy position of looking across the water and seeing the sun going down and the lights on the stage coming up just this beautiful night unfolding. It was magical.

Thurston Moore: Later on tonight, a large rattlesnake head's going to come over Manhattan over the river and introduce us to 2012. [on stage, from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

Rose Flag: L.S.D. L.S.D. [chanting in the crowd, from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

Thurston Moore: Yes, it's going to spray L.S.D. on our heads like angel dust. And we all become women. [on stage, from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

Fans face away from the Manhattan skyline during sunset at Sonic Youth's Williamsburg Waterfront show. "It was magical," says Lee Ranaldo. Chris Gersbeck for NPR hide caption

Rose Flag: I listen to a lot of Sonic Youth bootlegs, so I know Thurston is really good at stage banter. He's talking about this giant snake, so I wanted to goad him to keep going. I remembered yelling "L.S.D.," but I didn't remember him responding until I heard they'd caught it on tape. I recently came out as trans and that moment is one of these weird synchronicities with that band in my life. It's like they're leading me towards accepting my true self or something.

Leah Singer: It was this sunset show and Kim had on this orange dress this bright, sunset dress. It was Brooklyn, looking at Manhattan. Looking back, that was quite dramatic.

Steve Shelley: The sundown, the city lighting up it's always fun to see. It's even better when you're playing music.

Thurston Moore: It's nice to be back in Brooklyn, especially being here. Thanks for coming out tonight. ... This is our last song. [on stage, before the encores, from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

Crowd: Boooo! [from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

Steve Shelley: Playing "Psychic Hearts," off of Thurston's solo record, was fun, because we'd only played that once or twice together. I really like that whole song the lyric, the mono-dynamic of the whole tune.

Rose Flag: When they played "Psychic Hearts," I didn't recognize it. But I thought, "Oh, they're going poppy for this next record, which of course they're already writing." But yeah, that wasn't the case.

Thurston Moore: With the power of love, anything is possible. [on stage, after the second encore, from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

Crowd: [from Live in Brooklyn 2011]

When the show was over, Ranaldo remembers, everyone felt fantastic. After eight months away, they'd pulled off this very difficult set with only two days of rehearsal. But the afterglow soon faded, as difficult news and decisions arrived.

Leah Singer: The show was bookended by this artist's residency in Italy and a long-planned family holiday on Fire Island. We were out there when everything came out. That's when I realized my intuition was good. I was so thankful that we were there, at the show, just grateful and relieved.

Lee Ranaldo: In the days right after that concert, I had pretty frank discussions with both Kim and Thurston about what was going on and realized everything was going to be on hold while they worked out their split. In the immediate aftermath of that Brooklyn show, it was too soon to know what was going to happen. They'd been having difficulties for a while and I don't think anybody was ready to say right then, "OK, that's the end." After 30 years of this forward momentum, everyone was willing to just wait and see.

Steve Shelley: We knew something was amiss, but I was still shocked. Surprised? Maybe not. With all the difficulties in those last years, I realized it could stop. I just had to remind myself how lucky I was, what an amazing ride it was.

Mark Ibold: I got the news via a phone call and that was a pretty harrowing phone call. I don't want to say more than that.

Matador Records [Sonic Youth's label, 20082011]: Musicians Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, married in 1984, are announcing they have separated. Sonic Youth, with both Kim and Thurston involved, will proceed with its South American tour dates in November. Plans beyond that tour are uncertain. The couple has requested respect for their personal privacy and does not wish to issue further comment. [Press release, Oct. 11, 2011]

"I don't think it really struck me until after these shows that them splitting up would also mean that the band was going to stop working," says Lee Ranaldo. Courtesy of Dan Mapp hide caption

Steve Shelley: I thought we might cancel the South American shows, that it could go either way. Oh, boy, it was a difficult tour.

Kim Gordon: What was different from past tours and festivals was that Thurston and I weren't speaking to each other. We had exchanged maybe fifteen words all week. After 27 years of marriage, things had fallen apart between us. ... That week, it was as if he'd wound back time, erased our nearly 30 years together. "Our life" had turned back into "my life" for him. He was an adolescent lost in fantasy again, and the rock star showboating he was doing onstage got under my skin. [from Girl in a Band]

Dan Mapp: This is going to sound weird, but we all still went out for meals. We went out for ice cream in Argentina. People were still civil and hanging out. I'm not saying it was perfect, but people weren't isolating themselves completely or anything.

Kim Gordon: A lot of the crew had worked with us for years and were like family members. Thurston sat at one end of the table, with me at the other end. It was like dining out with the folks, except Mom and Dad were ignoring each other. ... As the tour went on, I softened a little. With all the history between us, it made me incredibly anxious to hold so much anger toward him. A couple of times he and I found ourselves taking photos outside the hotel, and I made a conscious decision to be friendly, and Thurston did too. [from Girl in a Band]

Lee Ranaldo: I don't think it really struck me until after these shows that them splitting up would also mean that the band was going to stop working. They never presented as a marital couple in the band. The two things didn't immediately go together. But the complications around the way they split and the other person or people involved just made it a very complicated issue. I don't think there was any way that those two could have worked together after this.

Leah Singer: It's funny because Sonic Youth is not over as an entity or a concept or a business. They're putting out this record and there's lots of recorded music. But in terms of seeing them live, which is the life of the band, that is over for the moment. And that's heartbreaking because there aren't a lot of bands that are that exciting to watch live, that are that into spontaneity.

Rose Flag: I don't think I really accepted they were done until a year or two later. It was this really gradual grieving process. The records still hold up and I have this really extensive bootleg collection. So it's still with me. But I'm still holding out hope I'll get to see them again.

Lee Ranaldo: We're all still alive. So playing is always a possibility. But it's not something that's being discussed, that we are thinking about. I have mixed reactions to other bands that have done reunions, but I have been convinced by so many different fans over the years that there's so many people out there that never got to see us. Luckily, all of our children got to see us plenty of times. It would be an awful lot of work, but I'll entertain those notions when the time comes up.

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The sunset of Sonic Youth: An oral history of the band's final U.S. show - NPR

Across the political spectrum, a persistent minority of voices insists that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the eastward expansion of NATO in the 1990s and 2000s. Others couch their criticism in more nuanced terms, but suggest that Russia should not pay a significant price for its invasion and war crimes, the better to get back to business as usual.

Political scientist John Mearsheimer, a conservative, blames the U.S. and NATO for the invasion. So does Noam Chomsky on the far left, propounding a few historical distortions along the way. Academic gadfly and tax delinquent Cornel West, wading into the unfamiliar waters of foreign policy, claims that NATO expansion "provoked" Russia into attacking Ukraine. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman and public nuisance, hasn't explicitly blamed NATO for the invasion, but her demand that the U.S. cease all aid to Ukraine and withdraw from NATO is a tacit endorsement of the opinion that Kyiv got what it deserved because of its dangerous liaison with America and NATO. The argument has become a leitmotif of the American far left and far right.

A more serious, and subtler, condemnation of current U.S. and NATO policy asserts that an outright military defeat of Russia (meaning the expulsion of Russian forces from all the Ukrainian territories they have seized by force) would be destabilizing and dangerous for the world. The operative phrase is that NATO must not "humiliate" Putin.

Henry Kissinger, our centenarian former secretary of state and self-appointed intermediary with China, has asserted that the West should not force "an embarrassing defeat" on Russia. He also said Ukraine must be prepared to accept Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which would effectively predetermine the outcome of any future negotiated settlement. Oddly, though, Kissinger has flip-flopped on his previous opposition to Ukraine becoming a NATO member, albeit as a diminished state, with Crimea "subject to negation." That, however, could leave Ukraine vulnerable to a close Russian blockade of its Black Sea grain ports. Kissinger, the ultimate realist, evidently thinks it is acceptable to allow the Russian navy to have its hands around Ukraine's windpipe.

French President Emmanuel Macron, a key leader in the coalition supporting Ukraine, has not gone as far as Kissinger. But on several occasions he has advanced this argument: "We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means." French media, calling Macron a "keen student of history," says "he is also wary of the desire among some allies to punish Moscow for its aggression, citing the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany at the end of World War I in 1919."

Brookings scholar Michael O'Hanlon has offered a more carefully hedged analysis, writing that an overly lenient settlement would give Russia little incentive not to attack again. On the other hand, in decrying hypothetical harsh terms, he also mentions World War I, claiming that "the Versailles peace wound up establishing the predicate for World War II more than producing stability."

Versailles has become a shorthand for critics of NATO's Ukraine policy, from those who think Washington and Brussels should offer Putin soft terms to those who explicitly blame the West for his war of aggression.

This invocation of the Versailles Treaty has become a form of shorthand for many critics of NATO's Ukraine policy, from those who think Washington and Brussels should offer Vladimir Putin soft terms to those who explicitly place moral responsibility on the West for his brutal war of aggression. Versailles has become a metaphor whose supposed "lessons" are that aggressors must not be humiliated or punished. The thesis also slyly shifts blame for criminal behavior from the aggressor to third parties.

The frequent castigation of Versailles in popular histories over the past century has established a narrative implying that seeking justice for international crimes will boomerang, and that wise statesmen should know better. It is a disguised insinuation that the Allied leaders of 1919, by humiliating Germany after four years of ghastly slaughter, paved the way for Hitler, thereby placing at least some of the moral onus on themselves. The so-called lessons of Versailles appeal to many because they are easy to grasp: a simplistic, determinist picture of history moving inexorably in a straight line and devoid of human actions, contingency and the complex interplay of events.

This argument, which reinforces both the purported lessons of history and a shallow realpolitik, falls readily to hand for those eager to accuse the West of provoking the Ukraine war. Supposed Allied triumphalism and harsh punishment of Germany in 1919 appear analogous to the situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when NATO expansion allegedly pushed a shamed and demeaned Russia into the mud. The argument hints that payback is to be expected, and perhaps deserved.

Like the origins of the Cold War, the legacy of the Versailles Treaty has been subject to so much revisionism, tendentious pleading and misinformation that closer examination is warranted. The treaty is called "draconian" (even the website of the Palace of Versailles describes it thus) and a reflection of victors' justice. There is no question that the post-World War I settlement, of which that treaty was a major part, failed to prevent a second, even more disastrous war. But the question is why it failed; after all, treaties are not self-enforcing.

In particular, the treaty's reparations demands were allegedly so crushing that the price was beyond Germany's ability to pay. This issue will be salient if the international community is ever in a position to pressure Russia to repair the vast material damage it has inflicted on Ukraine. (Last November, the UN in fact adopted a resolution calling on Russia to pay reparations.)

Given the widespread belief that World War I was a meaningless great-power bloodbath, the revisionist critique asserts that it was unjust to saddle Germany with guilt for starting the war, since every power involved was responsible. But during the treaty deliberations, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau supposedly quipped that one thing was certain: "The historians will not say that Belgium invaded Germany."

Not only in Belgium, but also in the richest and most industrialized part of France, the Germans invaded, systematically plundered, and took many civilians as forced labor. The official German policy against civilians was described as Schrecklichkeit frightfulness. According to Belgian records, "German soldiers murdered over 6,000 Belgian civilians, and 17,700 died during expulsion, deportation, imprisonment, or death sentence by court." The land was so devastated in Northern France and Belgium that to this day, farmers and construction workers constantly discover unexploded ordnance. It was this vast human and material destruction that reparations were meant to compensate.

The bill presented to Germany came to 132 billion Reichsmarks over 30 years something like $500 billion in 21st-century dollars. From the beginning, Berlin fell behind on payments, not from an objective inability to pay, but because nearly the entire ruling class the civil service, the aristocracy, big capital and the political parties along with the middle class, swallowed the German Army's lies.

The army general staff had received everything it had demanded during the war, including a virtual dictatorship over the country, yet it botched the job and then washed its hands, passing off the mess to the civilians while claiming it had been "stabbed in the back." Hoodwinked citizens refused to believe Germany had been "genuinely" defeated, choosing to believe instead that political leaders had fallen for the tricks of the Allies and domestic subversives, the most insidious such trick being Versailles.

Despite this intransigence, the Allies, except for France during the first few years, were not unyielding. The Dawes Plan of 1924 issued loans to help restructure Germany's finances, and the Young Plan of 1928 stretched out the reparations payments. In 1932, the Allies granted Germany, which had been continually in arrears on its payment schedule, an indefinite moratorium. By then, Germany had paid less than a sixth of the total reparations due: a pittance compared either to what it spent on the war or the damage sustained in the invaded territories.

Allied actions did not incite the extremism of Weimar Germany that led to Nazi rule; that was the result of an authoritarian society that modernized without gaining a democratic culture.

Did Versailles immiserate Germany? Not exactly. By 1929, its GDP was 12 percent higher than it had been in 1913, the last full prewar year, despite losing two million prime-age male workers in the war, with millions more disabled. What crushed the German economy by the end of the Weimar period was the Great Depression, a storm that swamped all boats: the United States itself was suffering 25 percent unemployment when Hitler came to power. Allied actions did not incite the endemic extremism of Weimar which culminated in Nazi rule; it was the toxic result of a traditionally militarized, authoritarian society that had industrialized and modernized without gaining a democratic culture.

Nor were the territorial clauses as onerous as typically depicted. Alsace-Lorraine, forcibly annexed by Germany in 1871, was returned to France. Formerly German territories awarded to Poland and Denmark had Danish- and Polish-speaking majorities who voted decisively in League of Nations plebiscites that they did not wish to remain with Germany. German speakers in what became Czechoslovakia had never been German subjects.

Both the territorial and indemnity provisions of the treaty were no worse than those Germany had imposed on France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and were vastly more lenient than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918, in which the brand new Bolshevik regime in Russia was forced to hand over to Germany lands making up 34 percent of its population, 54 percent of its industry, 89 percent of its coalfields and 26 percent of its railways. This outcome warned the Allies what they could expect if Germany won the war.

From the beginning, Germany violated the Versailles clauses intended to prevent it from rearming. The Allies banned German possession of U-boats in view of their massive submarine campaign in the war, which had sunk not just Allied but neutral shipping. In the early 1920s, however, the German Navy secretly used shell companies to establish facilities in Sweden and the Netherlands to test new U-boat designs. Around the same time, the German Army agreed to a technology transfer scheme with the Bolsheviks that allowed the army to test new weapons and tactics at secret sites deep inside the Soviet Union.

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The Western powers were aware of most of Germany's secret rearmament schemes, but did nothing to stop them. During the 1920s, they were complacent; by the early 1930s, they were preoccupied with their own economic problems; by 1935, when Hitler formally renounced the treaty, the reaction was silent dread, rationalized by the excuse that maybe Germany had been treated unfairly, and that countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland rightfully belonged in Germany's sphere of influence anyway. It should have been evident by then that the treaty's provisions were not the problem; it was the Allies' lack of will to enforce them.

This overview of the Versailles Treaty is not merely of antiquarian interest; the same issues arose immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Germans who were shocked and unaccepting that they had been militarily defeated, many ordinary Russians couldn't believe they had lost the ideological competition with the West. The revanchist mentality of Vladimir Putin, who has said the USSR's demise was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," echoes that of the German militarists of 1919. Independent Ukraine assumed the same position in the minds of Russian revanchists as independent Poland did to the right-wing movements of Weimar: territories unjustly taken from the homeland by fraud and force majeure.

There is a lingering belief, analogous to the notion that reparations exploited Germany economically, that Western countries consciously wielded free-market radicalism to loot the Russian successor state to the Soviet Union during the 1990s. It certainly appears true that many foreign investors and companies took advantage of the Wild West atmosphere of post-collapse Russia to reap huge profits.

There is a lingering belief that Western countries wielded free-market radicalism to loot Russia after the Soviet collapse. But the rise of Russia's oligarchs was a homegrown phenomenon.

But Russian migr journalist Arkady Ostrovsky, in his book "The Invention of Russia," explains how that Wild West atmosphere came to exist in the first place. He says that even before the fall of the Communist regime, former KGB operatives had already transformed themselves into oligarchs who divided up the Russian economy like a giant cake. This economic warlordism, like the endemic violence of Weimar, was a homegrown phenomenon, largely resulting from the lack of a democratic culture. By the same token, if Western governments had restricted their nationals from doing business in Russia (which would have amounted to imposing sanctions), the newly opened Russian economy would have been even more starved of capital. No doubt that too would have become a new charge in the critics' bill of indictment against the West.

Those who claim that NATO expansion provoked adverse Russian behavior typically present it as a process initiated and executed by Washington, with the existing and candidate members being passive subjects. This construct ignores the fact that the candidate states of Eastern Europe, many of which had experienced decades or centuries of Russian political domination and even forced Russification, had solid historical reasons for desiring NATO membership, rather than simply trusting in the Kremlin's good intentions. This year's protracted obstruction by Turkey of NATO membership for Finland and Sweden shows that member states are hardly U.S. vassals; had there not been unanimity within NATO, the expansion would not have proceeded.

The "lessons" of the Versailles Treaty are far more complex than the conventional wisdom will admit. On balance, Germany was not treated as a pariah: reparations terms were eased, disarmament violations were winked at and the country was admitted to the League of Nations in 1926. If the Allies had actually enforced the treaty, maintained a tolerable state of military readiness, and concluded mutual assistance agreements with Czechoslovakia and Poland, the most cataclysmic war in history might have been averted.

The invasion of Ukraine is but one component of an extraordinarily complex global crisis that requires the U.S. and its allies to rally global support for defending Ukraine while balancing our overall policies towards Russia and its de facto ally China. How the international community will eventually settle with Russia is an open question, but it should not be determined by a selective and misleading reading of history.

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from Mike Lofgren on politics and history

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Russia, Ukraine and Versailles: Bogus lessons from history won't ... - Salon

Decades from now, when high school students want to learn about the great conspiracy against democracy that began in 2020, they could very well start with the 98-page indictment filed Monday night in Georgia, in which former president Donald Trump is accused of leading a criminal enterprise to stay in power.

No one knows whether these charges will lead to convicting Mr. Trump and the other conspirators or to keeping him from power. But even if it doesnt, the indictment and the evidence supporting it and the trial that, ideally, will follow it will have a lasting value.

Unlike the other three cases against Mr. Trump, this one is an indictment for history, for the generations to come who will want to know precisely how the men and women in Mr. Trumps orbit tried to subvert the Constitution and undermine American democracy and why they failed. And it is a statement for the future that this kind of conduct is regarded as intolerable and that the criminal justice system, at least in the year 2023, remained sturdy enough to try to counter it.

History needs a story line to be fully understood. The federal special counsel Jack Smith told only a few pieces of the story in an indictment limited to Mr. Trump, focusing mainly on the groups of fake state electors that Mr. Trump and his circle tried to pass off as real and the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to certify them. But in Georgia, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, was unencumbered by the narrower confines of federal law and was able to use the more expansive state RICO statute to draw the clearest, most detailed picture yet of Mr. Trumps plot.

As a result, her story is a much broader and more detailed arc of treachery and deceit, naming 19 conspirators and told in 161 increments, each one an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, forming the predicate necessary to prove a violation of the RICO act. (Neither of the indictments, unfortunately, holds Mr. Trump directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot a tale best told in the archives of the House Jan. 6 committee.)

Not each of the acts is a crime, but together they add up to the most daring and highest-ranking criminal plot in U.S. history to overturn an election and steal the presidency and a plot that appears to have violated Georgia law, leaving no question about the importance of prosecuting Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators. Ms. Willis has risen to the occasion by documenting a lucid timeline, starting with Mr. Trumps brazenly false declaration of victory on Nov. 4, 2020, and continuing with scores of conversations between the president and his lawyers and aides as they try to persuade a number of states to decertify the vote.

The narrative contains tweets that might be just eye-rolling on their own such as Mr. Trumps utterly false claim that Georgia Democrats had fed phony ballots into voting machines but that in context demonstrate a relentless daily effort to perpetrate a fraud well past his forced exit from the White House on Inauguration Day.

The world knows about people like Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, who was asked by Mr. Trump to find him enough votes to overturn the state election and who refused. It knows about how Mr. Pence rebuffed his bosss demands to decertify the vote on Jan. 6 and of officials in other states and in the Justice Department who collectively helped save democracy by resisting pressure from the conspirators.

But Ms. Willis, in trying to tell the full story, made sure the high cost paid by lesser-known figures was also recorded for the books. Specifically, the indictment focuses on the outrageous accusations made against Ruby Freeman, the Atlanta election worker who was singled out by Mr. Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani for what they insisted was ballot stuffing and turned out to be nothing of the kind.

Mr. Giuliani told a Georgia House committee on Dec. 10, 2020, that Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if theyre vials of heroin or cocaine in order to alter votes on crooked Dominion voting machines. For this, Mr. Giuliani who admitted last month that he had made false statements about the two women and is facing a defamation suit they filed was charged in the indictment with the felony offense of making false statements.

Ms. Freeman was also targeted by other conspirators charged in the case, and she may well have been chosen for that role because she is Black and was thus a more believable villain to the kinds of people who have most ardently swallowed Mr. Trumps lies for many years. As the indictment painstakingly lays out, Stephen C. Lee, a Lutheran pastor from Illinois, went to Ms. Freemans home and tried to get her to admit to election fraud; he was charged with five felonies. He enlisted the help of Willie Lewis Floyd III, a former head of Black Voices for Trump, to join in intimidating Ms. Freeman; Mr. Floyd was charged with three felonies. Trevian Kutti, a publicist in the worlds of cannabis and hip-hop, was also recruited to help pressure Ms. Freeman, who said Ms. Kutti tried to get her to confess to voter fraud. Ms. Kutti now faces three felony charges.

In the vast carelessness of their scheme, to use F. Scott Fitzgeralds phrase, the plotters smashed up institutions and rules without regard to the resulting damage, willfully destroying individual reputations if it might help their cause. Ms. Freeman was one of those who was smashed, exposed by Mr. Trump to ridicule and abuse, though he never paid a price. Now, thanks to Ms. Willis, Ms. Freemans story will reach a jury and the judgment of history, and the record will show precisely who inflicted the damage to her and to the country.

See the rest here:

Opinion | The Georgia Indictment Speaks to History - The New York Times

Football season is nearly upon us, and its about time to start breaking down the schedule. Were going to do that today...in a way.

Personally, Im not a football expert, so Im going to tell you how North Carolina matches up against the South Carolina defense, or how Syracuses two-deep is setting up. Instead, Im going to look at this years schedule through the lens of history. In order to look at the 12 games UNC football will play this year, were going to look at 12 memorable games the Tar Heels have had against this years opponents.

September 2nd: South Carolina

The season opener against the Gamecocks in Charlotte brings back memories of the last time Carolina played such a game. In 2019, the Tar Heels took on South Carolina in Charlotte in the first game of the Mack Brown 2.0 era. That day was also the first game of the Sam Howell era. In his college debut, Howell led UNC on two 90+ yard touchdown drives in the fourth quarter as they rallied past the Gamecocks for a 24-20 win.

September 9th: vs. Appalachian State

The game might be less than a year old, but its hard to overlook the 2022 battle between the Heels and Mountaineers. In a game that featured 62 combined fourth quarter points, Drake Maye and Carolina finally won after Apps attempted game-tying two-point conversion with nine seconds left failed. In the moment, this game was often a bit infuriating, but in hindsight, reading the box score for it is pretty hilarious.

September 16th: vs. Minnesota

The Tar Heels and Golden Gophers have never met on a football field prior to this season. Instead, well remember when the mens basketball team lost to Minnesota in the 1980 Bruin Classic in LA. Its time for revenge.

September 23rd: at Pitt

While the Panthers have evened things out in recent years, UNC had their number in the first couple years Pitt was in the ACC. That included the 2016 game where Mitch Trubisky led Carolina on a late, winning touchdown drive, that included three fourth down conversions, and a game-winning catch by Bug Howard.

October 7th: vs. Syracuse

Being in separate divisions, UNC doesnt have a lot of football history against the Orange since theyve joined the ACC. However, thatll change a bit with the move to the new schedule format. One notable win over them came on the road in 2002, when Carolina scored 14 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to overtake Cuse.

October 14th: vs. Miami

UNC does have a couple nice wins over the Hurricanes in recent years, but theres only one answer here:

October 21st: vs. Virginia

This game might be memorable for the wrong reasons, but its hard to overlook the 2005 game against the Cavaliers that finished in one of the funniest football scores possible: 7-5.

October 28th: at Georgia Tech

A loss last year to the Yellow Jackets began the Tar Heels late season slump, so hopefully theres some revenge in store for this year. As far as better memories go, lets hope its more like the 2015 game. That day, UNC trailed 21-0 late into the second quarter only to come back in the second half as Marquise Williams went for over 100 yards both in the air and on the ground.

November 4th: vs. Campbell

The Camels are another team that UNC has never met on the football field, as they only began the modern version of their program in 2008. Hopefully, the football team will be amped up to get some revenge for their baseball brethren from earlier this year.

November 11th: vs. Duke

Too bad this game wont be in Durham for there to be any inflatable helmets to visit.

November 18th: at Clemson

While last years ACC Championship game ended in a blowout, UNC had played the ACCs preeminent power close a couple times in recent years. The last time they beat the Tigers was in 2010, when 195 all-purpose yards from Johnny White got the Heels a win.

November 25th: at NC State

You know the one.

See the original post here:

UNC Football: A look at the 2023 schedule through the lens of history - Tar Heel Blog

Public transport has become an indispensable part of the modern world. These vehicles, which facilitate transportation and make life more sustainable for people living in big cities around the world, have undergone a significant change in the development process in the past.

The origins of public transportation date back to the time people moved from one place to another in large numbers. People first used horse-drawn carriages, and then they had the opportunity to travel faster and more effectively by rail transport such as trains and trams. Later, vehicles such as buses, metro lines, and light rail systems were developed and the public transportation network was expanded.

Public vehicles have become a critical need today. Density and traffic problems in big cities made it difficult to reach destinations by individual cars and increased the demand for public vehicles. Public transport makes the daily life of many people easier.

It meets people's basic transportation needs, such as going to work, going to school, and performing other daily activities. These vehicles are a more viable option for many people to benefit economically, as well as reduce traffic congestion and environmental pollution. Public transport networks also help cities become more sustainable.

Also, public transport offers people the opportunity to explore different regions and have a variety of cultural experiences. At the same time, stations, stops, etc. other functional structures make it easier for disabled and elderly people to move around the city alone.

Lets take a look at a list of some commonly used public vehicles to facilitate urban and intercity transportation.

The bus is one of the most widely used public vehicles in urban and intercity transportation. It carries passengers by stopping at designated stops on certain lines.

Buses can have a capacity of up to 300 passengers, with an average bus usually carrying between 30 and 100 passengers.

The most common types include double-decker buses, articulated buses carrying larger loads, midwibuses, minibusses carrying smaller loads, and single-decker buses. The intercity bus is used for longer-distance services.

Horse-drawn buses were used from the 1820s, followed by steam buses in the 1830s, and electric trolleybuses in 1882. They used the first motorized buses in 1895.

Recently, there has been growing interest in hybrid electric buses, fuel cell buses, and electric buses, as well as buses powered by compressed natural gas or biodiesel. Since the 2010s, bus production is increasingly global and new designs are popping up all over the world.

The metro is a type of high-capacity public transport usually found in urban areas. Unlike buses or trams, usually, subway systems are railways running on a private right of way, inaccessible by pedestrians or other vehicles, and located in tunnels. It is a rail system serving underground or high-speed lines for urban transportation. Metro lines often host a large crowd.

Various private companies opened the first lines of the London Underground. Besides the main railway lines, it started to be used as a part of public transportation in 1933.

Trams, which are among the rail systems, carry a high number of passengers. There are both high-speed trams and low-speed trams. Unlike trains, rails can be laid on the streets and other vehicles can pass through these roads. Most trams run on electric power. There are also horse or petrol-powered trams.

The train is a public vehicle that is widely used in intercity and intercontinental travel. Trains run on certain lines on the rail system and usually cover longer distances. The train was first used in England in the early 1800s. The train was born because of an argument between an engineer named Richard Trevithick and a mine owner in Pennydarran, U.K.

The ferry or car ferry is the general name of the ferries used to transport vehicles. It is a transport mode used in the sea or lakes. It is used to transport passengers and vehicles between cities and the islands. Western Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, English Channel, North Sea, and Baltic Sea are some regions where ferry lines operate frequently. In some regions, both road vehicles and ships built for railway vehicles operate.

The cable car is a system in which cabins are suspended that provide transportation to high points in mountainous regions or in the city. A ropeway is a transportation system with a suspended vehicle that travels between two distant places, connected by one or several steel ropes stretched in the air. Cable cars work with the principle of the elevator, but they can rise to very high points from the ground, just like a helicopter, especially at valley crossings. The world's longest cable car, Norsj Cable Car, runs between rtrask and Menstrask settlements in Norsj, Sweden. The length of this line, which was established in 1942, is 13.2 kilometers (8.2 miles) long. The journey time is 1.5 hours.

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Types of public transports: Brief dive into history - Daily Sabah

While their rivals the New York Yankees are making history that they might be ashamed of, the Boston Red Sox have a player who did something worth celebrating.

Luis Uras hit a grand slam Saturday in Boston's game against their AL East foe, his second grand slam in as many at-bats over two games. According to ESPN Stats & Info, Uras, 26, is the first Red Sox player to hit a grand slam in consecutive games since Jimmie Foxx in 1940. He's the first player in the MLB to have such a hit in consecutive at-bats since 2009 when Josh Willingham did so in one game for the Washington Nationals.

The latest grand slam came in the top of the second inning at Yankee Stadium against All-Star pitcher Gerrit Cole. Uras smacked the ball on the first pitch of his at-bat and sent it flying to left field where it landed in the bullpen. He trotted around the bases and blew a bubble with his gum before doing the sign of the cross at home plate and high-fiving Jarren Duran, Pablo Reyes and Connor Wong, who he brought home with him. The grand slam give the Red Sox a 4-0 lead and they would go on to win 8-1.

Uras sat out of Friday's game, the series opener against the Yankees and hit his other grand slam on Thursday in the seventh inning of a 10-7 loss to the Nationals against rookie reliever Robert Garcia.

The Red Sox acquired Uras from the Milwaukee Brewers earlier this month ahead of the trade deadline. In the 2021 season, he hit a career-high 23 home runs with a batting average of .249. He's hitting .258 in 31 at-bats for Boston since the deal.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Red Sox's Luis Uras hits grand slam in back-to-back games

Excerpt from:

Red Sox infielder Luis Uras makes history with back-to-back grand ... - Yahoo Sports

Leading up to the 2023-2024 college football season season, Red & Black assistant sports editor Bo Underwood will count down the top 10 Georgia players at each individual position.

Rodney Hampton, UGA running back 1987-1989. Credit: The Red & Black, September 27, 1989.

Rodney Hampton burst onto the scene as a freshman in 1987, rushing for 890 yards and four touchdowns on seven yards a carry. Hampton did all of this while sharing the backfield with senior star Lars Tate. His stats took a dip the following year thanks to the presence of another senior in Tim Worley, but Hampton was finally the lead back during his junior year in 1989 and rushed for 1,059 yards and 12 touchdowns.

He was one of the only bright spots for a struggling Georgia team that finished 6-6 under first-year head coach Ray Goff. Hampton went on to become a two-time Pro Bowler and a Super Bowl champion with the New York Giants, but his college career wasnt too shabby either.

Lars Tate was one of the most influential running backs in Sanford Stadium history. (Left: Courtesy/UGA Athletics, Right: The Red & Black,1987.)

The aforementioned Tate was as steady as they come for the Bulldogs. He never averaged anything less than nearly five yards per carry after his freshman year, and only two Bulldogs have ever carried the ball more times.

The bruising runner is also tied for third in career rushing touchdowns with 36, and helped provide some much needed stability in the backfield for a Georgia program that was struggling to find itself in the wake of Herschel Walkers departure.

Georgia running back Knowshon Moreno celebrates a touchdown during a game against LSU on Oct. 25, 2008 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Ashley Connell)

Knowshon Moreno only suited up for Georgia for two seasons, but to say he made them count would be a gross understatement.

The New Jersey native ran for 1,334 yards and 14 touchdowns as a redshirt freshman on his way to being crowned SEC Freshman of the Year, and then he followed it up the next year with 1,400 yards and 16 touchdowns.

A physical runner, who seemed to always crave contact despite being undersized, Moreno made First Team All-SEC twice, and was one of the most dominant backs in the country during his brief career.

Frank Sinkwich, UGA running back 1941-1942. Credit: The Red & Black September 25, 1942.

Frank Sinkwich starred at Georgia from 1940 to 1942 and became the teams first ever Heisman winner. The reason that a Heisman winner is so low on this list is because he might as well have been playing a different sport, as football in the 1940s looked nothing like football does today in 2023.

Sinkwich is only 12th in Georgia history in career rushing yards, and a large part of that is because he also threw for 2,331 yards, and had as many career passing touchdowns as rushing touchdowns with 30 apiece. While Sinkwich was an incredibly versatile player, one of the best in Georgia history and one of the few Georgia players to have their number retired, his unique positional status and not being what classifies as a modern running back pushes him down a bit.

Georgia Bulldogs halfback Charley Trippi passes during practice in 1946. Trippi, a runner-up for the Heisman Trophy at Georgia who went on to lead the Cardinals to their most recent NFL championship in 1947, died Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022. He was 100. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

Another blast from the past. Its tough to rank players from the 1940s among the more modern backs because the sport was just so different back then. Charley Trippi is one of the greatest players of that era and went on to become a Pro Football Hall of Famer as well.

Like Sinkwich, he didnt crack the Georgia career top 10 in rushing yards, but was Georgias best player on both offense and defense, and won the 1943 Rose Bowl almost by himself.

After his career was interrupted by his service in World War II, Trippi returned to Georgia and won the Maxwell Award in 1946 in addition to finishing as the Heisman Trophy runner up. Its hard to box Trippi in as just a running back, since he played about five different positions, but he more than deserves his spot here.

Todd Gurley (3) is stopped during an attempted run by Darreon Herring (35) of Vanderbilt in the second half of the game. Gurley had 25 carries for 165 yards and two touchdowns on the day as Georgia won 44-17 over Vanderbilt (Photo/Joshua L. Jones @JjoshGA)

Watching Todd Gurley can be described as watching an alien sent from another planet to play football. He was that talented of a player. Gurley made an immediate impact as a freshman, rushing for 1,385 yards and 17 touchdowns, but never surpassed either of those numbers for the rest of his college career.

His 2013 season was cut short by injury, and he was arguably the most dominant player in the country in 2014 before being suspended for four games for NCAA rules violations and then tearing his ACL in his return against Auburn.

Hes still top five in Georgia history in career rushing yards and touchdowns, but Gurley could never reach his heisman potential.

georgia tailback Sony Michel (1) runs with the ball during the SEC Championship game between the Georgia Bulldogs and Auburn Tigers at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, December 2, 2017. (Photo/Reann Huber, http://www.reannhuber.com)

Sony Michel is one half of the most dominant backfield Georgia football has ever seen. After a relatively quiet freshman season buried on the bench behind Gurley and Nick Chubb, Michel took over in 2015 and ran for 1,136 yards and eight touchdowns after Chubb was lost to a knee injury. From there, he and Chubb combined to be one of the deadliest duos in college football history.

Michel had a great combination of size, speed and quickness, and hes third in program history in rushing yards and fifth in touchdowns. His effort in the 2018 Rose Bowl where he finished with 181 rushing yards, 41 receiving yards and four total touchdowns is one of Georgia footballs greatest single-game performances of all-time.

Garrison Hearst, UGA running back 1990-1992. Credit: The Red & Black, January 28, 1993.

Until Stetson Bennett came along in 2022, Hearst was Georgia footballs most recent Heisman finalist after he rushed for 1,547 yards and a Georgia record 19 touchdowns in 1992. That year he set then-SEC records for points scored in a season with 126, total touchdowns with 21, rushing touchdowns with 19 and yards per carry with nearly seven.

His blistering speed allowed him to outrun essentially everyone on the field, and he was still incredibly twitchy in the open field. Hearst is still fifth in Georgia history in rushing yards, and is one of the most talented runners to ever suit up for the team.

Georgia tailback Nick Chubb (27) runs the ball during the first half of a college football game between Georgia and Georgia Tech at Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017. (Photo/Casey Sykes, http://www.caseysykes.com)

Chubb was elite from the get-go. He ran for 1,547 yards and 14 touchdowns as a true freshman while filling in for the suspended Todd Gurley and never looked back. While on his way to another monster year in 2015, Chubb suffered a severe knee injury against Tennessee that sidelined him for the rest of the season, but miraculously returned to form in 2016 and was a key part of Georgias first ever College Football Playoff run in 2017.

A devastating combination of power, shiftiness, and pure straight-line speed, Chubb is one of the most beloved players in Georgia history. He is second in Georgia history in both career rushing yards and touchdowns, and its hard to envision him falling too far down the record books any time soon.

As a freshman, Herschel Walker led the Georgia team to a win over Notre Dame in the national championship game. Walker rushed for more than 1,600 yards in his first season.

No surprise here. Walker takes the top spot, mostly because hes in the running for the dominant college football players of all time.

Walker is number one in Georgia history in essentially every rushing category one could think of, and hes the most recent Georgia player to win the Heisman trophy after his sensational 1982 season where he ran for 1,752 yards and 16 touchdowns. He put up 1,891 yards and 18 touchdowns in 1981, and had arguably the best freshman season in college football history in 1980 where he ran for 1,616 yards and 15 touchdowns. Walker was so dominant that he, nearly individually, carried Georgia to a national championship as a freshman.

For anyone that watched him in person or grew up after his dominant collegiate run, Walker was seen almost as a folk hero terroizing defenders from his career by running over them like a freight train clad in red and black. To put it bluntly, college football will never see another like Walker.

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Ranking the top 10 running backs in Georgia football history - Red and Black

If history is any guide, the S & P 500 could climb to 4,900 by next summer, Bank of America says. The broader market index entered a cyclical bull market after rising 20% off its October low on June 8, the firm's technical strategist Stephen Suttmeier said Friday. Investors piled into the benchmark after its climb above 4,200 set off what the strategist called a "FOMO (fear of missing out) rally." "The S & P 500 (SPX) has climbed a wall of worry as many key market indicators have flashed bullish backdrop signals throughout 1H 2023," Suttmeier said in a note to clients. "The move on the SPX above 4200 has triggered a FOMO (fear of missing out) rally (see report: FOMO on SPX push above 4200), which has taken the SPX into cyclical bull market territory on a 20% rally off the October 2022 low," he added. Many investors do not consider it the end of a true bear market until the S & P 500 reaches a new high. The all-time closing high for the broader benchmark is 4,796.56. The S & P 500 closed Friday at 4,298.86 and breached the 4,300 level during trading on Monday. However, history suggests these cyclical bull markets could continue for some time. Since 1929, these cycles have lasted 33.6 months on average, and 17.4 months on a median basis. On an average basis, that has meant gains of 114.4%; on a median basis, 76.7%. Meanwhile, one year after the S & P 500 entered a bull market, the index was higher a majority of the time. On an average basis, the index gained 9.4%, and on a median basis, 14.1%. For investors, that could mean the S & P 500 could rally as high as 4,900 by next summer, the strategist said. "The year after the SPX enters a cyclical bull market shows the SPX higher 65% of the time on an average return of 9.4% and a median return of 14.1%, which equates to SPX 4700 and SPX 4900, respectively, into June 2024," he added. However, the strategist expects there could be some resistance ahead. While the outlook for the S & P 500 is positive above the 4,200-4,166 range, the strategist expects a key test for the index somewhere above the 4,300 level. "The SPX is bullish above 4200-4166 with its upside breakout from a February into June cup and handle pattern intact," he wrote. "This pattern does not rule out upside into the 4500s (pattern count at 4580), but the SPX tests a resistance at 4311-4325 (61.8% retracement of the 2022 cyclical bear market and the August 2022 peak)."

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The history of cyclical bull markets suggests the S&P 500 could rise ... - CNBC

By Julia M. Klein

Kay Redfield Jamison's eloquent writing on mental illness has bridged art and medicine, the personal and the professional. An expert on bipolar disorder, Jamison revealed her own struggles with the illness in the 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind. She dissected the relationship between mania and creativity in Touched With Fire and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire. She explored the distinctions between grief and depression in another memoir, Nothing Was the Same, about losing a husband to cancer.

"I have been interested in psychological suffering and different ways that society and individuals deal with itgood, bad, and indifferent," says the professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. "I have a lot of respect for psychotherapy when it's done really well and dismay, like many, when it's done badly."

Her latest work, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind (Knopf, 2023), is not a conventional history of psychotherapy. Instead, Jamison draws on an idiosyncratic catalog of personal obsessions to illuminate the broader topic of psychological healing and healers. The book represents "an archipelago of thoughts, experiences and images," Jamison writes in its pages.

The title is lifted from a poem by World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon, who had a productive and mutually admiring relationship with the anthropologist, psychologist, physician, and British Army captain W.H.R. Rivers. Rivers treated the poet when he was consigned to a mental hospital for the anti-war views he developed in the trenches. Feeling a responsibility to the men in his command, Sassoon later returned to the battlefield, where he was wounded but, unlike fellow poet Wilfred Owen, survived the war.

"Sassoon would say that Rivers gave him a place to be known," Jamison says. "From the first time he met him, Rivers understood him better than anyone had." Their relationship models the "therapeutic alliance" that Jamison and other researchers consider the most important component of successful psychotherapy.

The "free-flowing" (in Jamison's words), nonlinear narrative of Fires in the Dark zigzags between past and present, covering a dizzying array of topics: Neanderthal mourning rituals, Greek medicine, the Arthurian legend, the singer Paul Robeson's tumultuous and multifaceted career, and Jamison's own experience of disease and treatment. "The history of healing, like anything profound, is not particularly linear," Jamison explains.

Assuming "that psychological suffering goes back to the earliest times of our species," Jamison says she was interested in the origins of psychotherapy in religion and magic. She underlines that, in addition to medicine and therapy, healing may require the support of family and friends, books, music, work, and other activities that imbue life with meaning.

Though Fires in the Dark is wide-ranging, it is also, at times, Hopkins-centric. Jamison devotes her first chapter, "The Shadow of a Great Rock," to William Osler, one of the four founding physicians of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Though Osler wasn't a psychiatrist, his gentle, confident, and comforting bedside manner had "a very therapeutic effect on people," she says. "And he came to know grief so profoundly because of the death of his son [Edward Revere Osler] in the First World War." In the aftermath of that death, books and especially the poetry of Walt Whitman provided some solace, Jamison writes.

"Psychotherapy, at its best, helps you expand your life and your mind. It doesn't just bring you back to where you were. ... But in an ideal world, it would make you open to other experiences and other ways of dealing with things."

Jamison says she also "got off on a tangent about nurses" who chronicled their World War I experiences. Among them was Hopkins' Ellen La Motte, who authored what Jamison calls "a very short, very bitter, but beautifully written memoir" about her wartime service in France. "One of the major themes of the book is accompaniment[the idea] that psychotherapy is accompanying someone on a very difficult journey," Jamison says. "These nurses did that in a very prescribed way. From the bedside to the operating room to the body bags, they stayed with people."

Jamison devotes considerable attention to the "astonishing" career of Paul Robeson, the actor, singer, athlete, lawyer, polyglot, and civil rights activist whose life was clouded by segregation and harassment by the Cold Warera House Un-American Activities Committee. Robeson also endured repeated hospitalizations and treatments for what was then known as manic-depressive illness.

"Wherever he saw suffering, he bled," Jamison says. "Because of his political beliefs and unwillingness to bend to a completely tyrannical government, he doesn't get the kind of recognition that he probably should."

While researching the book, Jamison says she was "struck by a lack of exemplars in people's lives," an absence that the heroes of literature could potentially fill.

"One of the things that psychotherapy can do is make people find courage to deal with adversity. Psychotherapy, at its best, helps you expand your life and your mind. It doesn't just bring you back to where you were, although that's greatI mean, nobody's going to complain about that," she says. "But in an ideal world, it would make you open to other experiences and other ways of dealing with things."

Though Fires in the Dark is not a memoir, the book is, in part, autobiographical in its emphasis on the literature, music, and role models that have been most meaningful to Jamison. She hopes that meaning is generalizable to her readers: "It's saying, 'Bring in the things you love in life. Build an island that is of your own devising. Make it full of things that give you sustenance.'"

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A history of healing | Hub - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

One morning in early May, J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell made history as the first nonbinary-identifying actors to be nominated for Tony Awards. The night before the nominations were announced was the first time that either performer had attended the Met Galaor, as Newell calls it, our Tony nominee party. A couple weeks later, the pair met with TIME together in a Midtown caf close to both of their theaters to discuss the nominations, Ghee for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for their role as Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot and Newell for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for their role as Lulu in Shucked.

Neither are newcomers to Broadway. Ghee made their debut as Lola (a drag queen who helps save a failing shoe factory) in Kinky Boots in 2017, and Newell made theirs the same year as Asaka (the Earth goddess) in Once on This Island. (The two go way back, having met at a performance of Kinky Boots.) This year, Some Like It Hot and Shucked were also both nominated for Best New Musical, meaning that Ghee and Newell originated their roles on-stage, and can make them their own.

Those roles feel tailor-made to their performers: In Shucked, Lulu is a small-town whiskey distiller who brings down the house with a standing ovation in the middle of Act I with Independently Owned, a show-stopper about not needing a man.

Newell says they are learning from Lulu about gradually opening up. That in my own independent life, there is something else to have, there is another person to be had, that can meld, mesh well into this independent life that I live.

And in Some Like It Hot, based on the 1959 Billy Wilder film that starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, two musicians, Jerry (Ghee) and Joe (Christian Borle), must flee Chicago after witnessing a mob hit. They go undercover in drag, joining a traveling all-girl band, but Jerry, the bass player, finds himself drawn to his newfound persona as Daphne.

Of course, doing Some Like It Hot and bringing men in dresses back to Broadway, everybody has feelings, Ghee says. So theyre concerned about how its going to be perceived and received. And there were moments where I was like, cant we just be artists and create?

In conversation, Gheein a black, strappy, leather top and pleated miniskirtand Newellwearing a white, puff-sleeved top and a set of feathery lashesvamp and riff and ricochet off of each other, toggling seamlessly between thoughtful and funny. They discussed their characters, who their art serves, and what winning really means.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Alex Newell belts during rehearsal for 'Shucked' at a studio space in midtown Manhattan.

'Shucked'Emilio Madrid

Ghee: You know how to make the church go up in a way of, Im using what I got today. Using the gift. So it is definitely such a formative way of learning yourself as an artist.

Newell: And your instrument in general. You create your own style in church. The fact that gospel and hymns have their own diaspora inside a genre, that we can have a Lecresia Campbell giving us operatic tones into a belt, and we can have pop from Mary Mary. Thats that artistry of finding yourself and your voice.

Ghee: When I started doing drag, I used to say I never imagined myself doing it, which was a complete bold-faced lie. I was young Lola playing in my moms clothes as a kid, and using blankets as trains and making dresses. And so it was me tapping back into the little version of me, and that freest, most imaginative person, and having complete creative control of how I can be effective with my gifts.

Because Im always trying to be intentional with everything that I do, and especially with drag, and so it was my way of: How am I ministering to people? How am I reaching hearts and souls and minds through this artistry? So it really helped me free myself in every way.

Newell: Well, you know, I wasnt in drag ever until I won RuPauls Secret Celebrity Drag Race. No, I guess I never knew what drag was for so long, because I didnt know what I was doing when I was putting on my mamas heels and tromping around the house. Honey, I cried the day my foot went past a seven. I cried.

Newell: Very different. I always say drag is appreciating the womans body, in a way. And appreciating what life started out of. To appreciate our moms and our idols and all of that good stuff, and to really exaggerate the beauty of that form and that art.

Newell: Ill be honest, Im tired. I am exhausted. Mine is particularly strange, because I do the opening number, I have a 40-minute break, and when I come back on stage, its the number. Im just like, Ah! And its such a big thing from zero. I just jump in and feel like Im shot out of a cannon.

Ghee: By that time, Im warm. Im working towards that point in the show. And there are shows where Im like, Where am I pulling this from today? But I get into it and it is that giving into Daphne and that freedom to find the joy every time. And it cracks a part of me open every time.

Ghee: Changes every day. And I love it. I love being able to step in and be like, OK, what am I finding today? For them and for myself. What kind of freedom? What kind of joy? And bringing myself to the day in the moment, and then also leaving space for exploration and uniqueness. Very intentional of, like, Oh, this is very close to home and purpose-driven. But then also, how do I expand within this?

Newell: When Lulus singing the song, it is male-driven, about how this independent woman has done everything without a man. Ive done the same exact thing. I havent had a partner thats attached to me. Its just been me. And half of that creates a callus over the emotion of not needing anyone.

But then knowing that its OK to want it and to have it. It is OK to be independent and still have the things that everybody else does. I mean, there is the one line. Its so small, it happens so fast. And its, There might be someone that I aint met yet.

Newell: Well, you know, I modeled my Lulu off of Delta Burke and Julia Sugarbaker. Im the hybrid of both of them on Designing Women. And its me but heightened in the fact that I am loud. I am very outspoken. But I do have a filter, which is shocking to most. I do think about what Im going to say. Lulu does not. Lulu, if it comes up, it comes out.

Ghee: The creative team really trusted me and gave me the space to go. They really were like, We defer to you.

When I say to Christian [Borle, who plays Joe/Josephine] in Act II, when hes like, What do I call you? Jerry? Daphne? And Im like, Either is fine, as long as you do it with love and respect. When people ask me my pronouns, I say, All things, with respect. I understand that the world is conditioned to respond to what they see. So theyre always going to immediately say he/him. But I dont expect you to know what I am feeling and what I am carrying that day. And what Im presenting doesnt necessarily attach to what I am. And I walk in the fullness of who I am at all times.

J. Harrison Ghee performs as Daphne in 'Some Like It Hot.'

Marc J. Franklin

Newell: You dont see it coming.

Ghee: Truly.

Newell: You dont see that youre gonna laugh about something that you need to fix.

Ghee: One of my favorites is when Kevin [Del Aguila, who plays Daphnes love interest] says in the show, The world responds to what they see. And everyones like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then, Well, the world doesnt have very good eyesight. And youre like, Ah. Oh, right. Thats very true. In so many ways.

Newell: Ours is just blatant. Our Plan B joke is blatant. Maizie [Lulus cousin], she needs to find a plan B. Even though most people are trying to put a stop to Plan B. No ones expecting to laugh for two hours and then hear a joke like that. And literally say, Heres the mirror. If you feel uncomfortable, youre the problem.

Newell: Baby, I dont know. The change itself is an extremely hard one to make. Because if we sit here and we talk about why the categories were separated at the beginning, it was to give other people than cis white men awards. And we did take gender off of some awards in the U.K., and the only thing that won was cis white men. And I said, Ooh, we just went right back to where we started. So I dont know what that looks like. Its a deeper conversation. I think its adding a category, widening the horizon of the category.

Ghee: Weve got to free ourselves to see ourselves. We really got to give ourselves the permission to be like, You know what, we can do whatever we want to do. We do shape society and culture. Lets be ahead of that, and let us make the room and the space for everybody at the table to do all of the things.

Newell: In my spirit, Ive already won. Not a statue, not anything. I created a lane for somebody after me to come and do exceptional. I have created space and created conversation and made the ruckus that needs to create active change. If I win, yay, Ill put the statue in my bathroom. And Ill play with it every time I brush my teeth. And Id love it.

Ghee: But it is exciting to see so many people feeling seen and represented who are like, Wow, thank you. I didnt know that there was any possibility for me in this world. And I know that feeling of moving to New York. I wasnt a theater kid growing up. I grew up singing in church. And so it was like, well, I sing and dance and people respond; theater sounds right. Let me go try this out. And then to find Billy Porters album of At the Corner of Broadway and Soul, I was like, Whoa, there is somebody in this industry I can

Newell: See! And be!

Ghee: Something to look up to. So to now be that for somebody else? Again, the winning is already happening.

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J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell on Making Tony History - TIME