Among the great pleasures of 19th-century novels are their length, their breadth, the deep dives into characters’ lives and into the social fabric of the time. It’s almost suicidal to try to stage these stories in just over two hours. Yet that’s what British choreographer Cathy Marston did with Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre, in a 2016 evening-length ballet now remounted by the Joffrey at the Auditorium Theatre. It’s an act of love, and of daring—for good and bad, a contemporary feminist take on the story....

In 1876, the Canadian parliament passed the Indian Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that still dictates how the government interacts with the First Nations bands indigenous to the country and legally defines Indian status and band membership. Though heavily amended over the years, the Indian Act initially included policies that disenfranchised Indigenous women who married outside their band, stripping them and their children of Indian status and restricting their access to native communities and traditional land....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, September 12, 2016. Campaign raises $130K for hardworking 90-year-old vendor Fidencio Sanchez, 90, usually makes $50-$60 a day in the city pushing a cart and selling paletas, a type of Mexican popsicle. A campaign on the crowd-funding site GoFundMe has raised more than $130,000 as of early Monday for Sanchez, who briefly retired but recently went back to work after the loss of his daughter....

Bridgeport didn’t take kindly to Maria Marszewski when she took over Kaplan’s Liquors in 1987. The wives of some of her earliest customers at the then 48-year-old tavern and packaged-goods store weren’t pleased to hear reports of the lovely new lady tending bar. Her Christlike approach won over Bridgeport gangbangers—some of them not of drinking age—who would regularly boost whole cases of beer under her nose. “Next time he come, I hugging him....

Japanese sound artist Masami Akita has been revolutionizing noise with his project Merzbow since 1979—he’s put out somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 albums, singles, and live recordings under that name, but who’s counting? Akita has bounced between electronics, tape manipulations, and scrap metal and contact mikes, both in his solo work and his collaborations with artists such as Boris and Mike Patton, and he’s consistently remained at the forefront of the harsh-noise world....

Q: My husband recently passed away. He was a wonderful person and we had 12 great years together. He was also very, very organized. His death was an accident but everything was in order. He even left a note in a sealed envelope for his lawyer to present to me. It was one last love letter, Dan. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, no relationship is, but that’s who he was. Or that’s who I thought he was....

In startling news today, doctors in Missouri are reporting another confirmed pregnancy in a genetically male human—the latest in a small but growing cluster. In other words, as I’ve said here before, if men had to go through nine months of pregnancy, an excruciating and sometimes deadly birth, and then be responsible for another person 24/7 for the foreseeable future, there’d be no question about their right to opt out. And no qualms about it either....

More than 17,000 Chicago renters wound up in eviction court last year according to 2019 court data obtained by the Reader from the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. The number of cases filed remains on par with city eviction filings since 2016, though the data provided by the clerk excludes sealed eviction cases. Pangea Real Estate remains Chicago’s most prolific filer of eviction cases, as the company has been since 2012....

This week’s issue features photographer Pat Nabong’s sweeping photographs of Brooklyn Boulder’s Chicago’s annual Out to Climb event. I’ve been climbing regularly for almost five months now. My friend introduced me to climbing and I was hooked. I had only climbed once before when I was a little kid and I was so terrified, I couldn’t even rappel down.

Open mikes have gone dark amid the pandemic, but creativity has taken to a virtual stage. For local poet Caroline Watson, who runs the monthly poetry open mike Grandma’s House at the Martin, sharing work from the poetry community feels essential to this moment. Watson, who lives in Uptown, has traveled to the west, south, and north sides of the city to spotlight poets such as Billy Tuggle, who lives in Park Manor in Greater Grand Crossing....

Police misconduct has cost Chicago taxpayers more than half a billion dollars since 2004—and that’s just for legal settlements and fees. The toll that cops’ bad behavior exacts on our city isn’t measured only in dollars, although the city has paid out $100 million for misconduct cases in the last two months alone. It’s also a moral drag, a broad, ugly banner communicating to the country and the world that in Chicago, black lives don’t matter....

I’ve been down at my parents’ place combing through piles of things I’ve accumulated since I was a child—yarmulkes, foreign coins, and lots of doodles and scribbles I’m pretty sure I thought were worthy of Marvel back then. I didn’t expect these crayon-smudged pieces of lined paper to inspire as much reflection as they have, and even though I couldn’t quite recall what inspired my barely baked superhero ideas, the process of peering at these old creations offered plenty of opportunities to reminisce....

As its title implies, Rebecca Gilman’s new play, Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976, is set during the American bicentennial—but its roots are very much in the present day, notably the 2011 protests in Madison, Wisconsin, after Governor Scott Walker proposed eliminating collective bargaining for public sector unions in order to alleviate the state’s budget crisis. The play explores the various communities and loyalties in Reynolds, Wisconsin, after the local owners of the town’s cheese plant sell out to a Chicago-based conglomerate....

Chilean-American author Isabel Allende is famous for using magical realism in her fiction, a stylistic attribute that often overshadows how deeply her stories are rooted in her personal experiences. For instance, her debut novel, The House of Spirits, was formed out of a real-life letter to her ailing grandfather. Allende’s first cousin once removed was Salvador Allende, the controversial former president of Chile and the first Marxist to come to office in Latin America through open elections; Isabel eventually fled her home country to escape death threats from the Chilean government....

Under the name Itasca, Kayla Cohen has released some of the most sublime under-the-radar singer-songwriter sounds of the decade. As a teenager, Cohen picked up the guitar to explore the experimental strains of music she liked, and soon her own tunes began to bubble to the surface. In 2012, she moved from New York to Los Angeles and released her first cassette, Grace Riders on the Road, which showcases her breezy, sepia-toned vibrations in sparse, mostly instrumental pieces that occasionally veer into fuzzy psychedelic drones....

Today local label Vinyl for a Cause drops a limited-edition vinyl seven-inch called VFAC 004 in collaboration with Chicago-based online record marketplace Reverb LP. It’s the fourth Vinyl for a Cause release, and like the first three, it brings together two local artists to reimagine each other’s original creations—and half of the net proceeds go to a nonprofit chosen by the artists. On side B, Coval flips Woods’s “LSD” (featuring Chance the Rapper) into “Snow Day,” a song dedicated to Chicago’s winters....

Jane Austen is not a writer whose work you’d automatically consider as material for a full-blown, unironic musical. It’s true that all six of her books center around the marriage plot, and there’s usually a large and colorful supporting cast, including someone who can be counted on to play the pianoforte at a party, and sometimes one of the heroes will even say or write something absolutely swoon-worthy like “You pierce my soul....

This show has been canceled. Fri 4/20, 7 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, $40, $35 in advance, all-ages

The Jacaranda Collective’s inaugural production is a one-woman dramatization of the notes and journal entries of Rachel Corrie, the young American woman killed by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the leveling of a Palestinian home by Israeli forces. Adapted to the stage by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, it’s meant to be a provocative salvo from a brand-new theater company. But fraught, tragic source material doesn’t necessarily equal great drama....

Photographer Tim Nagle weathered sweltering heat and thunderstorms to go behind the scenes with three artists at Pitchfork 2019. Here are the candid moments he caught with Ric Wilson from Saturday, July 20, 2019.