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The year 2021 has already been a whirlwind for Kyra Jones. In the span of just a few months, the 28-year-old Chicagoan has landed her first full-time position as a staff writer for Hulu’s Woke, made plans to move to Los Angeles, and released the proof-of-concept trailer for her upcoming feature film, Go to the Body. Go to the Body is Jones’s directorial debut. The project is a shorter version of what will eventually be Jones’s feature-length film, which she’s currently raising money for....

Welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for Thursday, July 7, 2016. Chance the Rapper discourages fans from visiting WhirlyBall in Bucktown After his friends were refused entry to WhirlyBall due to their attire, this year’s Best Chicago ambassador took to Twitter, saying that the center’s dress code makes it “very inaccessible if you’re black or friends with black people.” The dress code included rules like “all hats must be properly worn, either straight forward or straight back” and “pants must be worn at the waistline with a belt tightened properly,” according to a photo posted by a Twitter user in early December....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, October 3, 2016. The Wall Street Journal reports that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Chicago-based Nuveen Asset Management have made profits exceeding $110 million on purchases of $763 million in Chicago Public Schools bonds, which currently have a below-investment-grade, or junk, credit rating on nearly $7 billion issued. CPS has said it needs the money to replenish its dwindling coffers before the new school year and to build and repair facilities....

It’s pretty hard to impress a cat. They are notoriously apathetic and play by their own rules. Only something as complex as a laser or as simple as a can of tuna will keep their attention, and even that is fleeting. So what happens when a group of stand-ups try to perform comedy to a room full of cats? The monthly comedy show “Just Kitten Around” at Windy Kitty Cat Cafe in Bucktown is technically geared toward humans—guests have 30 minutes to play with the cats before the stand-up begins....

After Cook County Jail emerged as an epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis this month, with one inmate dead and more than 275 infected, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court seeking the immediate release of medically at-risk people. On April 9, a federal judge rejected the request for releasing prisoners but ordered Cook County sheriff Thomas Dart to improve sanitation and carry out new social distancing measures in the overcrowded facility....

Born in London to a Jamaican mother and a Greek father, singer and guitarist Lianne La Havas takes inspiration from both branches of her family tree and beyond, finessing diverse influences into charming, sophisticated, and often heady alt-pop. She made her full-length debut with 2012’s acoustic guitar-driven Is Your Love Big Enough? and then slipped into something more electric on her 2015 follow-up, Green & Gold. Her new self-titled album is the first she’s produced on her own with her band, and its songs of love, loss, and personal growth continue her eclectic pop streak—it’s accessible yet hard to pin down....

A month after she released her third album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski ran out of LPs. In November 2014, the Brooklyn-­based singer-songwriter (full name Mitski Miyawaki) had pressed the record in an edition of 500 via Double Double Whammy, a small label run by friends from SUNY Purchase, where she’d studied composition. Though by December Mitski had aired the album’s songs in venues as prestigious as the Knitting Factory in New York City, neither she nor her label realized what kind of demand she’d created....

As the pandemic disrupted the comic book industry in April 2020, Devil’s Due Comics founder Josh Blaylock could see changes on the horizon. Creators previously resistant to experimenting with technology or crowdfunding sites suddenly needed income as publishers called for “pencils down.” For the modern comic book creator, the number of those routes alone can be overwhelming. One path is creating an independent webcomic. Another is taking three completed issues to a publisher like Image Comics....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, November 17, 2017. Have a great weekend! Emanuel appoints Andrea Zopp to police board Mayor Rahm Emanuel has appointed World Business Chicago CEO and former deputy mayor Andrea Zopp to the Chicago Police Board. Zopp also served as a prosecutor, ran the Chicago Urban League, and ran in the Democratic primary for Senate in 2016. “If anyone doubts Andy’s ability to call balls and strikes, you don’t have to look any further than her record,” Emanuel spokesman Adam Collins said....

The Lobster, the first English-language feature from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, takes place in a dystopian world where single people are hunted with tranquilizer darts and, when captured, must secure a suitable mate within 45 days or be transformed into an animal. As the film opens, a paunchy, nearsighted nebbish named David (Colin Farrell), whose wife of 12 years has recently left him for another man, checks into a rural hotel that specializes in matchmaking....

ARTIST: Josh Davis SHOW: Dinosaur Jr., Steve Gunn, and Thalia Zedek Band at Metro on Sat 10/8 MORE INFO: deadmeatdesign.com

For many years reedist Ken Vandermark was one of the main engines driving Chicago’s improvised-music scene. He played all the time in loads of contexts, and regularly formed new configurations; along with gallerist and Reader contributor John Corbett, he brought to Chicago a seemingly endless stream of national and international musicians who’d never been here before; and he organized many important concert series. For much of the past decade, though, most of his work has been in Europe, and he hasn’t played as much in his hometown....

Time to plan the week. Here’s some of what we recommend: 3/8-3/13: Along with classics from the Alvin Ailey repertoire like Revelations, this performance includes new works from choreographers Paul Taylor, Ronald K. Brown, Rennie Harris, and Alvin Ailey artistic director Robert Battle at the Auditorium Theatre (50 E. Congress). Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page....

Members of Chicago’s LGBTQ community have until Thursday, January 31 to participate in an online needs assessment survey, the results of which will be used to make grant-making decisions for organizations that support some of the city’s most vulnerable populations. While her team will be looking at data from the entire community, she says researchers are curious about what issues are prioritized when they control for race, orientation, and gender identity....

“When I first heard Isn’t Anything by MBV, that was probably 1989,” says Scott Cortez, the Chicago-based musician who’s half of Lovesliescrushing. “And I was like, ‘I know what that is! It’s this one patch on this one specific effect.’ I remember people freaking out—’Is there something wrong with my tape? Is there something wrong with my CD?’ And I was like, ‘No, this is amazing! What’s wrong with you? You don’t like warbling guitars?...

It would seem that August Strindberg’s daring 1888 psychological drama Miss Julie, about an illicit, destructive, doomed love between a male servant and his master’s daughter-in a social world built around knowing one’s place-would transpose perfectly to apartheid-era South Africa. Injecting a particularly brutal expression of state-sanctioned antiblack animus into Strindberg’s cutting tale of class, gender, and psychological trauma would surely bring the venerated but to contemporary tastes melodramatic chestnut screaming to life....

The members of west-side collective Pivot Gang have been calling themselves a boy band since long before Brockhampton was a twinkle in Kevin Abstract’s eye. Because Joseph Chilliams, Frsh Waters, MFn Melo, and Saba all rap, this self-description has caused some confusion, but as Pivot Gang see it, there’s not much to differentiate them from, say, the Backstreet Boys. “The only difference is that a label didn’t put us together,” Chilliams told Chicagoist in 2013....

Local rapper Xavier Holliday, aka XVRHLDY, takes to collaboration with aplomb. On his 2014 track with Hurt Everybody’s Supa Bwe, “Every Story Ever Told,” Holliday feeds off his partner in crime and slides in and out of his verses as if the instrumental was built to accommodate his every word. Holliday has struck gold again with “Polaroids,” a collaboration with 16-year-old Wisconsin rapper Trapo. Using a slightly reworked version of a loose, hip-hop-inflected neosoul instrumental by Chris McClenney and Iamnobodi called “Natural,” the pair emphasize the lax feel of the original track....

Before the Lucas Museum came along, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s most visible legacy project was the reinvention of the city’s riverfront. The construction of six new blocks of the Riverwalk would be his sparkling achievement, the Emanuel version of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Millennium Park. The city has said it intends to pay down the federal loan it used to finance the construction with vendor fees. Last year vendors on the existing stretch of Riverwalk grossed $4....