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S Austen demonstrates the centrality of Cabrini-Green to Chicago’s sense of itself. At first the development was a symbol of the city’s devotion to alleviating poverty and blight, then its drive to keep low-income black residents out of its neighborhoods, then its crime and corruption problem, and finally Cabrini-Green became the justification of the fiscal, political, and physical transformations that brought Chicago from a 20th-century machine town to today’s “world-class” city....

There are two kinds of horror comedies: the scary kind and the silly kind. The scary kind—from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) to An American Werewolf in London (1981) to Drag Me to Hell (2009)—keep the laughs and the chills strictly segregated, building tension and then releasing it in a laugh (and, sometimes, cutting short that laugh with an even bigger scare). The silly kind—from Young Frankenstein (1974) to Shaun of the Dead (2004)—erase the line between the two, turning the monster into an object of burlesque....

John J. Kim/Sun-Times Media The Rickettses: (from left) Joe, Pete, Todd, Laura, Marlene, and Tom in 2009 at Wrigley Field They’re the family that owns the Cubs. “The death penalty in Nebraska remains an appropriate tool in sentencing the most heinous criminals,” says Pete Ricketts. Notorious for its lack of heinous criminals, Nebraska hasn’t executed anyone since 1997.

The year-long war over Illinois’s budget was a nightmare for social service agencies. And, as the Reader reported in July, even the stopgap deal reached at the 11th hour earlier this summer wasn’t enough to reverse the damage done by a year of inaction. One of these groups is Lyte Collective, a Chicago-based nonprofit that works to meet the needs of the city’s queer homeless youth. That’s become increasingly difficult during the ongoing budget crisis....

This is my last column for the year, and in place of writing some variant on “The Future of Chicago Theater: Are Artists Ready to Return to the Stage?,” I thought this might be a good time to acknowledge the many ways the performing arts community in Chicago took care of itself and others in 2020, even as the official neglect and virulent incompetence of the outgoing administration found new lows....

Just southwest of Chicago, on Archer Avenue in Justice, Illinois, across the street from Resurrection Cemetery, is a bar called Chet’s Melody Lounge. Chet’s is a classic roadside tavern, with a pool table, a jukebox, a popcorn machine, and a large clientele of bikers. But Chet’s has an unusual tradition: every Sunday, the staff leaves a Bloody Mary at the end of the bar for a ghost. The ghost’s name is Resurrection Mary, and she has haunted this stretch of Archer since the 1930s, when she picked up young men dancing to the big bands at the Oh Henry Ballroom....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The family moved to Long Island when deLisle was seven, and within a couple years he gave his first public musical performance, singing folky songs (“Tom Dooley,” “The Battle of New Orleans”) in front of his class at school....

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present” is perhaps the most outstanding major exhibition the Art Institute has displayed during the past few years. The subject, Laszló Moholy­-Nagy, a Hungarian artist who was based in Chicago for most of the last decade of his life, was a prominent professor in the Bauhaus school, and made a significant contribution to contemporary art and design. At the same time, he’s someone many spectators are likely unaware of—even those who possess a baseline familiarity with art history....

On October 3, influential American composer Steve Reich turned 80, and celebrations of that milestone seem certain to continue for the next 11 months. Reich is one of the key architects of minimalism, along with Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass, and he’s enjoyed perhaps the most successful and rewarding career, consistently finding new ways to approach the deceptively simple constructs at the root of his music. Tonight the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series at the Harris Theater presents three Reich pieces composed between 1988 and 2007....

Stay-home edicts and orders preventing Illinois residents from public congregation have only been in place for about a month as I write this, but people are already feeling the effects of living like Emily Dickinson (albeit with access to a 24/7 news cycle and grocery delivery). Dickinson is perhaps one of our most famous American homebodies, but even the confines of her father’s house in late-19th-century Massachusetts was inspiration enough for her to come up with worldly and lascivious lines like “Rowing in Eden — / Ah, the sea / Might I moor — Tonight — / In thee!...

Nicole Mitchell may have moved from Chicago to teach at University of California, Irvine, in 2011, but she performs in town so often that she might as well still live here. In June she and operatic vocalist Lisa E. Harris debuted the suite EarthSeed at the MCA, and last month the Hyde Park Jazz Festival and Chicago World Music Festival jointly sponsored a residency and concert by Bamako*Chicago Sound System, her collaboration with Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko, while local imprint Third World Press released Liberation Narratives, a record that sets poet Haki Madhubuti’s recitations to music by Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble....

After ten former Northwestern University students wrote an open letter last week alleging a history of sexual misconduct by professor Alec Klein, 15 Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications faculty members have responded. Here below is the faculty letter in full, reprinted with their permission: Dear Alison Flowers, Meribah Knight, Kalyn Belsha, Olivia Pera, Suyeon Son, Lorraine Ma, Yana Kunichoff, Natalie Krebs, Lauryn Schroeder, and Fariba Pajooh: As faculty members at Medill we’d like to respond to your public letter to our dean concerning the treatment you received in the course of study, or employment, in our School....

Q: I’m a man from a very liberal background. Recently, a girl I started dating—a girl from a similar background—mentioned that she has “a thing for Black guys.” She also met my childhood best friend, a man of Korean descent, and commented to me that she found him handsome despite not typically being attracted to Asian guys. The position I’ve always held is that we’re attracted to individuals, not types, and that it’s wrong to have expectations of people based on race—especially when it comes to sexualizing/fetishizing people....

“People always assume it came from the play,” says Beau O’Reilly via e-mail. Predictably, the contributions include shows titled Hippopotamus (1/22-2/26, Fri 9 PM) and Orangutan (1/21-2/25, Thu 8 PM). Mark Chrisler’s Endangered (1/23-2/27, Sat 7 PM) concerns efforts to lure a gamer-turned-rhino back to the human side using his high school crush as bait. Logan Breitbart’s Jail (1/22-2/26, Fri 9 PM) asks “How does it feel to be the last person like you?...

J. Zunz is the solo project of Lorena Quintanilla, best known from Mexican electronic-infused psych duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete. Her new album, Hibiscus, was born out of a period of personal and political crisis, but while darkness and anxiety permeate its tracks, it also offers hope with a cinematic sense of wonderment that lightens its heaviest moments. Moody opener “Y” pairs crawling keyboard melodies and sinister layers of fuzz, while Quintanilla’s singing builds from a whisper into a resolute declaration about leaving a broken relationship behind....

Love & Mercy is a very entertaining biopic of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, and hardly the screaming train wreck I expected when I heard that the legendary songwriter, producer, and arranger would be played by two different actors—Paul Dano during Wilson’s glory years in the mid-60s, ending in his complete mental and physical breakdown, and John Cusack during Wilson’s traumatic experience as the patient of bullying psychiatrist Eugene Landy in the early 90s, from whom he was rescued (or so the movie asserts) by Melinda Ledbetter, an LA car dealer who has become his second wife....

Practice safe sex. COVID-19 or not, we should all practice safe, consensual sex every time. Be sure to use protection to avoid unwanted pregnancy and to take precautions against STIs. If you need birth control, Planned Parenthood can help—and you don’t even have to come into a health center to get it. Here are some suggestions for staying safe in these uncertain times: Exercise caution with someone new. People can have COVID-19 without knowing it or showing any signs....

Veteran guitar-pop whiz Matthew Sweet rolls into town Friday for a concert at Park West. (Opening the show is a reconstituted version of Material Issue called Material Reissue, and though I still find it incomprehensible that there could be a version of the band without founder Jim Ellison, name change or no, but that’s a discussion for another time.) Sweet is finishing a new album tentatively titled Tomorrow Forever, due early next year, and I imagine he’ll give fans a preview....

If A Walk in the Woods, Lee Blessing’s 1988 play about the private talks between two diplomats—one Soviet, the other American—got cozy with Noël Coward’s country-home comedy Hay Fever, the result would be similar to J.T. Rogers’s 2017 Tony-winning play. Set in 1993, Oslo traces the back-channel negotiations between Yitzhak Rabin’s Israeli government and the PLO instigated by a Norwegian diplomat, Mona Juul (Bri Sudia), and her think-tank-director husband, Terje Rød-Larsen (Scott Parkinson)....