Of all the panic being peddled by centrist Democrats to scare voters out of voting for Bernie Sanders, the scariest fantasy is one I call Horror House. Hey, Elizabeth Warren supporters—don’t get smug. They’d be using Horror House against you if she were higher in the polls. If she wins a few primaries, trust me, they will. McGovern’s nomination followed a heated primary season that led to a contentious convention in which the faction loyal to Mayor Richard J....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, September 7, 2016. How a meeting with Mother Teresa changed a Chicago gang leader’s life In 1985 former west-side gang leader Demetrius Ford met Mother Teresa in Chicago, an encounter that changed his life. Ford had been working odd jobs around Saint Malachy’s Church while he tried to get away from gang violence. Mother Teresa, who was made a saint by the Catholic Church over the weekend, prayed for Ford and held his hands in hers....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 7, 2016. Man stabbed at CTA Belmont Red Line stop for “no apparent reason” A 26-year-old man was stabbed as he exited a train at the Belmont Red Line stop in Lakeview around 3:30 AM Sunday. There is a suspect, but police have not released his description. [ABC7 Chicago] Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is hosting a free rally at UIC Pavilion Friday night, and so far more than 40,000 people have signed a MoveOn....
Chloe Riley Tim Meegan, 33rd Ward candidate, working at his campaign office in Albany Park If it were up to social studies teacher Tim Meegan, tax increment financing money would be a thing of the past. “Right now, TIF money is the new form of patronage,” Meegan says, pointing to the $5 million in TIF dollars that subsidized construction of the new Hyatt hotel in Hyde Park or Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to allocate $55 million in TIF funds for the DePaul University basketball arena near McCormick Place....
ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOW: Metz, Bully, and Slow Mass at Metro on Sat 1/16 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com
When John Raymond assembled his lithe trio, Real Feels, he wanted to play tunes so familiar to both his bandmates and his listeners that everybody, onstage and off, could set aside the task of grasping their melodies and structures and just zero in on the interplay and improvisation. A Minnesota native based in New York, Raymond chose tunes for the band (with Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman and drummer Colin Stranahan) that evoked nostalgia and warmth for him—hence the name “Real Feels....
Metal has a reputation as an escapist genre. That could be because some bands indulge in the theatrics and fun of dragons, witchcraft, and swordplay, or because others traffic in gruesome or apocalyptic themes that feel too outsize and horrific to accept as real—even when they’re a staunch reaction to a specific place and time. All of that is to say that in 2020, some of the most compelling metal albums are hitting too close to home for even the most reality-averse fans to ignore—including Abscess Time, the new fourth album from New York avant-garde metal band Pyrrhon....
Q: I’m a straight man in a live-in relationship with a beautiful woman. There are no sparks in bed, and it’s been more than a year since we’ve had sex. She says, “I’m sorry, but I’m just not interested.” Sometimes she asks me if I’m disappointed, and I say something like “I miss sex.” And she says: “Maybe someday. But the important thing is we love each other, right?” Before my last birthday, she asked me what I wanted as a gift....
Part one of a two-part series. Read part two here. As the northwest side continues to gentrify, evictions in this part of town have become increasingly common, organizers say. And among those most vulnerable to eviction are immigrant renters who don’t have written leases. Then, in early October, “my landlord gave me [verbal] notice that if I didn’t leave in 24 hours they were going to throw out me and my belongings,” Hernandez says....
The country-music world has been slow to embrace its queer community, so it’s been refreshing to see a new generation of queer country artists and songwriters—among them Brandi Carlile, Ty Herndon, and Shane McAnally, who frequently writes for Kacey Musgraves—live out and open lives in the spotlight over the past decade or so without their identities damaging their careers. The songs of New York singer-songwriter James Wilson, who performs as Paisley Fields, have some of the spirit of this new wave of contemporary country rock and pop, but their sound owes more to what legendary out-and-proud Seattle group Lavender Country did in the 1970s than to anything that’s going on now in Nashville....
It wasn’t just the elotes or the enticing smell of fried peppers and onions that got me. It was the diverse crowd of fans wholly intent on the ballgame. It was the summer of 2000 and I’d just moved to Chicago. I was at my first game on the south side, there to see the great pitcher Pedro Martinez (then with the Red Sox), but also to see the scrappy White Sox team that would make it to the playoffs that year, albeit briefly....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
What would you do if you and your partner could share every thought and every feeling you had with one another? What if this process required you two to be microchipped with a tracking device? In HBO Max’s Made for Love, based on Alissa Nutting’s 2017 novel, there is no question that this is bonkers to Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti). But for her tech mogul husband Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), things are not quite as clear....
For many people Labor Day has become a marker for the end of summer, but let’s take a moment to remember its original purpose: to celebrate the hard work that people perform year-round. The movies have long been treated as an escape from the working world, which makes the subject of work something of a taboo in entertainment. Yet many films and television programs have still tackled the subject, often for humor—indeed, the workplace comedy constitutes its own subgenre....
On her latest self-released EP, April’s Blood Sisters, Chicago synth-pop artist Justina Kairyte, aka Fee Lion, threads together the sinister and the seductive with razor wire. In the spring, she told Paper magazine that writing the chorus for the slow-burning “My Man” crystallized for her what became the EP’s theme: “a mysterious murderess slaughtering her lover in order to step back into her own light.” Kairyte understands the magnetic rhythmic pull that makes industrial music and the harder strains of dance so powerful, and Blood Sisters demonstrates it throughout....
At a Christmas party several years ago, Steve Crews sat down beside me and asked me what I thought about Tajikistan. I had no thoughts (I bet you don’t either). It’s one of the Soviet Socialist Republics that got away from Moscow, Crews explained, and it’s one of the poorest, most backward, and repressive places on earth. Crews had been a Tribune reporter before joining the dark side—PR—and he was the poet laureate of these annual Christmas parties, where reporters abounded....
Every political movement needs a folk hero, a larger-than-life figure who accomplishes amazing deeds and inspires lesser mortals to speak up. Earlier Americans have had Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, and Thelma and Louise. Modern feminists, particularly millennials who spend most of their lives on the Internet, have Lindy West, who, for the past decade, armed with sharp wit, thick skin, and a penchant for WRITING IN ALL CAPS, has told truths and slain trolls for the Stranger, Jezebel, This American Life, and now the Guardian and GQ....
Jason Little A couple of months back I interviewed Paul McGee, now of Lost Lake, for the Reader‘s bar issue—he was one of six prominent mixologists we asked to name a favorite drink. We disposed of the assignment at hand in a couple of minutes, so I took the opportunity to ask him a question that’s long been on my mind. The cocktail revival was like a lot of food movements have been—all about improving quality by getting rid of crappy shortcuts that had invaded the P&L sheets of bars all over America....
The climax of last summer’s hit movie Crazy Rich Asians featured a tense exchange between two characters over a round of the Chinese tile game of mahjong. Mahjong games here in Chicago, though—at least those organized by Debbie Turner—are more congenial and less intense. Turner did find other women to teach her, though, and she had her moment when everything fell into sync. She realized that if the game had been explained in another way, she might have grasped it better, and it gave her the inspiration to teach....
