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I learned a lot about outside society too, even if obliquely. When the police marched a sobbing seventh-grade boy out of school because he had stolen another student’s iPod, the mood in our classroom was one of stunned, somber incredulity. How could it be that these adults did not understand the feeling of a child looking at something they desperately wanted but could not afford? What was the thought process that allowed criminality to encroach on a 12-year-old?...

Reader photographers on the ground in Union Park are capturing portraits of the audience during day two of the Pitchfork Music Festival, and we’ll be updating this post with more photos as Saturday progresses. Keep up to date in real time with our reporters and photographers on Twitter and Instagram. 

Chicago hip-hop collective Private Stock throws the occasional show under the name Late Notice, and the next entry in the series is a doozy. On Sunday, January 21, Private Stock takes over 1st Ward with a concert headlined by rapper and tattoo artist Phor. Best known from VH1 reality series Black Ink Crew: Chicago (he works at Pilsen shop 9 Mag), Phor is an artist in other realms too—last month he dropped a luxurious album called Butterfly....

ARTIST: Tyler HahnSHOWS: Alabama Shakes and Songhoy Blues at Chicago Theatre on Sat 3/14MORE INFO: catharsisprintworks.com

In February 2017 the Reader ran a feature about Jaime Fennelly, who makes exquisitely crafted, meditative music under the name Mind Over Mirrors. The story was tied to a new album, Undying Color (his debut for the increasingly impressive Paradise of Bachelors label), but Fennelly was more excited about a multimedia project that was then more than a year away—and now it’s finally ready for the public. The public appears equally ready for it: the first two live performances of Mind Over Mirrors’ Bellowing Sun, at the Museum of Contemporary Art on April 6 and 7, sold out a month ago....

Kim McKean directs Caryl Churchill’s 2012 assault on the senses disguised as a play. Assembled from dozens of fragmented vignettes breathlessly performed over 80 lightning-fast minutes, Love and Information leaves one feeling a bit whiplashed afterward. But the cumulative weight of what at first seems like cacophony makes itself felt if you just let it wash over you rather than looking for a narrative or an explicit point. Strobe lights, glitchy TV monitors, and multiple references to social media and tabloid scandal enhance the overall portrait of a society that can’t pay attention or sit still, but that desperately wants to connect, to have something to believe in....

For the last few months, I’ve been watching the twists and turns of the ongoing Lathrop Homes saga, waiting for the TIF shoe to drop. This being a TIF, the mayor generally lets us know how he’s spending the money only after he’s already spent it. In 2011, the CHA authorized a development group called Lathrop Community Partners to redevelop the property as a mixed-use facility, with a blend of low-income and market-rate rental housing....

In 2011, with racial segregation off the radar as usual in the mayor’s race, we interviewed the candidates on the subject. See our related story: “The most important issue no one’s talking about in the mayoral race.” Dock Walls was nine when his family moved into the South Chicago neighborhood in 1966, from nearby Park Manor. The second black family on the block, at 81st and Euclid, they weren’t cordially welcomed....

Ashlee Rezin/for Sun-Times Media The kickoff of last year’s Chicago Gay Pride Parade Pride Month whips itself into a frenzy this weekend as Chicago plays host to several celebrations over and above the parade next Sunday at noon, from drag shows to comedy performances to a Sunday-night Britney Spears bash. But it’s not all partying—there are also discussions of Chicago LGTBQ history and Pride-centered storytelling nights. Read on for a detailed roundup....

Courtesy Tom Palazzolo In Marquette Park II filmmakers Tom Palazzolo and Mark Rance caught a shirtless Rahm Emanuel demonstrating against a neo-Nazi march on the southwest side. Like Jake Blues, Rahm Emanuel hates Illinois Nazis. The neo-Nazi rally (and the coinciding counterdemonstration) is recorded in the 1978 documentary short Marquette Park II by Tom Palazzolo and Mark Rance. A fan of Palazzolo’s work, I was rewatching the film recently when I caught, in the throng of the anti-Nazi crowd, a brief glimpse of Rahm’s distinctive face crowned by a youthful tuft of dark hair....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 20, 2017. The long-awaited Apple flagship on the Chicago River opens Friday The highly anticipated Apple Store on the Chicago River is set to open Friday at 5 PM. Customers will enter on Michigan Avenue’s Pioneer Court and walk down two pairs of granite staircases to the store on the riverfront. “When Apple opened on North Michigan Avenue in 2003, it was our first flagship store, and now we are back in Chicago opening the first in a new generation of Apple’s most significant worldwide retail locations,” Angela Ahrendts, Apples vice president of retail....

Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney’s latest glittering offering, follows a girl named Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) on her quest to piece together a fractured Dragon Gem in order to save her people from the literally petrifying Droon. Along the way, she encounters Sisu (Awkwafina), the last living dragon, who accompanies her on her journey. With creatures like a giant pill bug named Tuktuk (Alan Tudyk), a nod to the eponymous auto-rickshaws common in southeast Asia, and effervescent sidekicks—including a con artist baby named Noi (Thalia Tran)—the film is rollicking and vivacious, a feast for the eyes....

AP Photo/Ron Jenkins Demonstrators assemble in McKinney, Texas, to protest the violent police response to a pool party. I came across what the Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker had to say about the incident at the pool party in McKinney, Texas. “Video imagery doesn’t get much worse than a white police officer throwing an African-American girl in a bikini to the ground, kneeling on her back as she cries, and drawing his gun on other teens,” she wrote....

This review contains spoilers. Evelyn is the sister of Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), a free-market enthusiast who comes to the rescue of the family after their battle with the Underminer in the last few minutes of the first movie. In keeping with the first movie’s conservative themes, the police chastise the family for interfering, the media depict them as criminals, and the government condemns their activities. “Politicians don’t understand people who do good just because it’s right,” observes Rick Dicker (Jonathan Banks), one of the only sympathetic government officials....

Summer is coming to a close—and taking its seasonal outdoor film screenings with it. This week marks the last of Comfort Station’s “Silent Films and Loud Music” series and of Northwestern University’s summer cinema offerings. To help you keep track of the remaining alfresco entertainment, here’s a roundup of 28 free films screening this week: Una Boda en Castañer Puerto Rican romantic-comedy in which a soon-to-be bride and groom face cultural and familial obstacles leading up to their impending wedding....

Anyone who regularly takes the el or subway has seen them. But not everyone appreciates the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ presence at transit stations. Kevin Havener, an Edgewater resident who often commutes via the Red Line, contacted me to share a message he sent to the transit authority, to which he says he never got a response. He claimed that the Witnesses’ practice of offering literature inside el stations violated a guideline in the agency’s Rules of Conduct warning against the distribution of written materials on CTA property....

Let’s be real. Trap music, in all its glitzy mainstream flair, wouldn’t exist today without one of Atlanta’s most storied dope boys, Jeezy. Though T.I.’s Trap Musik (2003) made the phrase a household name, Jeezy gave the 808-driven subgenre several crossover assists on his 2005 debut, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, collaborating with Akon on “And Then What” and international hit “Soul Survivor.” Though Jeezy was already a solidified trap star, thanks to DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz stamp of approval on Tha Streets Iz Watchin and Trap or Die mixtapes, his career as a sought-after hitmaker soared even higher from there....

For the better part of two decades, virtuosic multi-instrumentalist Herbert Kinobe has composed exquisite Pan-African music from a Ugandan perspective. Born in 1983 in a small village outside Kampala near Lake Victoria, Kinobe (he performs under his last name) grew up hearing the music at the nearby Kanyange Nnamasole Tombs, a historic Buganda cultural site that regularly holds ceremonies and rituals, and at age nine he joined his school choir, which toured Europe....

Bodies are gross. It’s true of all bodies, but while men are often encouraged to embrace the disgusting, women are often taught to be ashamed of it. The comedy show and podcast Ladylike encourages women and nonbinary folks to celebrate the sickening by sharing their stories about blood, guts, sex, puke, and feces galore. While women and nonbinary audiences have embraced the show, Gephart does wish that more men would attend....

UPDATE Thursday, March 12,4:30 PM: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Kate Hendrickson directs the Chicago premiere of Krista Knight’s Lipstick Lobotomy, an arch but moving 2019 play about mental illness, conformity, and the search for understanding in World War ll-era America. When Ginny (Ann Sonneville) checks into an upper-crust sanitarium hoping to be cured of obsessive thinking and persistent depression, she immediately latches on to Rosemary (Abby Blankenship), an unruly fellow patient and the eldest daughter of kingmaker Joseph Kennedy....