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“I currently love the color purple! Eyeshadow, nails, clothing, anything,” says Alina Anna, 17, a restaurant hostess and aspiring photographer. “It’s also the color of my birthstone, amethyst, which is very important to me.” Ever since Anna moved here from Ukraine a decade ago, she’s been thrifting and going to garage sales. “Everything I’m wearing besides the jewelry was thrifted, actually,” she says. “I adore silk. My mini briefcase and beret are always my staple pieces for most of my looks....

The southeast side of Chicago was once a bustling and flourishing neighborhood. With boutiques, bars, and blue-collar jobs, the community was thriving. Situated between waterways, Lake Michigan, and just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Indiana border, the neighborhood once employed 40,000 workers. However, by the time filmmaker Steven J. Walsh grew up in the neighborhood, it was a totally different landscape. “Everyone I knew was struggling and now I’m seeing why....

You never know who might show up at Hot Stove Cool Music Chicago, an annual benefit concert that brings the city’s baseball and music communities together to support nonprofits helping urban youth and families. In past years, Eddie Vedder has crowd-surfed, Jimmy Chamberlin has hit the skins, and Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson have played a Cheap Trick number. That element of surprise is just part of the magic of the event, which was cofounded by Baseball Hall of Fame journalist Peter Gammons in Boston in 2000....

Argan oil—which comes from the kernels of the Moroccan argan tree—is the most expensive edible oil in the world, but it’s more widely recognized as a hair and skin care product. Chef Jimmy Papadopoulos of Bellemore, challenged by C.J. Jacobson (Ema) to create a dish with the oil, says, “I didn’t even know it was edible.” To balance the richness of the cod and pumpkin-seed paste, Papadopoulos made a salad of “sharp, acidic, underripened green things,” including green almonds (immature almonds that he compares in texture to “a juicy grape”), green rhubarb, and green strawberries soaked in sweet muscat vinegar with a little salt....

Much of the world’s introduction to City Girls was through last summer’s inescapable smash hit from Drake, “In My Feelings.” The Miami-based hip-hop duo of Yung Miami and JT rapped the undeniable bridge on the bounce-flavored track, which put them on stereos and streams of people worldwide and seemed to set them up for surefire success. That is, until JT was busted for credit-card fraud just when the single hit airwaves, and the serious prison sentence she received for the incident stalled the group’s inevitable explosion....

Michelle Fields has tweeted her thanks to women in media who have her back. They signed a letter asking the Trump campaign to fire campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, accused by Fields of jostling her with a disputed degree of severity when she approached Trump after a news conference in Florida March 8 to ask a question. Actual journalism has a hard time these days finding a foothold in the media. The list of signatories to the letter asking for the head of Corey Lewandowski runs heavily to conservative partisans who didn’t like Trump in the first place....

Tim Samuelson initially discovered the apartment complex—a modernist skyscraper in Hyde Park with sweeping views of Lake Michigan—the way he learns about most things: by reading about it. Samuelson’s job for the city involves researching, consulting, and curating, but also imbuing awe: for Chicago’s buildings, forgotten stories, cultural history. He moved into a well-preserved 15th-floor condo and furnished it. Very carefully. “I wanted everything just so. This was going to be a kind of showplace for Miesian simplicity and modernism,” he says, confessing a tendency to line up the furniture with the cracks in the floor....

“I like to think they’re deliberately not good: in the way that my dad’s writing is rubbish, my accents are rubbish,” Morton says. “If I was like Meryl Streep, it just wouldn’t be the same.”

Frothy and insubstantial, Michael Frayne’s Noises Off is a cute and silly romp through the run of a terribly doomed fictional performance. Hard-nosed director Lloyd Dallas (portrayed with dry wit by Mike Tepeli) leads this play within a play and tries his best to whip his daft and melodramatic cast into shape—all to no avail. Lines are forgotten, love triangles grow complicated, sardines get tossed, and the wheels rapidly fall off this rickety contraption....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, August 19, 2016. Have a great weekend! Lake Michigan drownings on the rise during hot summer There’s been an increase in drownings in Chicago and in other areas of Lake Michigan during the summer, according to the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project. So far this year there have been 29 drownings in the lake, 13 of them in Chicago, which is an increase over 2015 but far fewer than in 2012, when there were 50 drownings....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 9, 2016. Mike Madigan slapped with lawsuit claiming dirty election tricks Jason Gonzales lost his challenge to the powerful Illinois house speaker in the Democratic primary in March. Now he’s claiming that Madigan and the political machine were involved in “fraudulent election shenanigans” against him, according to the Sun-Times. Gonzales alleges in the federal lawsuit that Madigan and his cohorts registered two fake candidates to split the Hispanic vote in the 22nd District, claimed that the Harvard grad was a “convicted felon” in ads, and placed Madigan supporters at polling places....

Wikimedia Commons William Pfaff in 1984 I mourn the death of essayist William Pfaff at the age of 86. Pfaff seemed to me deeper and wiser than other international correspondents; he certainly wrote better. He didn’t conspicuously globe-trot—from Paris he cast his eye on America in the world, and his tone was often annoyed and rueful. We were not, in his eyes, humanity’s savior or crown jewel (for all our lovable mistakes); our silliness often marginalized us....

When the Upright Citizens Brigade announced that it was closing its training center and theater in Manhattan last week, it illustrated the challenges of keeping improv and sketch alive during a pandemic shutdown. But for several institutions and individual instructors, Zooming over to the online world has opened up some new possibilities and also allowed them to keep an income stream coming in as their stages remain dark. Yet only a couple weeks into the process of teaching online, Carrane says he can already see the benefits....

One of the albums I’ve listened to the most so far this year is Much Less Normal, from Vancouver electronic musician LNRDCROY, aka Leonard Campbell. Originally released on Bandcamp and cassette in 2014, the album recently saw a vinyl reissue on Firecracker. I’m not sure if I’d technically count it as a 2015 release, since I heard and saw nothing about it last year, but it likely would have landed on my year-end top ten list for 2014 had I known about it....

courtesy of Nonesuch Records Abelardo Barroso The story sounds partly apocryphal, but who am I to second-guess? Cuban singer Abelardo Barroso—who as a singer in the legendary and deeply influential Septeto Nacional was one of the most important voices behind the island’s son explosion in the 1920s—had fallen on hard times by the mid-’50s. He hadn’t cut a record in 15 years, and it had been even longer since he had a been a creative force....

Thinkstock Privacy shmivacy My sister just flew into Chicago on an evening flight that after one delay and another landed at two in the morning. There were no apologies from the crew as the passengers shuffled off the plane, just as there had been no complimentary food or beverages from the crew either during the flight or during the hour the plane sat fully loaded at its gate in Los Angeles....