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I’ve always thought of grappa as something old men drink, a rough spirit with lots of burn and little flavor, like a cheap vodka. The Italian spirit, distilled from pomace—the grape skins, pulp, seeds, and stems left over after grapes are pressed for wine making—has historically been a workingman’s drink, cheap and strong. In the last several years, though, better grappa has been making its way to the U.S.; Nonino’s much-praised single-varietal grappas have been available for a while now, Chicago’s Rhine Hall has been making grappa since it opened in 2013, and there are at least a few grappa options at most good liquor stores....

One of the TV ads put out to promote the Safe Roads Amendment is downright terrifying. Both the Tribune and the Sun-Times have urged readers to vote no on the measure, arguing that the campaign is fueled by cronyism, and that politicians shouldn’t need a constitutional amendment to force them into fiscal discipline. In September the Tribune ran an editorial blasting the amendment as “diabolical,” asserting that it would serve as a gravy train for the contractors and unions who make campaign donations to politicians....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, August 15, 2016. Republican state senator Matt Murphy resigns for private sector job State senator Matt Murphy, a close ally of Rauner’s, resigned from the senate Friday for a job in the private sector. The Republican from Palatine had served since 2006 and was considered a rising star in the party. Another high-profile suburban GOP legislator, Ron Sandack, also resigned recently. [Tribune]

Mick Jenkins has become one of the best rappers in the city (if not the country) by making music that comes across as if he’s inviting you into a deep conversation. Because his songs that take on race, consent, systemic injustice, and black history, among other subjects, you can’t passively listen to them—they require the type of attentiveness that makes your listening experience an interaction. His best tunes arrive gilded and shine to a degree that it can take at least a couple dozen listens to begin to approach his headier points....

It’s been nearly five years since Sharon Van Etten released Are We There―which means it’s also been nearly five years without that voice. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter has long possessed the secret power to sound woefully resigned to the poetic drudgery of life while simultaneously prophetic in her realization of that. Though Van Etten is a raw and affecting lyricist, her smoky, folklike singing sometimes does the job all by itself—she threads each line with emotion using her delivery and melodic timbre....

Heather Trost has made herself heard both inside and outside the music scene in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she lives—in recent years her violin has appeared on recordings by Beirut, Josephine Foster, Claire Cronin, and Thor Harris, among others. She remains best known as half of the wonderful A Hawk and a Hacksaw, a Roma-inspired duo with her husband, Jeremy Barnes, but her first solo album, Agistri (LM Duplication), which dropped earlier this year, couldn’t sound much more different than those raucous Eastern European sounds....

Prometheus, impaled forever on a rock for tipping humanity off about fire and freedom, has stood since antiquity for the unstoppable triumph of reason over religious or cultural orthodoxy and raw power. In more recent, radical circles, he has stood for the spirit of iconoclasm itself, as noble as he is fierce. However, in this pious new adaptation from the Greek language by renowned classicist Nicholas Rudall, directed by Terry McCabe, Prometheus is seen not so much as standing for anything as he is standing, basta....

Since 1997, Evanston indie rocker Justin Roberts has built a deep discography of children’s music that treats listeners of all ages with respect. He first got an inkling that he wanted to make originals for kids while teaching at Step by Step Montessori in Minneapolis in the early 90s, and he’s since become an unusual type of star in children’s music: though he didn’t have kids himself, his ability to speak to them through music has earned him three Grammys for his independently released albums....

Red Tape Theatre presents Suzan-Lori Parks’s 1999 Pulitzer-nominated riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In Parks’s version, Hester (Jyreika Guest) lives in a lean-to under a graffitied highway overpass with her five fatherless children, scrounging for scraps to survive while appealing to anyone who will listen to help her find a way out of her situation. Every authority figure in Hester’s life—the doctor, the welfare worker, the preacher, and the father of her firstborn—abuses her in some way....

I biked my way through Lima, Peru, earlier this month, and while the streets are crazy congested, one of the features I enjoyed the most was the capital city’s extensive system of boulevard bike paths—an idea I’d love to see copied in Chicago. Reed said he could imagine Chicago taking a similar approach in the medians of Stony Island Avenue, which would make it easier to pedal to the upcoming Obama Presidential Center from the far south side....

Absolutely Not cannot be stopped. The local trio are becoming one of Chicago’s most prolific acts, releasing great records, touring nonstop, and apparently making anyone who hears or sees them instantly fall in love with their high-strung, synthy punk rock, which sounds like everything is turned up to 11. Today Absolutely Not release a new single and music video, “Programmed,” which the Reader is pleased to exclusively premiere. The video is an eerie Stepford Wives-inspired drama, directed by Dave Rentauskas, that perfectly mirrors the track’s paranoia-inducing, dystopian sketchiness....

On January 12 I headed over to City Hall to see firsthand if the spirit of reform that’s supposedly transformed the Emanuel administration since the release of the Laquan McDonald video had reached the Community Development Commission. Not that there’s anything wrong with developers making a fortune. I’m hoping to make a fortune one of these days myself. It’s just that we have other things we could do with the money, what with the schools being broke and everything....

The Indian American’s role on Connecting . . . was a breakthrough moment that is still few and far between: a South Asian American leading a major primetime TV show. Currently on hiatus, the show takes viewers to a world we have known all too well in the last year, where a group of friends connect via video calls and share the challenges of the pandemic together. One of Cheena’s closest friends, Chicago native Danny Pudi, is well known for playing Abed Nadir on NBC’s Community....

The old fable of the frog and the scorpion ends with the scorpion stinging the frog midstream and when the frog ask why as now both will die, explains, “Because it’s my nature.” Interpretations of the fable (such as this one) tend to go hard on the scorpion. Chicago didn’t know it wanted or needed a museum of narrative art until Lucas came along and offered us one, and half the city didn’t know that even then....

Here’s a postscript to last fall’s troubles at the University of Missouri. It’s also a prelude to this fall’s presidential election. Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Missouri’s Republican lieutenant governor said the students wanted “governance by mob rule.” The Republican senate leader threatened the university with a financial “haircut.” A Republican legislator in Jefferson City accused the university of coddling students and submitted a bill to revoke the scholarships of any player who pulled a stunt like that again....

What do you get when a leather daddy and a librarian walk into a synagogue? Well, apparently, a museum. The now 30-years-old Leather Archives & Museum to be exact. “Chicago is probably the only place that this could exist, because we’re right there on the street front in Andersonville like, ‘Hey, look at us,’” says Gary Wasdin, LA&M’s executive director and resident Daddy. “We’re not ashamed or shy.” The museum’s auditorium is lined with enormous murals of men painted by Etienne....

When Lamar Moore took over the kitchen at the Currency Exchange Café in January, he did not mess with the greens. Moore does have some changes planned for the menu at @cexcafe, as it’s known on Instagram, and on his own carefully composed posts of dishes that will soon be coming forth from the kitchen. There’s a pair of cakey, moist, buttery drop biscuits topped with turkey sausage patties and over-easy eggs dripping with peppered sawmill gravy....

Want to leave Illinois without actually setting foot out of the state? Head west. In a historic building on Main Street downtown, the couple opened the Savanna Marketplace, a gift shop, and the Blue Bedroom Inn, a bed-and-breakfast above the store. They made friends and established themselves in the community, and then even entered local politics—Lain was elected mayor a year ago in a landslide, a gay liberal from a solid blue city in a town that had gone for Trump in the last presidential election....

Local production duo Midas Wells and Chris Kramer, aka Tensei, combine frothy spiritual jazz, warm hip-hop beats, and vocals from a far-flung crew of rappers and singers. In January, Tensei dropped the excellent album Constellate, whose buzzy atmosphere recalls the Soulquarian sound of the late 90s—lead track “Liquid Tongues,” with singing from former Chicagoan A. Billi Free, casts an astral glow. Free, now based in New Mexico, has scheduled an August release for her album I Luma, which features Tensei’s beats and an Angel Bat Dawid guest turn....