Illinois news

• From Abe to Pigasus

  21-08-2024 19:25 via chicagoreader.com
  
  For those of us lucky enough to live here, Chicago is always the dense and vibrant hub of the world. But this week, our drop-dead gorgeous, beating-heart-of-the-nation city, with all its challenges and glories, really is the cynosure of the globe, focal point of the human universe.   It’s a heady moment. Also a traffic-tangling headache. […]
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• Blake Chastain on #exvangelicals

  13-09-2024 14:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  In 2016, Chicagoan Blake Chastain started the hashtag #exvangelical, a pithy descriptor that quickly took off as an umbrella term for anyone who has left evangelical Christianity. Faith changes are not a new phenomenon, but over the past decade, exvangelicals have found new ways to form community through social media. Their journeys take divergent paths, […]
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• ‘No new revenue without reform’

  12-09-2024 22:16 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Chicago’s transit agencies are nearing the edge of a fiscal cliff. Ridership plummeted at the start of the pandemic, and it’s struggled to return in the years since. Where exactly those missing riders have gone—and why—is up for debate, but that lost revenue has put transit agencies, which rely on ridership fares to fund roughly […]
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• Review: Speak No Evil

  12-09-2024 18:54 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Speak No Evil in wide release in theaters
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• An oral history of Ragamala

  12-09-2024 18:07 via chicagoreader.com
  
  In fall 2013, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events kicked off its annual World Music Festival with an ambitious new program: an overnight celebration of Indian classical music called Ragamala. According to Ragamala cofounder and DCASE performing arts programmer Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero, the event drew enthusiastic crowds from the jump. In the years […]
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• Sunken treasure

  12-09-2024 17:53 via chicagoreader.com
  
  You think the Titanic had a disastrous maiden voyage? Consider the Vasa, a Swedish warship constructed by King Gustavus Adolphus (sometimes called “the father of modern warfare”) between 1626 and 1628, that sank its first time out, after only clearing about 1,400 yards from shore. Now housed in her own museum in Stockholm’s Royal National […]
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• Last supper

  12-09-2024 17:25 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The tense family dinner has long been a trope for American realism. Just off the top of my head, plays that have such a device as a central dramatic event include Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose (heading to Broadway in winter 2025 after its Steppenwolf run earlier this year); Stephen Karam’s The […]
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• Free your mind (and your buds will follow) when Morgan Street Snacks comes to Monday Night Foodball

  12-09-2024 14:28 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Ryan Cofrancesco was finishing a six-month bid for possession at the Vienna Correctional Facility when he started making pizza. He’d never been in trouble before, but the longtime restaurant worker had a drug problem and got busted with two dime bags of heroin. After two “terrible” months at Stateville, he was sent to a 120-bed […]
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• Against domestication

  12-09-2024 14:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  D Rosen’s primary artistic mediums are their own time and labor, expended in service of “cultivating interspecies friendships.” Rosen’s “day jobs” as an animal caretaker (farmworker, pet sitter, etc.) allow them to both observe and bond with nonhuman animals, who then act as source material, collaborators, and activators of the artist’s practice. This significant investment […]
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• Review: The Becomers

  11-09-2024 23:10 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The Becomers opening Fri 9/13 at the Music Box Theatre and in wide release on VOD on Tue 9/24
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• Review: Mickey Hardaway

  11-09-2024 23:10 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Mickey Hardaway streaming free on Pluto TV and Tubi
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• Review: I’ll Be Right There

  11-09-2024 23:10 via chicagoreader.com
  
  I’ll Be Right There in limited release in theaters
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• Köfte and potato tostini at Tostini

  11-09-2024 21:25 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at [email protected]. Sometimes, a restaurant is secretly beloved: you never hear about it, but once you mention it, it turns out everyone has loved it […]
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• The Chicago Urban Ag Crawl promotes south-side food solidarity

  11-09-2024 21:09 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The urban agriculture ecosystem in Chicago has grown fivefold in the last 23 years, according to Grow Greater Englewood lead steward Anton Seals Jr. In the past, Englewood has seen the closure of several grocery stores—notably Whole Foods in 2022. However, a growing national spotlight on food insecurity and access to city land has led […]
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• The window and the incident

  11-09-2024 19:49 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. Just as football fans are excited for their season to have started, so, too, are local moviegoers overjoyed with the abundance of screenings in this and coming weeks. Case in point: […]
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• George E. Lewis embodies a unique strain of musical Afrofuturism

  11-09-2024 19:25 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Every year the Chicago Jazz Festival presents a memorial to recently departed musicians, projected on a screen behind the stage, and this year the list of the fallen was particularly heartbreaking: it included Carla Bley, Calvin Keys, Richard Davis, Eleanor Collins, and David Sanborn. This got me thinking about celebrating jazz’s living heroes—and these heroes […]
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• From ’74 to ’24

  11-09-2024 19:25 via chicagoreader.com
  
  If you’re reading this the week before September 17, then exactly 50 years ago, Films by Women/Chicago ’74 (which started on September 3 that year) was underway at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute. Sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, the festival came to fruition when film critic Gene Siskel, who’d attended […]
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• Chicago Reader Volume 53, Number 32

  11-09-2024 18:35 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 32. September 12, 2024
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• Broad shoulders and pointed words

  11-09-2024 18:12 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Here’s the thing about icons: they’re not known for their flexibility. Take Pablo Picasso’s towering, untitled 1967 Core-Ten steel sculpture outside Daley Plaza. It’s been featured on so many postcards, B-roll clips, and travelogues that it’s easy to overlook just how many residents rolled their eyes at the thing when it was first unveiled.  Royko: […]
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• This Is Our Youth is a twentysomething roller-coaster ride

  11-09-2024 17:55 via chicagoreader.com
  
  As my first experience with this Kenneth Lonergan 1996 contemporary classic, seeing it in a small black box, directed by and starring twentysomethings, was a visceral thrill. Under Andrew Shipman’s direction, Gwydion Theatre Company’s intimate production elicits the roller-coaster ride of feelings of that certain age, which have not changed since the Reagan-era ʼ80s setting. […]
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• Within a Shadow illuminates big questions

  11-09-2024 17:40 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Within a Shadow, now in its world premiere from Lex the Movie in association with Red Theater, is an ambitious two-act dramedy that digs into the complexities of estrangement, cultural identity, and the ever-elusive quest for self-love. Written, produced, directed by, and starring LaRose Washington as Alexis (“Lex”)—a Black woman grappling with loneliness in her […]
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• Sentimental Journey

  11-09-2024 17:13 via chicagoreader.com
  
  By Casey Cereceda
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• Capraesque capers

  11-09-2024 17:11 via chicagoreader.com
  
  What a difference nine years makes. When Paul Slade Smith’s witty, political farce, then called A Real Lulu, premiered in the summer of 2015 at the Peninsula Players in Door Country, Wisconsin, the very idea of someone being elected to a higher office because they have zero experience at that kind of job seemed preposterous—the […]
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• A mother-daughter painting show

  11-09-2024 17:06 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Rare is the opportunity to view a mother-daughter companion show. Thérèse Mulgrew’s large-scale, still-life portraiture sets the scene of an endless dinner party where the playful and symbolically rich paintings of her mother, Wendy S. Rolfe, seem to adorn the corridors of attendees’ psyches. Mulgrew was a young attendee of her mother’s dinner parties—their roles in […]
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• Beneath the Willow Tree explores generational trauma

  11-09-2024 16:54 via chicagoreader.com
  
  In the program for Pulse Theatre Chicago’s world premiere production of Beneath the Willow Tree, playwright Isis Elizabeth tells us a little about the origins of her play. Begun during the pandemic, she writes, when she was “battling with unhealed wounds, traumas and locked down in a house,” she conceived of the idea of writing […]
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• Royal dialogues

  11-09-2024 16:32 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Janet Ulrich Brooks is my kind of theatrical royalty: a no-nonsense performer who can play everything from firebrand playwright Lillian Hellman to diva Maria Callas with riveting conviction. In 2017, she stepped into the sensible shoes of Queen Elizabeth II for TimeLine Theatre’s production of Peter Morgan’s The Audience. I missed that outing, but Brooks […]
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• We-Vibe Couples Vibrators inspire connection, conversation, and pleasure

  11-09-2024 16:10 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Pleasure products can help deepen intimacy with your partner while increasing physical and emotional satisfaction. When it comes to sexuality, intimacy can play a crucial role in enhancing physical and emotional satisfaction. So why not embark on a journey to deepen those feelings of closeness, support, and trust? Whether you’re exploring with a new or […]
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• Thin blue lies

  11-09-2024 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  On an early summer evening in August 2020, Jonathan Ridgner, a Black cop in his second year on the force, and his white partner, Nicholas Abramson, were driving through Humboldt Park in their squad car when they spotted 26-year-old Leroy Kennedy IV, who is Black, sitting against the wall near a corner store with some […]
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• The CPD’s ‘you lie, you die’ rule, explained

  11-09-2024 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  What is Rule 14? Rule 14 is one of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) 55 Rules of Conduct that all employees are required to follow. In 2019, before she was elected mayor, Lori Lightfoot called Rule 14 the “you lie, you die” rule. It expressly prohibits department staff—both sworn police officers and civilians—from “making a […]
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• Idiosyncratic postpunks Beastii celebrate their first record as a full band

  11-09-2024 00:41 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Chicago punk singer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Dot (aka author and Reader contributor Jen B. Larson) launched Beastii as a solo project nearly a decade ago. The first Beastii release, the 2016 EP Love Harder, augmented Dot’s guitar with the humming and thumping of synths and programmed beats. Beastii have since become a full band, with […]
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