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Every editorial is a nose thrust into the people’s business by somebody nobody elected, so it’s surprising to read an editorial that disparages someone else’s nose on the same basis. Nevertheless, the Sun-Times, in a weekend editorial championing the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, had this to say: “The rumor mill rumbled all Friday that Friends of the Parks, a small group of lakefront protectionists elected by nobody, might be willing to drop their opposition to building the museum on Chicago’s lakefront....

Life’s no bed of roses for murder convicts after they’re exonerated, Chicago journalist Alison Flowers shows in her new book, Exoneree Diaries. Flowers investigated potential wrongful conviction cases for Northwestern University’s Medill Justice Project from 2011 to 2013. She works at the Invisible Institute, the south-side nonprofit led by Jamie Kalven that has been instrumental in monitoring police misconduct. Exoneree Diaries is based largely on a series of Flowers’s reports for WBEZ in 2013 and 2014....

Here is how you explain to a doctor that, despite the fact that you seem OK and are not visibly dying, you do have a rare illness that requires immediate medical attention. You do it calmly, because if you reveal that you’re freaking out, then they’ll know you’re a lunatic. Panicking is intimate; it’s meant for the close friends and family, if any, that you’ve been frenetically recounting your symptoms to as they talk you down....

“Chicago is a bird watcher’s paradise,” said Scott Judd, an experienced birder. Birder and environmental worker Miranda Wecker says the city is better for spotting birds than rural Washington state, where she has lived for many years. The green spaces and lakeside location make approximately 350 species of birds observable in Chicago. Lake Michigan’s elongated shape is ideal for migration, as birds prefer flying over the city instead of directly over the water....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. When the bill was rejected by the City Council in 1986, an angry community immediately set out to revamp and reintroduce the ordinance. A newly formed organization, Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting, spearheaded the campaign. Its leaders included, over a two-year period, Rick Garcia, Art Johnston, Laurie Dittman, Jon-Henri Damski, Jonathan Katz, Irwin Keller, and Kit McPheeters, with crucial behind-the-scenes advice from Mayor Washington’s liaison to the LGBT community, Kit Duffy, and Peggy Baker and Jon Simmons, who succeeded Kit as mayoral liaisons to the community....

In a formerly vacant lot in Albany Park at the intersection of Pulaski Road and Wilson Avenue stand two tipis—one perhaps 20 feet tall, the other half that height—surrounded by dry, yellowed grass rising up from the cold earth. Across the street to the north is a Citgo gas station, and to the west is the large parking lot of the 17th District Chicago Police Department. The Chi-Nations Youth Council, a grassroots organization that champions environmental and social justice while creating safe spaces for Native American youth, and the American Indian Center, the oldest urban Native American cultural center in the nation, have leased the lot together with the intention of growing a garden....

Peter Tsai Baconfest 2015 in its full glory. “You know you’re in the first world when you’re at Baconfest,” said the man at the Kanela Breakfast Club table, just before handing us plates of bacon-infused loukoumades, Greek doughnuts covered in maple syrup sitting in some sort of thick bacon paste. He gave us forks, too, but said we shouldn’t use them. “You need to eat it all at once to get the full bacon experience!...

Completed in 1985, when it was known as the State of Illinois Center, the Thompson Center has reached a dangerous age: too young for city landmark status (which is restricted to buildings at least 50 years old) and, after years of deferred maintenance by the state, too decrepit for the likes of Rauner. Eddy, a movie buff, had loaded up on film courses at NU but had no idea how to make one....

As a member of Calle 13—the politically conscious Puerto Rican hip-hop band formed by her brothers René Pérez Joglar and Eduardo Cabra Martínez—Ileana Mercedes Cabra Joglar began performing onstage when she was a teenager. By her late 20s, she was stepping out on her own under the name iLe. On her debut solo album, 2016’s iLevitable, the singer-songwriter delves into classic Latin American roots genres such as bolero, mambo, boogaloo, and rumba....

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out . . . —Matthew 18:9 Shylock is, of course, the iconic Jewish moneylender. He’s made his fortune letting ducats at interest, and just about every character onstage damns and abuses him for it—including his daughter, Jessica, who, as played here by Phoebe Pryce (yes, Jonathan’s daughter), seems to find her very proximity to him excruciating. Excruciating enough, in fact, that she takes radical steps to distance herself from him....

One of my favorite recordings from 2013 was the second album by the trio of veteran drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath and relative young guns Ethan Iverson and Ben Street (on piano and bass, respectively). Tootie’s Tempo (Sunnyside) turned the spotlight on the percussionist, one of the last great proponents of bop playing; but he’s a musician capable of so much more. The trio’s first recording was a terrific but loose live session from the New York club Smalls; the second release captured the group melding into a working ensemble, essaying a wide variety of standards drawn from the entirety of jazz history, with Heath given the latitude to explicitly impart his personality in every performance....

I don’t want to make overblown claims for Loy Webb’s new play, The Light. It’s got its problems. You could argue, for starters, that it’s not really a play at all but a 90-minute teaching moment on the subjects of race and gender—and, given its extraordinary idealism, an act of wish fulfillment, as well. Webb’s characters are supposed to be average people, a school principal and a firefighter, yet they make choices that seem absurdly noble to a cynic like me....

New York trio Forma promised some changes with Physicalist, their 2016 debut for Kranky Records, but while it’s a retreat from the techno flirtations they served up on their 2014 EP Cool Haptics (The Bunker New York), the first half of the album offers a familiar approach. Sharpening up the basic MO of their 2011 self-titled debut and 2012 album Off/On (both on Spectrum Spools), they place a pop focus on late Kosmische tools and the pioneering synthesizer music of Laurie Spiegel, deploying an array of synthesized sounds—rubbery post-Kraftwerk synth arpeggios over rolling bass tones and driving, uncluttered dance beats—using tactics common in 70s and early 80s electronic music....

Courtesy of Cuneiform Records Mike Osborne A number of factors explain why the remarkable British saxophonist Mike Osborne isn’t better know in the US— various illnesses, including schizophrenia and lung cancer (which eventually killed him in 2007), as well as the fact that he never worked in any meaningful capacity with American players during his peak years in the 60s and 70s. He stepped away from music for good in 1982, but over the preceding half-decade he struggled to maintain a career....

Yet again, Antonin Scalia has given us reason not to trust the court he sits on. When he scolded the Supreme Court in his dissent to its ruling that sanctioned same-sex marriage, I could understand it. His side had lost, and what explanation for that could there be other than that the winners were unfit to judge? And so he wrote, “To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. CPS alters plans to shut down three Englewood high schools over the summer, will phase them out instead Chicago Public Schools is backtracking on its controversial decision to shut down three Englewood high schools at the end of the 2017-’18 school year and now says it won’t close them until the current freshmen graduate. Harper, Hope, and TEAM Englewood high schools will be phased out over the next three years, and a fourth high school, Robeson, will likely close over the summer, according to CPS chief executive officer Janice Jackson....

Throughout history Jews have been on the move, often out of necessity. Ever since the Babylonian exile, the story of the Jewish diaspora has been by definition one of journeys, as Jews were either expelled or forced by circumstance to search for opportunity elsewhere. So it’s fitting that Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership has organized its first Sunday Cinema series around the theme of Jewish journeys. All four titles are distributed by The National Center for Jewish Film, and all have postshow events curated by Spertus....

If you have any time for tense, startling improvisation, Both Will Escape (Family Vineyard) is 2016’s record to beat. Recorded in spring 2015, it captures the thrill of discovery as guitarist Tashi Dorji and drummer Tyler Damon play together in a studio for the first time—and for just the third time in any setting. Their sound is not without precedent: its jagged edges and unpredictable turns recall the drums-and-guitar duo of Han Bennink and Derek Bailey, and Dorji and Damon occasionally achieve a sandblasting intensity on par with that of Rudolph Grey’s Blue Humans....

I go to a lot of concerts—one recent year I counted 139—and aside from the occasional festival, jazz and improvised music almost always happen indoors. For more than a year now, the pandemic has kept me from my regular haunts—Constellation, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio—but it’s also brought me a new kind of show. For a few months this past summer and fall, saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Tyler Damon played regularly, usually on Friday evenings, in Margate Park near Foster and Lake Shore Drive....

In 1987, Ben Hollis and John Davies pitched Chicago PBS station WTTW on a program that would capture the city’s obscure corners, unusual characters, and fringe phenomena. To show the station what they had in mind, they’d shot a “guerilla demo” at a spot Hollis already knew: the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Belmont and Clark in Lakeview. He’d often driven past it late at night and seen groups of young people hanging out in the parking lot, and he figured it’d be worth investigating....