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Chicago is celebrated as a city of many neighborhoods, but really there are only two: the skyboxes and the bleachers. Joe Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, watches life roll by from a skybox. Founder of the discount brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, Ricketts divides his time between a 17,000-square-foot mansion in Omaha and a palatial ranch in Little Jackson Hole, Wyoming, using his $2.1 billion fortune to market bison meat, fund political initiatives against federal spending, and hold forth on his blog about the importance of free markets, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance....

On the night of Friday, August 16, eight young men huddled over Apple laptops and samplers set up on circular tables near the DJ booth at Cafe Mustache. They were there for Open Beats, a sort of open-mike night that gives electronic producers the opportunity to play their music for an audience. The event doesn’t start till 9 PM, but the 15-minute performance slots are first come, first served, and these eight producers all wanted a chance....

It’s a Sunday and the theater is packed, an abnormality for any comedy spot in Chicago. Around 40 people situate themselves in chairs and chat with friends, patiently waiting for the mayhem about to ensue. The space used to be an old clothing store but is now home to the new Lincoln Lodge venue, complete with three theaters, two classrooms, and a bar. The show is Sautéed Stand Up: A Cooking Comedy Competition hosted by Nathan Hall and Tad Walters....

Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman took matters into her own hands and produced the self-titled fourth album by her project the Weather Station (Paradise of Bachelors) herself. A listen to the record proves it was a smart move. There’s a sense of mission and a layer of passion that I didn’t hear on its lovely 2015 predecessor, Loyalty. This time around Lindeman’s voice sounds more cutting, the arrangements are richer and more exciting, and the lyrics hit harder as they trace various strains of romantic disappointment with sharp observational detail....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Chuy Garcia: Chris Kennedy was right about Emanuel’s plan to make Chicago whiter Cook County commissioner and congressional candidate Jesus “Chuy” Garcia agrees with gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy’s assessment that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is spearheading a “strategic gentrification plan” to force people of color out of Chicago. Garcia, who ran against Emanuel and forced him into a runoff race in 2015, said the mayor has had years to make the changes promised during his first run for mayor in 2011....

A young woman arrived late to join two friends at Radio Anago, a new Japanese restaurant in River North. Hugs and kisses were exchanged, then the newcomer delicately bent her knees, and then her waist—and then indelicately planted her butt on the floor. Under the glow from squat $300 brass table lamps, nigiri shine from the spare brushing they’ve been given of nikiri, a cocktail of dashi, sake, mirin, and usually soy that sushi chefs use when they trust you’re not going to dunk their lovely fish and perfectly steamed rice into a puddle of soy sauce muddied by green-tinted horseradish paste....

As if anyone needed another reason to oust Bruce Rauner, consider this: there will never be legalized marijuana in Illinois as long as he’s governor. So the first question is—isn’t it already legal? “We’re in a holding pattern,” says Cassidy. “We’re continuing to work out a draft. But there are a lot of factors at play.” Alas, the legislature is filled with nervous Nellies—they’re afraid to vote for legalization because someone, somewhere, might accuse them of being soft on crime....

This week I’ve been scheming up ways to time travel back to 1990 and revisit some old haunts, à la Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time. If you’re unfamiliar, this is the one where Reeve’s character travels back in time to meet a woman that he sees in a 1912 photo while he’s on retreat at the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island. Reader contributor Dave Kehr called the movie “amateurish” but you be the judge; it’s rentable on several of the streaming services....

The polished promotional video for what’s being promoted as the world’s first Hyperloop route, between Chicago and Cleveland, features a rough-voiced narrator extolling the no-nonsense virtues of the midwest. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) claims that within three to five years it can build a 340-mile corridor of vacuum-sealed tubes on pylons for shooting passengers in pods as fast as 760 mph, reducing the journey to less than 30 minutes. The Hyperloop craze launched in 2013, when tech guru Elon Musk introduced and named the concept....

Sharmili Majmudar is the executive vice president of Policy and Organizational Impact for Women Employed, an organization that pursues equity for women in the workforce by effecting policy change, expanding access to educational opportunities, and advocating for fair and inclusive workplaces so that all women, families, and communities thrive. It happens all the time—and it’s a major reason that, even though we’ve made progress since your mom entered the workforce a generation ago, the gap between what women and men make, across the board, is definitely not closing fast enough....

The story behind Purim has the same basic narrative as many other Jewish holidays: they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat! At Purim, you eat triangular cookies called hamantaschen, meant to represent the hat worn by the villainous Haman. (Just go with this story, OK?) These are stuffed with some sort of filling, traditionally poppy seeds or jam, though I personally prefer chocolate or salted caramel. Traditionally, you also wash them down with vast quantities of alcohol, which helps out a lot while performing the two other great Purim traditions: making a lot of noise to drown out the name of the villainous Haman and wearing a silly costume....

In David Gosz and Leo Fotos’s clinically subtitled new show, Tru: A Musical for Mental Health, an English teacher (Stephen “Blu” Allen) grapples with his codependent relationship to his undiagnosed mental disorder in the most literal, theatrical terms. “Her” (Meredith Kochan), the teacher’s ghostly, emotionally manipulative and physically abusive lover whom only he can hear or see, beckons Truman to lie in bed all day, casts doubt on his impact as an educator, and pushes him toward self-destruction....

Can you guess which “emo night” this flyer is for? On Thursday the front room in Logan Square bar the Burlington debuts a DJ night geared toward emo from the late 90s and early 2000s, and it’s called, well, Chicago Emo Night. It’s not the only genre-specific DJ event focused on the evolving punk subgenre—Tom Mullen, who hosts his own DJ night in New York City, put together a handy map of many of the emo nights in the U....

The latest viral video to take over Adult Swim’s 2 AM slot (home of such disturbing classics as The Salad Mixxxer and Too Many Cooks) is This House Has People in It, an 11-minute horror-comedy short shot on surveillance video cameras. It’s the work of Wham City Comedy, a three-man Baltimore group who create nonsensical multimedia anticomedy with a dark twist. Ben O’Brien, Robby Rackleff, and Alan Resnick specialize in the type of content that is meant to be paired with a marijuana haze and a bag of Cheetos—it’s impossible to look away from a video like Unedited Footage of a Bear at 4 AM after a round of bong hits....

On its fantastic fourth album, Mother (Bella Union), stirring Cretan-Australian duo Xylouris White masterfully expands its reach without surrendering the essential intimacy and bruising power that’s made it more than the sum of its parts. Cretan singer and lyre player George Xylouris and drummer Jim White are expansive players who together produce a bigger sound than one might expect from such a stark lineup. This time out they introduce additional instrumentation in the form of rustic viola and violin bowing from guest Anna Roberts-Gevalt of the superb Kentucky folk duo Anna & Elizabeth....

I’m not sure if Neil Steinberg is more aware of himself than other people are, or simply writes about himself more honestly. At any rate, in Wednesday’s Sun-Times he admits (to his own horror) that he’s coming around a little on Donald Trump: “The really scary part is, at least while reading the story [about Trump buckling down to serious and traditional campaigning in Iowa], I found myself nodding my head, thinking, ‘Yes, yes, Donald Trump, working hard, maybe the man deserves to be president....

“I’m actually very excited,” says Sophia Wong Boccio, founder and executive director of the Asian Pop-Up Cinema. The fifth annual festival runs from September 10-October 10 and features 22 films spanning East Asia. Though the pandemic created challenges for the festival, Wong Boccio overcame those hurdles by creating a unique hybrid film experience—seven films are available to see in-person via a socially distant movie experience at the Davis Drive-In Theater in Lincoln Yards, while the rest are available to rent online and enjoy in the comfort of one’s own home....

On February 22, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed HB3653 (also known as the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity – Today or SAFE-T Act) into law. The massive criminal justice reform bill sprawls across 764 pages and makes changes to some three dozen existing Illinois laws as well as introduces new ones. It’s been decried as an “anti-police” bill by law enforcement groups, and the president of Chicago’s police officer union called it “nightmare legislation” that was intended as an “attack on law enforcement in this state....

Looking forward to the year in beer, I asked brewers at four breweries that opened in 2015 to tell me about the just-released beers they’re most excited to drink in 2016. Ones containing brettanomyces, lactobacillus, and pediococcus—strains of yeast and bacteria that make beer sour and/or funky—appeared on the lists of all the brewers I talked to, evidence the sour-beer trend doesn’t appear to be waning anytime soon. Hopslam Ale (Bell’s) Dubovick puts this imperial IPA brewed with honey in his top five beers of 2015....

The first Chicago Dyke March took place in Lakeview in 1996, and from the very beginning, its intentions were radical. That first march, its organizers said, was conceived as an alternative to the “corporate, white male dominated Chicago Pride Parade.” To this day, it has no corporate sponsorships and doesn’t allow police officers or politicians to participate. Its original intention was also to increase dyke visibility, which in recent years has expanded to include queer, bisexual, and transgender folks....