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With another presidential election upon us, it’s time for me to write my quadrennial Don’t fool yourself, Chicago column, in which I plead with independents and Tea Party types not to view a vote for the Republican candidate as a vote against the Democratic machine. Good God, my friends, please don’t fall for that argument. You’d only be fooling yourself. Building that tower required making peace with Mayor Daley and virtually every other powerful Democrat in this town....

It’s difficult to describe the vastness of Chicago indie rock and punk without mentioning Great Deceivers, partly because of the four-piece’s pedigree. Guitarist Russell Harrison and bassist-vocalist Ben Rudolph play in unforgivingly ferocious hardcore unit C.H.E.W., while drummer Seth Engel makes delightfully solemn indie rock as Options and has been part of far too many other groups to list here. In Great Deceivers’ 11 years together, they’ve issued music on several small but vital indie labels, including Florida’s New Granada, Virginia’s Flannel Gurl, and Chicago’s Sooper....

Iranian-American Muslim fashion blogger Hoda Katebi gave a contentious live interview broadcast by WGN News on January 31, in which host Robin Baumgarten tells the University of Chicago graduate that she “doesn’t sound American”—not because of her voice but because of her views. The interview went viral on social media after Katebi posted the clip on her political fashion blog, JooJoo Azad, on February 9. Mom, I’ve made it — someone turned me into a meme!...

You’re right, UITM: Mary shouldn’t have hidden this from you. But she assumed—incorrectly, as it turned out—you would have a problem with those texts. It was a reasonable assumption on her part, since swapping flirty texts with a stranger is regarded as “out of bounds” by most. While this makes Mary’s failure to disclose look a little worse, we live in a culture that defines absolutely everything as cheating—don’t get me started on the idiocy that is “micro-infidelities” and the idiots pushing that toxic concept—and as a consequence, people not only lack perspective (oh, to live in a world where everyone regarded harmless flirtation as no big deal!...

When today’s newsletter arrives in your inbox, I’ll be in the middle of a daylong fast for Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. I’m by no means religious in the traditional sense—I’ve spent more Shabbats at rock clubs than in synagogues. But I love Yom Kippur, even if my stomach doesn’t (note: my stomach definitely does not love fasting). As a child, I’d considered this day of atonement a suffocatingly strict holiday....

Q: I’m a straight male in my 30s. I’ve been with my wife for 12 years. I have had several affairs. Not one-night-stand scenarios, but longer-term connections. I didn’t pursue any of these relationships. Instead, women who knew I was in an “exclusive” relationship have approached me. These have included what turned into a one-year affair with a single woman, a three-year affair with a close friend of my wife, a seven-month affair with a married coworker, and now a fairly serious four-months-and-counting relationship with a woman who approached me on Instagram....

Englewood-raised rapper Spenzo had planned to release his follow-up to 2013’s In Spenzo We Trust last spring, but 2014 came to a close with no new mixtape. Delays happen, and the process of tweaking and finessing a mixtape—especially one that resembles a studio album more than the traditional rough-around-the-edges (and, increasingly, old school) idea of a mixtape—doesn’t lend itself to a strict schedule. But during the past few months the MC’s been dropping tracks with enough regularity to suggest that his forthcoming Ahead Of My Time mixtape will come out soon....

I celebrated my 28th birthday at Blackbird six months after it opened. I don’t remember exactly what I ate, but I know pork belly was involved, along with a red that blew open my doors of perception about what grapes are capable of. Blackbird opened my eyes to a lot of things. But I was still a dumb schmuck who knew everything, so I couldn’t just allow myself to be blown away by the experience: I thought it was a bit extra that the menu namechecked the servers’ designer suits, and I thought it was funny to compare the crowded, overlit dining room to the confines of a lab rat....

Gossip Wolf got hooked on local experimental pop trio White Ppl late last year via their debut single, “Ilovemybb.” Rapper-producer Ano Ba and singers Elly Tier and Cado San (none of whom is white) transform bits of rap, indie rock, outre dance, folk, and soul into enchanting songs. On Saturday, April 13, White Ppl play the Whistler’s monthly Brasstax series alongside the DJs who organize it. The free show starts at 10 PM, and the Brasstax crew are accepting donations to raise funds for Hoist Fest—a daylong event at Subterranean on Sunday, May 26, where White Ppl will play with Rich Jones, Jordanna, Jovan Landry, and more....

It’s hard to describe the otherworldly (and interspecies) connection that comes with holding a squawking hen, but in a year of no touching or socializing, it was a defining high point. I discovered Nettelhorst Elementary School’s chicken coop on a neighborhood walk and dove headfirst into the community of “Chicken Tenders” that care for these nine charismatic ladies (names include Popcorn, Princess Fluffy Butt, Regina George, and Rosie). They were born in March 2019, the coop broke ground a month later, and Lake- view hasn’t been the same since....

At any given time I probably have about a half dozen or so Co-op Hot Sauces in my kitchen. Since 2004 Mike Bancroft, founder of the youth arts education center Co-op Image (and Sauce and Bread Kitchen), has pushed an endless and inventive variety of hot ferments to support his cause. Whenever I run across them I can’t stop myself from stashing one in the old shopping basket. Bancroft is a prodigious collaborator too, something I hinted at in the headnote to the Lime Chili Munchy Jax recipe he gave us for this week’s Cannabis Issue....

For a long time I thought the name of this local psychedelic-sludge powerhouse was related to the “bog people”—those scarily well-preserved ancient corpses that turn up from time to time in peat bogs in Europe, often baring signs of violent deaths that have made some archaeologists think they were human sacrifices or executed criminals. Which is pretty damn metal. It turns out that’s not the case at all; their name means” Faces of the God,” using the Polish word for god....

“It is that experience of reading a book which can most politicize and most radicalize people,” says Anthony Arnove, a founding editor and editorial board member of Haymarket Books, Chicago’s foremost progressive publisher. Founded in 2001, Haymarket has grown in tandem with the rising popularity of political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America. Haymarket’s editors have bet on a hunger for leftist classics, Howard Zinn-inspired people’s histories, politically engaged poetry and children’s books, and on new work from marginalized voices, and they’ve had notable success with a number of titles, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough, and Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches among them....

It hasn’t always been blindingly obvious that Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a riff on Plato’s “Symposium.” But the Greek fable it offers about the origin of love is at the heart of this hard-rock musical by John Cameron Mitchell (book) and Stephen Trask (music and lyrics) about “a mere slip of a girly boy from Communist East Germany” who became “the internationally ignored songstress barely standing before you.”...

Chicago’s el system, with its iconic train cars, relatively fast speeds, and occasionally breathtaking views, is the sexier side of the CTA. But the city’s grid of 130 bus routes is really the meat and potatoes of our transit network, with 274.3 million boardings in 2015 compared to the el’s 241.7 million trips. I started my bus excursion around 5:30 PM on a Tuesday at the 87th Street Red Line stop, which was renovated in 2013 as part of the Red Line South reconstruction....

I coined the term “live lit” over lunch with Keith Ecker in 2011. We were at Kopi Café in Andersonville, discussing a fix for the minor problem we shared: that the existing term “storytelling,” emphasizing as it did both “narrative” and “speech,” did not encompass what we were both attempting with the shows we’d founded. My show, Write Club, monthly at the Hideout, and his, Essay Fiesta, monthly at the Book Cellar, both emphasized writing at least as much as delivery, and featured essays, not stories....

On December 3, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. It had hardly been a week since a grand jury in Missouri did the same for Darren Wilson, who’d killed Michael Brown. Garner’s cry for help while trapped by Pantaleo’s illegal chokehold—”I can’t breathe”—became a cry of protest all over the country, and few used it as effectively as Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins....

Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until a date to be determined. Tickets already purchased will be honored at that time, but contact point of purchase for refund information. On their third full-length, 2019’s Black Friday (Polyvinyl), Boston band Palehound offer candid meditations on love—its many forms and stages, and the vulnerability it brings—from the perspective of someone deep in the midst of it....

On Friday, July 8, archival label the Numero Group opens the Numero Factory Outlet, a brick-and-­mortar shop in its Little Village warehouse at 2533 S. Troy. Numero cofounder Rob Sevier says the store will carry the entire Numero catalog, including items otherwise offered only online. “It’s gonna be a pretty relaxed environment,” Sevier says. “If you come in, we’ll be playing test pressings for the next record. It’s part of our workspace....

When I was a child, I listened to childish things. I put a B96 bumper sticker on my mom’s car in grade school, I was glued to Loveline and Q101 all through middle school, and I studied classic-rock radio with naive devotion in high school. So when my car’s tape player broke down six years ago and I was forced to listen to the radio again, I was excited to revisit all my favorite stations....