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In 2013, Alison Sudol put aside her band A Fine Frenzy to focus on her acting career, which has included roles in the television show Transparent and the film franchise Fantastic Beasts. In the past year, she’s returned to music with new material, and the time off has done her good. Her early singles, such as 2017’s “You Picked Me,” were the sort of breathy, surging, hooky, anonymously pleasant indie pop you’d expect to hear playing during intense moments on teen TV dramas....

Andrea Bauer Slayer at Riot Fest this past summer One year ago, heavy metal royalty Slayer released their first new song into the world since 2009’s World Painted Blood LP, and this weekend we get one more, when they unleash a picture-disk seven-inch for “When the Stillness Comes” for Record Store Day. This will be the first official single off the long-awaited upcoming record, whose production has been bogged down with dramatic personnel shifts that included the departure of founding drummer Dave Lombardo and the passing of guitarist Jeff Hanneman....

Whether you’re decorating your lockdown living space, buying unique clothes only your COVID bubble will see, or trying to replicate that long-gone thrift shopping high of snagging a one-of-a-kind piece before anyone else, Instagram start-ups are a surprisingly simple and engaging way to shop secondhand from home. The accounts are highly curated, and many sell out quickly, meaning there’s an addicting rush that comes from sending a DM and a Venmo payment and suddenly owning whatever just appeared on your feed....

This has been a summer of discontent for Chicago cyclists. On the morning of the crash Kuivinen, 20, had been biking southeast in a green-painted stretch of the Milwaukee Avenue bike lanes in West Town, police said. Near 874 N. Milwaukee, truck driver Antonio Navarro, 37, veered into the bike lane while making a right turn onto southbound Racine Avenue, striking and dragging Kuivinen. Reached by phone the day after the crash, 27th Ward alderman Walter Burnett said a Chicago Department of Transportation official told him the department was investigating the TOD bike lane blockage and would have a report by the end of the day....

We brought Savage Love Live to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, and the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis over three nights. As is always the case at live shows, the crowd had more questions than I could possibly answer in a single night. So in this week’s column, I’m going to tear through some of the ones I wasn’t able to get to. A: I’m fine about relationships with seemingly set end points, as relationships don’t have to be open to or become long-term in order to be a success....

You don’t have to be a Star Wars fanatic to like Joe Zettelmaier’s 2006 heist comedy about a group of twentysomething fanboys (and one fangirl) who plan to steal a fortune in mint-condition Star Wars action figures. But it doesn’t hurt if you know a fanboy or two IRL, the better to appreciate how well Zettlemaier’s script captures the aggressive geekiness of these twenty- and early thirtysomethings who know everything there is to know about the Star Wars universe but can barely navigate this one....

The Reader’s exposé of Profiles Theatre triggered something in Chicago that one theater-world friend calls “incredibly important”—an overdue acknowledgement and fierce repudiation of abuses to which the theater world had remained willfully blind. “These were not children in these shows, these were adults,” Mitchell marveled, “and they all decided to just go along with all this crap? . . . Were all these women and stage managers and directors bedazzled by all the attention and full houses to the point where they simply had to submit to the abuse?...

There’s an elevated floor behind the bar at Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio, the new pasta-forward restaurant from former Spiaggia executive chef Sarah Grueneberg, that looks bigger than the restaurant’s actual kitchen. While it plays host to a remarkable piece of stagecraft, it’s also integral to the food being served there. Grueneberg’s more traditional pastas include a wonderfully snappy pappardelle tossed in a duck ragu surprisingly busy with olives and parsnips. The star of the classic tortellini en brodo, meanwhile, is the brodo itself, in which bob mortadella-stuffed nuggets....

American Blues Theater’s Chicago premiere of ensemble member Rick Cleveland’s 2015 play, about the April 27, 1994, meeting of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton at former president Richard Nixon’s funeral—the first time in history five U.S. presidents had met together at a public event—would make a great field trip for a high school class in American history. The play packs five great character studies into one itty-bitty (90-minute) show and is full of fun facts that might give you an edge on an AP exam: for example, the nugget that Gerald Ford, best known for his 1974 pardoning of Nixon, kept a quotation from a 1915 U....

And just like that, Frankie Cosmos—otherwise known as Greta Kline, and otherwise tied to an obligatory footnote, given that her parents are Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline—released her third studio full-length in four years. Though the brand-new Vessel is the biggest record to date for the 24-year-old lo-fi indie darling, featuring an even fuller band sound than 2016’s Next Thing—as well as a proper knighting from Sub Pop—Kline continues to write the same flickering, aching pop songs that regularly come in under two minutes in length....

When Ussanee “Au” Sanmueangchin moved to Berwyn nine years ago to study English, she missed the taste of sticky rice and black beans in sweet coconut milk. She grew up eating this dessert in Bangkok, but in Chicago khao niao thua dam was nowhere to be found. She asked her mother for help, and found some recipes online, but it just wasn’t the same. De Pinha developed a number of now classic desserts based on Portuguese antecedents, such as khanom mo kaeng, an eggy coconut milk and wheat flour custard topped with crispy fried shallots; and foi thong: golden threads of yolk boiled in syrup, one of nine “auspicious” sweets served on special occasions....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Chicago police used a conference room in the Trump hotel during the Women’s March The Trump International Hotel and Tower in River North provided the Chicago Police Department with a complimentary conference room for officers who patrolled the Women’s March Saturday, according to the Tribune. But there was no special message intended. The room was used for a police roll call because of its “central location,” according to CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, and it’s “fairly standard practice” for companies to donate space for police use during large events....

Broken Prayer were one of Gossip Wolf’s favorite hardcore bands of the past decade. The defunct local dark punks’ blistering tunes, wrapped in the lamentations of vocalist Scott Plant, fairly drip with deliciously febrile contempt! Since 2016 Plant has been fronting Droids Blood, whose lineup also includes BP drummer Nick Donahue. On their new self-titled tape, they vary the tempos more and even add some borderline poppy hooks, but there’s also lots of grimy, slightly industrial synth gunk and bass murk—”Ceaușescu’s Dream” and “Unreality” sound deranged in the best possible way....

From Bitter Lake, a firsthand account of war-torn Afghanistan “Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell us stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense and how that led us in the west to become a destructive and dangerous force in the world....

Q: My best friend’s father is an avid user of social media. He’s retired and spends most of his day posting memes on Facebook and Instagram. Recently, I realized he might not know how Instagram works. I noticed over the past week or so that he has been following, liking, and commenting on a lot of Instagram pictures of young gay men. I don’t think he realizes that anyone who follows him can see that activity....

History has been so indifferent to Swedish hardcore pioneers Crude S.S. (short for “Society System”) that when the trio’s own members get a little foggy on the details, it’s hard to find any evidence to clear things up. The official Facebook page for this fiercely subversive band—who made a kiss-off song about our money-grubbing society called “Destroy Capitalism”—says the group formed in 1980, but earlier this month they began selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Swedish HC since 1979....

Last Thursday, a small group of people gathered in a sun-drenched storefront on Kedzie Avenue in Irving Park. Brought together by the grassroots group Healing to Action, they came to discuss their mounting discontent about Chicago Public Schools’ sexual health education curriculum. Though the event welcomed anyone with kids, grandkids, or other relatives at CPS, and even just interested community members, no men showed up. “The biggest problem we have in our neighborhoods is violence, gender violence specifically,” Margarita Miranda, one of Healing to Action’s leaders said in Spanish, as an English-language interpreter streamed her words into the headsets of attendees....

Say what you will about 2016 as a whole—the cover of our Year in Review issue sums it up—but Chicago hip-hop had a great year. And while December has traditionally been a quiet month for musicians, no one around here seemed to get the memo. Just look at the past week: Chance the Rapper and Jeremih released a joint Christmas mixtape buoyed by collaborations with Chicagoans from a diversity of scenes, including street-rap phenom Lud Foe and Teklife producers DJ Spinn and Gant-Man; King Louie dropped the long-gestating (by his standards, anyway) Tony 2 on the first anniversary of his near-fatal shooting; and Vic Spencer put out his second full-length in two months, The Ghost of Living, produced by Internet sensation Big Ghost....

You probably know about Charlotte Corday. She assassinated the bloodthirsty French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. You certainly know about Marie Antoinette, the Vienna-born French queen famously separated from her head during the Reign of Terror. All you can possibly know about Marianne Angelle is what playwright Lauren Gunderson tells you in The Revolutionists, running now at the Greenhouse in a supple, often amusing Organic Theater Company production. Gunderson invented Angelle to represent Caribbean women who fought French colonial rule even as the French themselves were massacring one another in the name of liberté, egalité, and fraternité....

The Republican Party has a problem—no one doubts that. “Trump isn’t the cause of the problem,” said John Kass in the Sunday Tribune. “He’s merely a symptom.” Some of us might think Kass was selling Donald Trump short. Germany had all sorts of problems after World War I that Hitler wasn’t the cause of. But history doesn’t remember Hitler as a symptom. As Donald Trump hopes to, he came to power as the solution....