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I’m writing to encourage reporters who hesitate to toot their own horns to make an exception. This is the time of year when I promote the Anne Keegan Award, giving annually for journalism “reflecting the dignity and spirit of the common man.” Len Aronson, husband of the late Tribune columnist, and some friends (myself included) launched the award after Keegan died in 2011. It’s been given four times since, most recently to Maureen O’Donnell, the elegant obit writer of the Sun-Times....

Since opening five years ago, Finch’s Beer Co. has struggled to find its place in Chicago. Its original lineup failed to impress the local beer-drinking community, the majority of its distribution was outside of Illinois, and plans to build a facility on the river (and then out in the suburbs) fell through. But following a February sale of the brewery—from the Finch family to several of the original investors—the company acquired Hopothesis Brewing and Breakroom Brewery....

Rapper-producer Frank Leone grew up in the town of Monticello, just southwest of Champaign, and began taking music seriously after a chance meeting with Vic Mensa at a downstate Lupe Fiasco show in 2011. Since dropping his debut mixtape in 2015, he’s reworked his sound, moved to Los Angeles, and scrubbed the Web of large chunks of his catalog. His self-released new debut album, Don’t, is full of playful experimentation: He pitches his voice down till it oozes like molasses, and up till it squeaks and hiccups (“Don’t Want”)....

Last summer, Garland Martin Taylor Jr. drove 5,500 miles across the country with a 400-pound stainless-steel revolver in the back of his pickup truck. It’s not an actual, working revolver. Rather, it’s a sculpture, titled Conversation Piece—Taylor calls it a “war memorial”—made of scrap metal provided by a south-side manufacturing company. Welded onto the trigger are faces, which are meant to be anonymous. Stamped on the barrel, grip, and cylinder of the revolver are the names of people age 20 and younger who’ve been killed by gun violence in the neighborhoods surrounding Taylor’s home in Hyde Park....

Today’s biggest pop-country stars take lyrical tropes from 80s and 90s hits—drinking cold beer, driving trucks, praying, partying, feeling heartbreak—and bulk them up with hip-hop beats, hyperslick production, and catchy hooks that sound engineered in a lab. Twenty-nine-year-old Mississippi native Hardy (aka Michael Hardy) began his career as one of Nashville’s song scientists; he was a cowriter for bro-band duo Florida Georgia Line, then worked on smash singles by the likes of Blake Shelton and Dallas Smith....

L ast week I opened a review by calling An Enemy of the People the current Ibsen of choice, given the number of productions and adaptations it’s fostered in Chicago over the last few months. I had no idea how right I was. You know what Lydia R. Diamond’s latest, Smart People, turns out to be? That’s correct. Still, none of that has sobered him. Au contraire: opprobrium just makes him double down....

In the late 90s, Racetraitor were a hardcore phenomenon in Chicago and beyond, famous at least as much for their aggressively radical onstage political stance as for their records. That said, their lone full-length, 1998’s manic and blastbeat-ridden Burn the Idol of the White Messiah, still strikes like a white-hot fire iron. Metal-tinged guitar squeals and Mani Mostofi’s tortured yowls curdle inside a nonstop series of towering double-kick breakdowns, challenging you to push through....

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s twangy, peppy hits bounced up the country charts in the 90s, but their cowboy boots always seemed like they pinched a bit. Twenty-some years later, Carpenter’s records have eased into a more comfortable idiom, scuffing up their coffeehouse folk with a bit of rock. On The Dirt and the Stars (Lambent Light), her voice has lost a lot of its snap and range, but its ragged edge fits well with her confessional, resolutely earnest approach....

“It was on a dreary night in November,” intones teenage Mary Shelley, thrusting a candelabrum in the air and compelling her glib and glamorous friends, poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, physician John Polidori, and stepsister Claire Clairmont, to act out the ghost story roaring from her imagination. It’s the gloomy summer of 1816 in a cabin by Lake Geneva. The result: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a dark allegory of human creativity remembered for the monster Mary made....

It was one step forward and, alas, another step forward on the road to financial ruin. As I explained last week, Mayor Emanuel recently agreed to give Wall Street lenders $110 million in fees—which will come out of your property taxes—as part of a deal to lend CPS $725 million to pay off old debt. Yes, my oldest obsession. Yes, I’m writing another column about TIFs. I really don’t want to....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. Congress has responded in typical fashion by protecting its donors—the investor class—the only people in the country who didn’t need help. By unrecorded voice vote, Congress passed the CARES Act, rushing $1.77 trillion in taxpayer money out the door to help their friends on Wall Street. This bailout also saved the stock market and preserved the wealth of the 10 percent of Americans who own 85 percent of the stocks and bonds....

“Boa b/w Cold” This is the time of year during which I play catch-up, perusing year-end lists to see what albums I might have overlooked last year. Thanks to British avant-music magazine the Wire I revisited Earth’s Primitive and Deadly (placing at number 11 in a top-50-albums list), which I initially wrote off as too cheesy only to find upon another listen is perhaps the band’s most humorous and colorful album to date....

In 1998, New Jersey guitarist and vocalist Steve Poponi started a band called Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start—yes, that whole thing is their name (it’s a Konami cheat code). Emo’s second wave was in full swing, and its influence makes itself felt on UUDDLRLRBAS’s early recordings—they’re filled with eruptions of tension-shattering guitars and unrestrained vocals that overwhelm Poponi’s otherwise serene singing. As third-wave emo dragged the genre through the mud in the 2000s, Poponi guided his group through an evolution, slowly shedding the convulsive bursts in favor of mellower, more pop-centric songs that fit right into the melancholy indie-rock milieu of the mid-aughts....

Heidi Zheng never had plans to run a bookstore. In fact, neither she nor her husband, Peter Hopkins, had any retail experience when they were approached to take over the Dial Bookshop. But still, it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. “What a story!” Zheng says. “That’s the thing about people who grow up reading too many books, I simply cannot refuse because it’s such a good story.” “They met and married in a bookstore, so I don’t need to tell you that they love books,” Gibbons says....

Chicago is a sanctuary city. This does not mean it’s a haven for criminals from other countries. This does not mean people from other countries can commit crimes with impunity. It simply means that immigrants can live their lives without worrying that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will round them up and send them back to where they came from. Just like everyone else who moved here in search of a better life, from as far away as India or as near as the collar suburbs, Chicago has become their home....

One of the best Chicago rock albums of the past year was made by a band that no longer lives here: the Funs. The duo of Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Jerome Lesicko, who both sing and trade off guitar and drums, recorded September’s double LP My Survival at Logan Square’s Public House Sound Recordings, but they wrote it in New Douglas, Illinois, a former coal-mining town nearly five hours south of Chicago where they’d moved in 2012 to refurbish a house near Lesicko’s parents’ place....

The excellent record/vintage clothes shop Wild Prairie is one block from my pad and has been a godsend during quarantine. The small, very-easy-to-distance-within store has always felt safe, often with just one shopworker present (usually of the wonderful owner couple of Alex Gonzales and Natasha Rac) and there’s usually a shopper or two perusing the bins. They have a great selection of vinyl including house, jazz, soul, and loads of 60s psychedelia (making this guy VERY happy)....

The neighborhood of South Lawndale, aka Little Village, home to the recent power plant smokestack disaster, can add one more trophy to its showcase of immiseration: 149 residents in 60623 have died because of COVID, more fatalities than in any other Illinois zip code. The death data also reveal disparities in morbidity for those with COVID diagnoses. For instance, among the 304 COVID cases in 60415, just southwest of Oak Lawn, 34 people (11 percent) died....

Speaking to a standing-room-only group of more than 100 rapt Second City students in mid-January, Odenkirk explains why the hostility was so strong in 1990 that Second City matriarch and longtime producer Joyce Sloane had to step in on his behalf. “Growing up, show business seemed so far away. Second City seemed far away. It freaked me out. It was all so intimidating. The whole business is so scary and distant and such a mystery....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 28, 2016. Have a great weekend, and go Cubs! OpenOversight allows civilians to match police names and badge numbers with their photos Web developers at Chicago-based Lucy Parsons Labs are trying to make it easier for civilians file misconduct complaints against Chicago police officers with a new tool, OpenOversight. (Disclosure: the Reader collaborated with Lucy Parsons Labs on our recent investigation into CPD’s secret budget....