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When Liz Crokin’s name appeared in national news stories due to her surprising connection to a controversy involving Roseanne Barr last week, it felt like an ironic twist of fate. Crokin, a Winnetka native, dished tabloid-style gossip about the lives of Hollywood stars for Chicago print media for almost a decade. But now it’s the former Tribune and Sun-Times columnist’s name popping up in other journalists’ lurid news stories. Roseanne was Right, President Trump is on Track to Increase Human Trafficking Arrests 500% in 2018 Over 2016!...

Holy Hive call their sound “folk-soul,” and you couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of what that term means than the Brooklyn trio’s debut album, Float Back to You. Auspiciously released over Memorial Day weekend—the traditional kickoff to the summer season—this ethereal record blends the folky falsetto vocals of Paul Spring with deep shades of beachy 60s soul courtesy the funk skills of drummer Homer Steinweiss. Spring is a singer-songwriter with a 2013 children’s album under his belt, while Steinweiss is a former member of Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and a longtime session musician (that’s him on the annoyingly catchy Bruno Mars song “24K Magic”)....

Earlier this month, we recorded our Savage Lovecast Christmas Spectacular live at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. The audience submitted questions on tiny cards before the show, which allowed questioners to remain anonymous and forced them to be succinct. More questions were submitted than my guests and I could get to, so I promised the crowd I would answer as many of their unanswered questions as I could in this week’s column....

I’m not going to lie—I judged Girl Logic: The Genius and the Absurdity, comedian and Last Comic Standing winner Iliza Shlesinger’s debut book, by its cover. For one, I was turned off by the sexist title, styled in faux-math font. Then I saw that the actress Mayim Bialik—who recently argued that you should sleep in the same bed as your children because bears do—contributed the foreword. A poor way to validate an allegedly pro-woman publication is to include a recommendation from someone who believes that modesty is what kept her from being assaulted by Harvey Weinstein as a teen....

Jars of fermenting plums are the most enduring image from Hirokazu Koreeda’s intimate family story Our Little Sister. When making plum wine, you must puncture the skin of the fruit to release its flavor, and the wine may be sweet or bitter, light or heavy, depending on what ingredients you add and how long the mixture sits. Like this wine, each of the three Koda sisters has grown tart and sweet in her own way....

Oh, to quarantine inside a Polly Pocket, safe and enclosed, all the comforts of home sculpted in colorful plastic. Browsing the Instagram account @polly_pick_pocket might be the next best thing. Logan Square–based artist Julia Carusillo works as a set and exhibit designer, creating sets and displays for theaters, nature centers, and aquariums—which gives her a particular appreciation for miniature worlds. On the popular Instagram, she posts soothing ASMR “tours” of Polly Pocket interiors from her collection....

A Chicago Blues Festival favorite who first costarred at Petrillo in 1989 and headlined most recently in 2013, Irma Thomas radiates soulful onstage goodness. And our city’s capricious climate has taught her to arrive carrying several changes of wardrobe. “A couple of times before, I wound up having to go and buy an outfit because it was too chilly for what I had,” she says. “I didn’t bring anything warm enough!...

There’s a patch of ground behind the lilies in Lauren’s west suburban backyard garden where tomatoes won’t grow. She thinks it has something to do with the soil’s pH, but whatever it is, it’s a fertile spot for a different kind of plant. She mostly left them alone all summer, just giving them water when they needed it, until late September when they’d grown about 3½-4 bushy feet, their stems ending in narrow clusters of lime-green flowers laced with orange hairs, loaded with cannabinoids and terpenes....

“Nobody else has this.” That’s what Glenn Fahlstrom claims about the burger at Fahlstrom’s Fresh Fish Market, a burger weighing in at a half pound of chopped sirloin, with raw onion, lettuce, “poorman’s” Thousand Island dressing, tomato, and cheese. I didn’t eat the burger at Fahlstrom’s. I was there to eat fish, primarily. But the claim about its singularity is dubious, as there’s a suspiciously similar burger a few miles north at Glenn’s Diner, the Ravenswood seafood restaurant Fahlstrom founded in 2005 and then was booted from after a protracted legal battle with one of his partners two years ago....

This week we were supposed to run a review of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a graphic novel by Chicagoan Emil Ferris about a precocious ten-year-old who becomes embroiled in the political turbulence of late 1960s Chicago as she tries to investigate the murder of her Holocaust-survivor upstairs neighbor. The reason we are not is because Fantagraphics, Ferris’s publisher, informed us last week that the entire print run of the book, 10,000 copies, is stranded on a cargo ship that has been seized at the Panama Canal....

My Friend Dahmer (which is now playing at Webster Place) takes place in 1978, and the movie evokes a certain type of filmmaking that flourished in the U.S. around that time—an improbable mixture of art house sensibilities and exploitation-movie content. Dahmer draws viewers in with a provocative title, which promises to reveal intimate secrets about serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, then refuses to deliver any details about his crimes. Rather, it’s a portrait of the killer as a young man—the movie depicts Dahmer’s senior year of high school and the events leading up to his first murder....

Q: I am at a loss. I am devastated. I just found out my husband has been sexting with another woman. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this woman is his first cousin! And this has been going on for years! I was on my husband’s iPad when I found their explicit chats along with requests for “visuals.” I went to my husband and asked if they had ever gotten together physically....

For the many of us who are still paying our fair share while corporations and the 1 percent stand around gawking gleefully (“How droll,” they chuckle as the rest of us squabble over minimum wage), we might need help understanding how much we owe. If you haven’t started getting your stuff together from last year’s wages, you better get to the IRS site and file for an extension posthaste. The official IRS website still has an open and fairly easy-to-use slate of tax information available....

During the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian activists played an integral role within both the feminist movement and the gay movement—but that legacy has largely been forgotten in mainstream teachings. A new exhibition at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives aims to change that. The initial concept for the exhibition was lesbian feminism in Chicago, but as time went on, the curators became more interested in the relationship between lesbians and feminism....

It wasn’t so much confidence that motivated Fat Rice chef Abraham Conlon to write a Macanese cookbook after only two visits to the former Portuguese colony of Macau. It was fear. The problem with compiling a book based on such recipes is that the relative scarcity of Macanese cookbooks means that they’d never been widely codified. So Conlon’s worry that his recipe for diabo, aka devil’s curry, might be spot-on for one family and all wrong for another isn’t without merit....

A weekend marked by extreme heat and storms makes the cataclysm at the outset of The Tempest hit home. But even without that assist from nature, Midsommer Flight’s free outdoor touring production of Shakespeare’s late romance, directed by Beth Wolf, has plenty of resonant moments, thanks in part to the cross-gender casting of Stephanie Monday and Julie Proudfoot as Prospero and Alonso. The idea of powerful women being cheated of their place in public life—or even having their lives threatened—by callow, grasping men like Antonio (Dylan S....

Fans of both the 1999 film riff on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and of 1990s pop and rock hits are the obvious target audience for this musical, now in a touring production. Roger Kumble adapted his own movie (which itself was de Laclos by way of Jay McInerney in its portrait of rich dissolute Manhattan private-school kids) with assists from Jordan Ross and Lindsey Rosin....

The other day I was walking past Trump Tower, steaming over the sight of that wretched name on its side, when it hit me. I know a way that might make Trump take his name off that building. Make him choose between giving up the sign or the property tax break he effectively gets for having it there. He shouldn’t get both—especially not in a Democratic city like Chicago. Burke recently dropped Trump as a client—in part because he’s worried the connection will cost him votes as he runs for reelection next year in a mostly Latino ward....

These two sax-percussion duos represent several generations in Chicago improvised music—saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher is 26, while drummer Steve Hunt is 63—but all the musicians share an exploratory curiosity, and both pairs engage in fascinating modes of communication. Reedist Keefe Jackson and Hunt—a perpetually overlooked titan in the city’s jazz scene who’s played in NRG Ensemble, Caffeine, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions, among others—are celebrating the release of The Long Song (1980), a succinct cassette featuring three feverish pieces of bob-and-weave interplay, aerated friction, and surprisingly bruising onslaughts that reveal less common sides of each musician’s personality....

Just before Anand Giridharadas took the stage at the Chicago Humanities Festival earlier this month, in the auditorium at the private and pricey Francis W. Parker School in upscale Lincoln Park, a giant “Thank You” to the Robert R. McCormick Foundation flashed up on the screen. It was followed, in smaller type, by thanks to 20 other sponsors: organizations like ITW, the MacArthur Foundation, Allstate, and Bank of America. An accomplished speaker with an approachable presence and an aura of cool (the uniform: waxed jeans, black blazer over black tee, sneakers, and an impressive salt and pepper coif), Giridharadas, himself a onetime McKinsey consultant and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, is fully aware of the ironies here....