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There is a deeply complex science behind cookie baking. Aside from the question of butter versus margarine versus Crisco (butter, always), it’s something I never really bothered to consider until a few months ago when I saw it had been given the full J. Kenji López-Alt Food Lab treatment on the website Serious Eats. (The Food Lab, for the uninitiated, delves deeper into the science of cooking than you thought anyone would ever want to go....

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016 at age 76, often employed tricky or complicated methods to arrive at results that appeared simple. For most of the conversations in Taste of Cherry (1997), he interviewed the participants separately, then edited their responses together to create the illusion of free-flowing dialogue. For his experimental feature Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003), he digitally composited multiple shots to create the illusion of individual, unbroken takes....

Sun-Times Print Collection In 1990, David Biro murdered Nancy and Richard Langert (and their unborn child) in their home in WInnetka. “Ken” was tried as an adult for a double homicide committed in Pennsylvania when he was 15 years old; he was convicted and sentenced to a mandatory life sentence without parole. Letters to a Lifer is a recent book by Cindy Sanford that tells Ken’s story. The author, coming from a police family, surprised herself by getting to know Ken in prison and questioning the need to punish him forever....

Two months after two senior staff members of the Better Government Association resigned under duress, all 11 members of the staff they left behind signed a petition to join the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) to unionize. Wage scales are an inevitable subject of negotiation when management sits down with labor, but job insecurity often plays a bigger role when employees decide to unionize in the first place....

Television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz started working together at the Star-Ledger in New Jersey (“the paper at the end of Tony Soprano’s driveway in The Sopranos,” says Seitz) in 1996, but their bond actually goes back further than that: both cite the 80s police drama Hill Street Blues as a gateway into the world of TV. And it’s a show that’s stuck with them: in their recent collaboration, TV (The Book), it scores 104 out of 120 points on the scale the pair devised to rank the greatest American television shows of all time....

In Theatre Y’s most recent production of Juliet—the company’s third time putting up Hungarian-Romanian playwright András Visky’s familial autobiographical work in the past ten years—the theater itself is a womb. In 1959, András Visky was barely two years old when he, along with his six siblings and his mother, Júlia (i.e. Juliet) were arrested and deported to the Romanian wilderness as part of the ruling Communist party’s infamous Bărăgan deportations. For six years, Júlia and her children faced constant threat of torture and execution before finally being released in 1964....

There’s a notorious quote from the dearly departed Mark E. Smith that goes like this: “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall.” It’s tempting to read this as Smith claiming that he was the sole crucial member throughout the prolific postpunk outfit’s four decades of constantly mutating lineups—and it’s true that when Smith came onstage, you knew what band you were getting. But it can also mean something very different: that the Fall’s sound was about musical chemistry, about holistic connections among players, rather than about conventional competence or lone genius....

This summer Chicago rapper 8MatikLogan released “House of Pain,” a blazing, salacious single punctuated with tasteful claps. Its video is closing in on 400,000 YouTube views, and it could become an even bigger breakout success—which would be a long time coming for the MC. He started rapping in 2012 under the name Logan, and he’s built up a catalog of raw, teeth-grinding rhymes. In 2015 he dropped his debut mixtape, 1636, and became firmly entrenched in the local scene, collaborating with artists such as Saba and Taylor Bennett....

It’s been a busy few weeks on the labor front for both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Columbia College. “But,” Lester added, “we were able to get a secure guaranteed benefit for the [current] members of the orchestra going forward.” And he said they’re “studying” what to do about new hires. “We’re working with the Association to come to an agreement on a plan for them; the expectation is that we will work cooperatively to get this done....

I don’t know anyone who isn’t looking forward to the end of this grueling, demoralizing election campaign. I’m certain that its ugliness will leave a toxic residue for a long time no matter who wins, but assuming the race is called tonight, it’ll be cathartic for at least half the people who bothered to vote. I’ll probably be cowering on my couch from 8 PM onward, but I also feel a yearning to be out in the world, among like-minded, generous souls....

Karen Hawkins The difference in the texts I got over the weekend from Black friends and other folks of color versus the ones I got from white friends is a good place to start for why I reached out to this particular group of writers for essays. Last Friday feels like a year ago. In the e-mail I sent that morning asking for these essays, I put it this way: As I edited these essays, I cycled through all of the stages of grief....

It was close to 11 AM on Tuesday, January 5, when Cook County circuit court Judge Martin Moltz said in open court that he thought Governor J.B. Pritzker’s eviction moratorium is “utter idiocy.” According to an attorney representing a property owner, the eviction case before Moltz, which had been filed in October, was a “post-foreclosure matter.” The former owners who had lost their house had allegedly illegally reentered it. The new owners, Kirkland Group—a Tennessee-based real estate investment firm—were trying to get an eviction order from the judge, but since this was a residential case, Moltz was bound by the moratorium....

In 2014, Absolutely Not singer-guitarist Donnie Moore and his sister and bandmate, keyboardist Madison Moore, founded Glitter Creeps as a monthly punk-rock LGBTQ DJ night—an alternative to “typical” gay nights, as Donnie explained to me in last year’s Best of Chicago issue. Over the past two years Glitter Creeps has grown by leaps and bounds, evolving into a monthly live-music series at the Empty Bottle featuring LGBTQ-friendly bands from Chicago and all over the world....

“We used to have a rhino on Ringling,” Jeff Jenkins says. This was back when he was a young clown in the Greatest Show on Earth. The rhino would charge fullspeed into its pen backstage the moment the show ended, sometimes dragging its handler on the floor behind it. It was terrifying. Today Jenkins is the ringmaster of Chicago’s Midnight Circus, which he cofounded in 1997. The circus employs a pit bull named Rosie....

Many rock ’n’ roll duos deal with economy of one sort or another. In the case of Philadelphia group Writhing Squares, it’s not a matter of compensating for thin arrangements: woodwind player Kevin Nickles and electric bassist and rhythm programmer Daniel Provenzano both sing and play synthesizers as well, and they can make so much noise on their own that there’s rarely room or need for other musicians. The overblown sax and ultracoarse fuzz of “Geisterwaltz,” from the new double album Chart for the Solution, sound as big and mean as the Funhouse-era Stooges might have if they’d been willing to tackle 3/4 time....

Recently, several articles appeared about the phenomenon of “Hygiene Theater”—the focus on largely ineffective COVID-19 safety measures like Clorox wipes and plexiglass dividers designed to give people a false sense of security indoors. Some in the theater industry are rapidly signing up for this new brand of drama, such as Broadway announcing that it will reopen at 100 percent capacity in September, eager to trade profits for the safety of its patrons and casts....

On his energetic new album Three Letters From Sarajevo (Wrasse), Bosnian composer and guitarist Goran Bregović displays his broad-minded ability to express the full splendor of vintage eastern European traditional and folk music. He’s been charged with brazen acts of cultural theft in the past, such as translating the gritty sounds of a singer like Šaban Bajramović, known as the King of the Romany, for a mainstream listenership. While that remains debatable, there’s no doubt that he’s popularized music from the region, notably scoring films by Serbian director Emir Kusturica and touring the world with his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra....

Punk musician and engineer Blake Karlson launched Chicago Research in late 2018, and since then he’s used the label to document every scrap and fleck of gunk he can dredge up from the dark underside of local electronic music. In less than a year, he’s racked up more than a dozen releases, most on cassette and all available to stream or buy on Bandcamp, and each one provides insight into glorious and sometimes grotesque new sounds....

Thursday, August 29 Chicago Cultural Center Claudia Cassidy Theater 11 AM–noon Red Rose Ragtime Band, programmed in collaboration with the Illiana Club of Traditional Jazz Preston Bradley Hall 11 AM-noon What Is This Thing Called Jazz? Trumpeters Corey Wilkes and Pharez Whitted in conversation with pianist Miguel de la Cerna (and in performance with bassist Micah Collier and drummer Jeremiah Collier) 6:30–7:25 PM Mike Reed’s The City Was Yellow celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, with cornetist Rob Mazurek, flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonists Ari Brown and Geof Bradfield, trombonists Steve Berry, guitarist Jeff Parker, and bassist Matt Ulery...

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Today marks a quarter-century of color-coded el lines. Yes, back in the day, you didn’t ride the blue or brown line. You rode the Douglas or the Congress or the Ravenswood, and if you wanted to get from the far south side to Evanston, you had to take the Dan Ryan and then transfer to the Howard at Lake Street....