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The morning-after crowd is hammering Donald Trump for intellectual incoherence, but it’s a bum rap. I’ve gone back over the transcript of his Monday night debate against Hillary Clinton, and what I find are more provocative proposals than he quite knows how to organize. But it’s clear where he’s going, and by the second debate next month Trump should be able to present a national economic strategy that will sail him into office....

AMC Josh McDermitt as Eugene, a man with no plan AMC’s The Walking Dead has offered a lot of scares and surprises in its five-year run. But one of the biggest shocks of all (spoiler alert) was when Eugene Porter admitted that he’d lied about being a scientist with a direct line to the Pentagon and a bead on a cure. Our band of heroes now runs low on everything, including hope....

Thanks to Donald Trump, the funding outlook for the long-awaited $2.3 billion Red Line extension—proposed and postponed since the Nixon administration—looks pretty bleak right now. To find out, I rode the train to 95th and traced the path of the proposed extension, buttonholing neighbors near the planned station locations. After 111th, the Red Line would continue to hug the Union Pacific line as the railroad turns southeast and climbs an embankment to an overpass near 116th and Michigan....

For a second consecutive year, activists delivered symbols of death to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s doorstep. But unlike November 2015, when protesters circled City Hall with caskets and calls for his resignation, this time they took the message directly to the mayor’s Ravenswood home. It’s not only gun violence and police killing people, attendees said—it’s also city policies. Speakers stressed the need for leaders to follow through on housing policies to help the homeless, including those living in Lawrence Avenue’s tent city, located under a viaduct at Lake Shore Drive....

Hogtown Last year we created the category Best Chicago Story in hope that it would become a perennial, and that every year we could single out the locally produced short or feature that best captured the life of the city. This year we didn’t even need that category, because the best Chicago story was also the best locally produced drama, period. Daniel Nearing’s Hogtown takes place in 1919, as the city and the nation are trying to absorb the domestic aftershocks of World War I, and culminates in the eight-day race riot that erupted on the south side that July, leaving 38 people dead....

Prolific DIY punk rocker Craig Woods won me over last year with Hot Bagels; he released a slew of gritty, lo-fi recordings with that project, which he launched shortly after moving to Chicago from Philadelphia in late 2013 and has since become a full-fledged band. But Woods has a lot more on his plate than just Hot Bagels, and tomorrow night he’ll join together with his cohorts in gnarly punk outfit Pink Eyes to celebrate the release of their self-titled debut at Fizz Bar & Grill....

Like Hannibal from the A-Team, Gossip Wolf loves it when a plan comes together—especially when it involves new music from local power trio Beat Drun Juel! Their 90s rock style is worthy of MTV’s Buzz Bin—imagine if PJ Harvey were in Tad, maybe. On Friday, July 22, BDJ release the EP Suppressor, about which guitarist Donna Polydoros says, “It’s badass how much heavier our sound has gotten over the past year, since our current drummer joined....

When venerable comedy institutions in Chicago get shout-outs, ComedySportz tends not to top the list, not with Second City and the now-gone iO hogging so many of the famous alums. As Reader critic Jack Helbig wrote back in 2003, “Improv purists tend to put ComedySportz at the bottom of the food chain”—probably because of their crowd-pleasing emphasis on fast-paced competitive games, à la Whose Line Is It Anyway. But as artistic director Jason Geis and executive director and producer Renee Ross make clear, this isn’t the end of the road for the company by a long shot....

It’s come to a point in the Rich East High School basketball practice where the coach, Craig Hodges, has seen enough and can take no more. The problem is pacing—his players are rushing and need to settle down. So he whistles practice to a halt and gathers the team to the sideline to hear what he has to say. “When you think of great players, the way they play, the game slows down,” he tells them....

Q: My ex-girlfriend, who I dated for nine months, called me two months after we broke up and accused me of giving her HPV. She was going on, telling me how I needed to tell any future person I had sex with that I have HPV. I’m a 38-year-old man, and I’ve never had any signs or symptoms of any sexually transmitted infections. I know HPV is very common, often clears up on its own, and cannot be tested for in men....

Once upon a time, before there was a Record Store Day, Dusty Groove‘s morning basement sales were an annual highlight for many an obsessive crate digger. Begun in 2001, the sales have become rarities (the most recent was outdoors on a side street in 2014), but this wolf used to enjoy trying to spot famous musicians waiting patiently with the plebes to sort through the store’s marked-down goodies—and is still convinced that Dean Wareham somehow cut the line in 2002....

“Trouble Over Me,” the first track on Tift Merritt‘s solo debut, 2002’s Bramble Rose, is very nearly a perfect country song. It’s so good that it took me months to listen to the rest of the album—when I first heard it a few years ago, I just kept on replaying “Trouble Over Me” over and over. Born in Houston and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Merritt earns frequent comparisons to Emmylou Harris with her graceful voice and rootsy rhythm guitar....

Mindy Kaling’s book Why Not Me? comes out in September. When Aimee Levitt made her New Year’s reading list back in January, I was trapped somewhere around page 250 of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, with no evident escape route. I was stuck on that book for a solid month. My life at Northwestern University wasn’t allowing me much reading time. I needed a spark, and right on cue, the bathroom strategy emerged....

Q: Borrowing Gen Z’s love for labelling everything, I’m a 46-year-old homoromantic asexual Canadian faggot. For me that means I’d like to love and be loved by another man but I’d hate having sex with him. To add a vexing complication, I also need some sort of power imbalance. Ideally, I would fall somewhere between being a man’s sub and being his slave. I’ve been searching for this since I came out in my early 20s....

Loy Webb’s new play is subtitled “A Parable,” and on those terms, it succeeds splendidly. By framing His Shadow through the lens of sibling jealousy, there are echoes of biblical brothers, particularly Joseph. But Teeny (Charles Andrew Gardner) doesn’t want a coat of many colors; he desires a football jersey that doesn’t share a number with his NFL hero big brother, Juice (Marcus D. Moore). Teeny’s single-minded determination to prove himself on the gridiron at his small college in the “Middle of Nowhere USA” collides with the demands from Rain (Anna Dauzvardis), a campus activist, that he protest the police killing of a young Black woman....

Courtesy the artist Tinkerbelles Next month, local postpunk duo Tinkerbelles are setting out on a tour that comes with an ambitious goal: to earn a spot in The Guinness Book of World Records as the band who’s played the most shows on the shortest tour. On Friday, June 19, the band plays three shows in Chicago and one in Evanston before heading out for nine more days jam-packed with nonstop shows—they’re aiming for a final count of 40 full sets played across seven states....

The first thing to know about Orville Peck is that the Canadian country-pop crooner always wears a mask. Its top half is made of leather, and from the bottom hangs a row of long fringe, which he sometimes braids to each side to reveal his scruffy chin—his memorable look is something like a cross between the Lone Ranger and a BDSM enthusiast. Peck has risen to the top of the current yeehaw zeitgeist with his own brand of tender queer longing, and the 12 atmospheric songs on his debut album, 2019’s Pony, tell stories about fading rodeo queens, ill-fated love affairs, and the way time wears people down like an old bootheel....

Because someone left a 1997 issue of the New England Quarterly lying on a table in the Newberry lounge, I’ve just read a commentary on the Indian rebellion of 1675 to 1678, which are remembered as King Philip’s War. As ships continued to arrive from Europe, natives who’d lived at peace with Puritan settlers were no longer willing to tolerate the unrelenting encroachment on their lands. They rose up. We’re looking at a serious difference of opinion....

Did you know the original Chick-fil-A in Hapeville, Georgia, was called “the Dwarf House”? The important thing is to not let a bigoted fast-food chain play god with your sandwich. Though the virus has kneecapped the usual Pride festivities it has not stopped Chick-Feel-Gay 2.0 at Lost Lake. For the second year in a row, executive sous chef Dani Kaplan, with former Income Tax sous chef Carolyn Centofanti, will offer a “pun in the face of oppression,” slinging fried chicken sandwiches and waffle fries ($15), this time through the bar’s walk-up window, along with rainbow flag cookies ($5) and “Dykes Hard Lemonades” ($15)....

Following the Las Vegas massacre in October, Donald Trump’s White House put together a list of talking points to help its surrogates argue it wasn’t a gun that allowed Stephen Paddock to shoot 58 people to death in 15 minutes. Among them: “[S]ome of America’s cities with the strictest gun laws have the highest rates of gun violence. Examples include: Chicago last year had over 4,300 shooting victim [sic]” Even Hollywood conservatives have gotten into the Chicago-hating act....