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It could have been a metaphor, a cliché even, except it was real. Someone threw her away. Literally folded her small body into a garbage can, covered her in grass clippings, and shut the lid. This was in an alley, in a Black neighborhood, on Chicago’s distant south side. Those details are not meant as shorthand to signal murder and mayhem. The alley was free of debris and sat behind a chain of tidy single-family homes, the compact houses and yards as neatly arrayed as place settings....

You may have noticed recently that there are a lot more animals (usually, but not always, dogs) in places where they didn’t used to be. Like on the floor in front of the airplane seat next to you, sans carrier, eagerly awaiting takeoff. Before we get into the details of that story, a few definitions are in order. Emotional support animals are a relatively new phenomenon that has been growing in popularity over the past decade....

John Herndon doesn’t really want to tell me this story. He hasn’t discussed it much in public, and he’s not sure he wants to now. You can’t blame him. It’s hard to know who to trust with details of the cruel abuse you survived in foster care, or who will understand what it was like to be raised by committee in an intentional community in North Carolina. “I totally cried out loud when I heard them,” he says....

Here in the midwestern tundra, January can be a sleepy time for shows by touring bands, but no matter where or when Madison garage punks the Hussy play a gig, they heat things up—or even set them on fire. And that’s not just cliche rock ’n’ roll hyperbole; in this case, you can take those words literally. In an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal last January, guitarist-vocalist Bobby Wegner (who also runs DIY label No Coast) estimated that since he and drummer-vocalist Heather Sawyer joined forces in the summer of 2008, he’s set his instrument ablaze about 100 times....

“I thought, what a great way to tackle this [issue]—with someone who had been through it,” says Adam Kassen, one of the series’ executive producers. Ultimately, though, Nagao says she’s “ecstatic” about how the show turned out, and is hopeful that it will draw wider attention to the problem of wrongful convictions. Between 3 and 5 percent of U.S. prisoners are estimated to be innocent, which translates to an estimated 60,000 people currently serving time for crimes they didn’t commit....

I hate Valentine’s Day. A lot of people do. But I don’t hate it for any of the conventional reasons. As a former Hallmark employee and lifelong midwesterner, I find chalky candy hearts, pink plush puppies, and other kitschy garbage hard to resist. I’ve never spent V-Day alone weeping into a pint of ice cream while You’ve Got Mail plays in the background. In the past decade, I’ve never even been single on February 14....

After Shawn Carter grew from rapper Jay-Z into all-powerful rap mogul Jay Z, the money he made as one of the most gifted lyricists in music became a key ingredient in his songs—resulting in the sagging nadir that is 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail. But a switch flipped with his 13th album, June’s concise 4:44 (Roc Nation/UMG). Call it a response to Beyoncé’s Lemonade (in which she confronts infidelity, a subject her husband addresses here); call it a response to ongoing injustices and the now very public deaths of black citizens at the hands of police officers....

This morning Riot Fest announced the lineup for its 15th year (its eighth outdoors), and the most eye-catching headliner is Bikini Kill. When the iconic riot grrrls announced in January that they were playing a handful of reunion shows, a Chicago date was conspicuously missing—and as other big local festivals announced Bikini Kill-free lineups, it became clear that the band were coming to Riot Fest or not at all. Alas, Bikini Kill are the only top-tier Riot Fest act that includes women....

When he released his 2009 LP Never Better (Rhymesayers), Minneapolis MC and rock musician P.O.S (born Stefon Alexander) had already made a name for himself on his own and with Doomtree, his seven-member hip-hop collective and record label. But Never Better announced a new P.O.S—one who had taken his production and lyricism to another level. Its aggressive beats, huge hooks, dexterous flow, and fully articulated punk-rock attitude made it one of the best and most unique rap albums of the year....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The A side on the Artistics’ second Okeh 45, a smooth and snappy Sam Cooke-ish groover called “Get My Hands on Some Lovin’,” became a minor local hit in ’64 (and it can’t have hurt that it had been cowritten and originally recorded by Marvin Gaye)....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The duo gigged around the midwest, frequently visiting Michigan, and after their split in the mid-60s I can find little further evidence of Len’s career—in 1969 he did make an interesting solo LP for Atco, which mixes up weird country-rock and straightforward crooner pop....

In an interesting experiment this weekend, two of the city’s iconic arts organizations have joined forces. For the first time ever, the Joffrey Ballet is dancing at Symphony Center, accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess provides a brief orchestral interlude before the dancers reappear in Commedia, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to music from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. The original ballet was composed in 1920 (for the legendary Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, with sets and costumes by Picasso), but it was inspired by, and sounds a lot like, music of the 18th century....

Earlier this year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences faced a torrent of criticism when, for the second season in a row, it nominated only white actors and actresses in the four performing categories. Academy voters looking to address that imbalance this year will be all over Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, an intimate and haunting drama about a poor, fatherless African-American kid growing up in the closet in the predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood of Miami....

Michael Gebert Grilled pork banh mi at CoCo Several years ago I was in Santa Cruz, California, and discovered something I hadn’t expected to see anywhere this side of Saigon: fast-food banh mi chains. But if you thought about it, the Vietnamese-French fusion sandwich, with its crusty baguette, Asian meats (paté or grilled), and crunchy fresh vegetables, was a perfect candidate for taking off as a more exotic substitute for Subway....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, May 6, 2016. Have a wonderful weekend. Chicago Teachers Union comes up with revenue proposals instead of setting strike date Instead of setting a strike date, Chicago Teachers Union delegates proposed a revenue-recovery plan Wednesday. The union is asking Chicago Public Schools and the City Council to consider using tax revenue and tax increment financing (TIF) surplus money to help fund the schools and prevent budget cuts....

In 1992, Nasir Blackwell was desperate. He had been convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed. While incarcerated in Pontiac Correctional Center, he visited the law library—a six-by-nine-foot cell, most of its books published in the 50s—and picked up a volume on homicide. “I began studying law. I was studying history, and so I began studying the history of jurisprudence. I could not believe how law was man-made,” he says....

The first time I saw Gabriel Garzón-Montano in concert was at South by Southwest in 2017. His appearance had generated a lot of buzz; a song from his 2014 EP, Bishoune: Alma del Huila, had been sampled for Drake’s 2015 track “Jungle,” and the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter had recently released his debut full-length, Jardin. Partway through his performance, he had an audio issue with his keyboard, and as sound technicians addressed it, he kept the crowd engaged by unexpectedly delving into his Colombian heritage: he grabbed a mike and launched into an impeccable a cappella version of the traditional Afro-Colombian fisherman’s tune “El Pescador,” singing in Spanish and gyrating his hips, and then returned to his reconnected keyboard to complete his set....

Remember those giant but strangely juicy and fruitful tomatoes from your grandparents’ backyard garden? Did your mother have a prize-winning squash at the county fair? If your mom or your grandparents are still around, ask them if they kept any seeds. Seed libraries have been around for centuries. The structure can be as simple as a few labeled envelopes filled with harvested seeds from favored plants. Most seeds last for a long time if kept cool and dry....

At first glance, the recent banning of political science professor Jacqueline Stevens from the Northwestern University campus looks like a case in point for this dismissive old quip about university faculty squabbles: “The politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” On July 28, College of Arts and Sciences dean Adrian Randolph sent Stevens a letter banning her from campus and from any contact with students, and ordering her to undergo a “fitness for duty” evaluation with a doctor of their choosing....

Jim Franks thinks your open-crumb, cold-proofed, exquisitely lamed sourdough boule is bullshit. These are all bakers who have managed to make a living at the difficult and often dangerous business of running commercial bakeries—and selling bread made from hard grains that have been milled without removing the nutritious bran that surrounds the germ, unlike the majority of commodity flour produced in the United States. He didn’t find his purpose until after a friend showed him how to make sourdough and he made it on his own for the first time....