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A handful of Twitter bots and propaganda accounts appear to be trying to influence Illinois’s gubernatorial election on behalf of Republican candidate Jeanne Ives. Jain initially set out to study the number of positive and negative mentions each Illinois governor candidate received on Twitter, but when he began pulling data from the social networking site, he noticed that Ives—who trails Rauner by 20 percentage points (51 to 31) according to a February 28 Simon Poll—earned a disproportionate number of mentions....

We don’t often think of sidemen as comprising a “supergroup,” but there’s really no other way to describe Chicago’s Source One Band. Between them, bassist and bandleader Joe Pratt, lead guitarist Sir Walter Scott, keyboardist Stan Banks, and drummer Lewis “Big Lou” Powell have performed or recorded with a list of greats that starts with Koko Taylor, the Chi-Lites, the Jackson 5, Tyrone Davis, Otis Clay, Denise LaSalle, Johnnie Taylor, Artie “Blues Boy” White, Willie Clayton, and Latimore—and keeps going from there....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “Putting intention behind what you wear will affect how you show up in the world,” says spiritual coach and energy healer Tori Washington. “This doesn’t mean spending hours picking out what to wear but empowering yourself to wake up, inquire around how you want to feel, and dress yourself in a way that will draw that energy into your life....

This year marks the 27th in a row I’ve contributed, in one form or another, to an alternative weekly’s Best of issue. Most years, the reward for engaging in the tedious process of validating all the things readers like is the opportunity for us to tell them where they’re wrong. When it comes to the endless Food & Drink category, I’m sorry, readers, but you get an awful lot wrong....

If you’ve seen my new favorite movie, The Big Short, you’ve heard that banking used to be a boring, old-boys’ enterprise that mostly consisted of lighting up a cigar, making a fixed-interest loan to the neighborhood hardware dealer, and taking a nap. Over the life of the deals, the last of which will expire in 2033, Illinois will pay about $832 million more. (I tried to reach Blagojevich’s chief financial officer, John Filan, for this cameo....

As I mentioned last week, I couldn’t fit everything in my annual column of gift ideas that I thought was worthwhile. On Friday I wrote about a couple terrific music-related photography books, and today I’m highlighting some additional box sets. From the vantage point of 2017, it can seem as though Seattle’s underground rock scene didn’t exist before Sub Pop Records and grunge, but an unexpected little box set simply titled U-Men offers a small but important corrective....

In current hip-hop, Vince Staples is without parallel when it comes to sneering wit. The Los Angeles MC’s concise 2018 Def Jam dispatch, FM!, is a colorful, subversive assessment of contemporary culture—and he’s reportedly set to follow it with four full-length albums later this year. Regardless of Staples’s lyrical abundance and profundity, there aren’t too many performers in any genre with the dark waggishness to juxtapose tracks called “Fun!” and “No Bleedin”—the latter of which features Kamaiyah talking about jumping into some undefined abyss....

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering, who records and performs as Weyes Blood, was nine years old when Titanic hit theaters in December 1997. On Weyes Blood’s fourth album, last month’s Titanic Rising (Sub Pop), she uses the dreamlike, dramatic “Movies” to sing about how film can leave us wanting more from, or disappointed by, our own reality. Mering wields her powerful voice to create an air of serenity, and in combination with the gentle, sumptuous indie rock of Titanic Rising, it gives the album a disarming tranquility—listening to it is as immersive as watching a good movie....

“When we shut down in March 2020, we pivoted our programming immediately,” MCA director Madeleine Grynsztejn wrote in a recent column for Art in America. The most important new programming was “The Long Dream,” a wide-ranging exhibition featuring more than 70 local artists, which was meant to reflect the museum’s “commitment to equity.” “When most institutions were furloughing their front-facing employees, we went in the opposite direction,” she wrote, going on to list the ways the museum has supported staff since the pandemic began, such as allowing visitor services staff to work from home and offering anti-racism workshops....

I know a fair amount about plants, and gardening, and the pending environmental disaster that we euphemistically refer to as climate change. In fact, I spent two and a half years as a small-scale organic farmer in Detroit, and could probably have thrown together a good 5,000 words about common household substances that not only support your gut microflora but will double the size of your beets—which’ll prove helpful in preparing for the next Ice Age....

QI’m a (mostly) straight male who’s been dating the same woman for more than a year. It’s easily the best relationship I’ve been in. We get along great and rarely fight, and the sex has been great. But there were a few incidents recently when in the heat of the moment she asked me to tell her what I wanted to do, and I froze. I didn’t know what she expected me to say or do....

You’ve done this. The commenters weren’t entirely wrong. Chicago naturally shares a lot with our nation’s largest cities. However, Chicago is as midwestern as the corn that surrounds it. Even more, it’s the capital of the region. And we should embrace it. A recent study by the Economic Innovation Group compared economic and quality of life characteristics for several midsize midwestern metros, comparing South Bend, Indiana (home to former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who served as mayor from 2012 to 2020), and other similarly sized metros in the region with other metros throughout the country, examining the period between 2007 and 2016....

Blues singer Jean Williams, known as the Countess, delivers her music with a theatrical panache that recalls the classic blueswomen of Bessie Smith’s era; skilled thespians as well as gifted vocalists, they often transformed their songs into melodramas that they carefully acted out onstage. Born in Chicago in 1966, Williams cultivated her musical tastes by listening to artists such as Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Bette Midler, Tina Turner, and Madonna, and she honed her theatrical chops by attending what she calls “the drag queen shows on Rush Street,” where a dancer named Flame Monroe taught her the finer points of makeup and fashion (she still designs most of her own stage outfits)....

You can grow your own medicine Do you have a green thumb? Are you interested in growing your own cannabis as medicine? As of January 2020, Illinois medical cannabis patients by law are allowed to grow up to five plants. There are great benefits to growing your own medicinal cannabis. Patients can grow their favorite strains and learn more about cannabis growing cycles. With cannabis shortages and dispensary prices potentially increasing, most patients find that growing their own cannabis helps save money on their medicine....

North Carolina singer-songwriter Caroline White records gentle guitar folk under the name Infinity Crush. She’s cited poets Li-Young Lee and Dorianne Laux as inspirations, and given those cues, you could be forgiven for thinking that she’d be singing nothing but elevated songs about nature and love. To be fair, she does do plenty of that; in “Through the Ashes” she compares herself to a bird and to the sun, and uses imagery of falling snow....

It was an unseasonably warm 61 degrees just before midnight last Tuesday, and there was the best kind of rain for bicycling, a refreshing mist that was too fine to soak into my jacket, but one that gave the streetlights a dreamy glow. Nonetheless, plenty of people are using the trail to bike home from work or play late at night, which is only common sense. Some 80,000 Chicagoans live within a half mile of the path, which provides an alternative to sharing the road with cars on busy Armitage and North Avenues, the two nearest parallel main streets....

The appeal of a summer road trip, at least if you are a laissez-faire sort of person, is that you don’t have to make any definite plans the way you do when you buy a plane ticket. You can keep revising and postponing indefinitely, until it’s nearly August and you’ve finally decided to request time off from work, and then you realize that not everyone sees the potential of an open-ended vacation and that the world is actually full of planners who have booked up every available campsite within a 200-mile radius....

Inside the Hyatt Regency in River North on Friday, I was sitting at a table eating some buffet food when I was joined by some fellow attendees of WhiskyFest Chicago. One woman noticed the notes I was taking, so I explained that I was planning to write about the annual booze-tasting extravaganza. I didn’t mention that exhaustion had already started to set in, but maybe she saw it in my face....

There is no story in Roger Bean’s jukebox musical, nor are there any characters, only the barest fig leaf of a unifying theme; all of the songs in this show are either about the iconic highway, stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, or they concern stops along the way. If you think this is not enough to power a two-hour show, you’re right. Bean depends utterly on the songs, and on the nostalgic feelings these old chestnuts from mid-20th-century America—among them “King of the Road,” “On the Road Again,” and the one the show is named after—are meant to evoke in the audience....

Local stand-up Sam Gordon gathers some of the best Chicago comedians every week for her variety show The Combo. The BYOB event at the North Center storefront Bughouse Theater features stand-up, improv, music, sketch comedy, and anything else that Gordon deems a worthy addition. It’s a fun, relaxed night that gives stage time to underrated comedic talent, not least of which is Gordon herself. She talks about her day job as a nanny with verve and charm—when she goes into detail about getting into fights with privileged toddlers, it’s hard to not be on her side....