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If Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour “Sy” Hersh is the closest thing that print journalism has to a superhero, then his origin story can be found in the first few pages of his new memoir, the aptly titled Reporter. During another late shift, he overheard two cops discussing a robbery suspect who’d just been shot and killed, reportedly while trying to avoid arrest. One police officer, Hersh recalls, said something like, “So the guy tried to run on you?...

The members of the Devil Makes Three grew up in New England but formed their trio in California in 2002. They’ve since moved their home base to Burlington, Vermont, and their crisscrossing migrations seem fitting for a group that draws on rootsy styles and sounds from across the continental U.S., including folk, bluegrass, country, blues, and ragtime, with traces of punk and rock attitude. For most of their career the Devil Makes Three have stuck to bare-bones, folky tunes played on acoustic instruments (Pete Bernhard on guitar and lead vocals, Lucia Turino on upright bass, and Cooper McBean on banjo and guitar), and their 2016 full-length, Redemption & Ruin, topped Billboard’s bluegrass chart....

One of the best bargains in the Chicago scene, this well-established festival—currently co-organized by Plastic Crimewave, aka Steve Krakow (a Reader contributor), and artist Matt Ginsberg (Dark Fog, Underground Symposium)—celebrates its ninth installment. Named after a 1968 song by Marc Benno and Leon Russell, Icicle Star Tree has a killer lineup that showcases the diversity of what psychedelic music can be. Friday includes a collaboration between TALsounds (Natalie Chami) and Matchess (Whitney Johnson), two mesmerizing electronic artists....

Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

Now onstage at Black Ensemble Theater: a hard-charging, gotta-dance, groovilitastic celebration of the genre of superfreaks and pile-driving downbeats. If you’ve ever sung about (or in fact are) the kind of girl “you don’t take home to mother,” this show is yours. As in all BET shows, there are a lot of expositional breaks between songs—in this case, mostly delivered by Neal as he offers bullet points for the artists on display....

Even if you don’t recognize the name Zia Anger, you’re probably familiar with her work. Over the last few years, Anger has pushed and played with the limits of conceptual visual storytelling as the creative force behind some of the most notable music videos in indie music over the last decade, including Mitski‘s “Geyser” and “Your Best American Girl,” Angel Olsen‘s “Hi-Five,” Maggie Rogers’s “Fallingwater,” and a slew of projects for Jenny Hval....

There’s no one in the world quite like Brazilian polymath Hermeto Pascoal, who at 81 continues to produce music in a world all his own. Since the 1970s, when he traveled to the U.S. and worked briefly with Miles Davis—he appears on the classic 1971 album Live-Evil—he’s pursued a feverish hybrid of frantic jazz fusion, Brazilian folk, and outward-bound exploration akin to that of Sun Ra’s Arkestra (though without the extraterrestrial themes)....

Buried in an April 9 Chicago Sun-Times editorial was this line: “[Mayor Lori] Lightfoot is free to move large sums between departments, without City Council approval, under executive powers granted to her last month.” “During these unprecedented times we cannot proceed with business as usual when the health and welfare of our residents and communities are at risk,” the mayor was quoted as saying. But in the most potent move, the order gave the mayor’s budget director the power to revamp the city’s budget “as needed to maximize effectiveness of the City response” to the pandemic....

Multidisciplinary artist Charlotte Moorman’s experimental cello performances and avant-garde festival curation shaped New York City’s cultural underground in the latter half of the 20th century. Moorman died of cancer in 1991, and for the last 25 years her legacy has been felt largely as a footnote to the histories of her better-known collaborators: John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono. But now the Block Museum of Art has opened a retrospective exhibition this month on Moorman’s legacy of performance and provocation....

Every Chicago Public League gymnasium contains idiosyncrasies of design and utility, and Uplift Community High School in Uptown is no exception. The most exciting high school basketball game of the year plays out here on January 16. The players, coaches, and the scorer’s table are under crepuscular lighting and jammed against a concrete wall on the south side with just a narrow band separating them from the court. The Uplift Titans are playing the Whitney Young Dolphins, a nationally ranked program....

When the Black Lives Matter and other social justice uprisings hit Chicago last year, the creators at Soft Cage Films were ready. The nonprofit film production company has been documenting social change, combating oppressive systems, and amplifying underrepresented voices of color in film through experimental techniques, artistic collaboration, and engaging storylines since its founding in 2012. Building off that collective energy, Soft Cage ramped up full speed, launching two new film initiatives that created needed virtual spaces to challenge oppressive systems, like gender and racial discrimination, police brutality, and health-care access for people of color, which could not have been more fitting in a year where everything got turned upside down....

Michael Gebert This rented stuffed bear is looking forward to Intro’s in-house Fourth of July picnic. The solstice has passed, and by the ancient laws of the mysterious Druid sect that really runs our food scene, that means the season of outdoor events featuring celebrated chefs, beer, and sunshine has officially begun. There are some coming up in the near future you should know about, starting this Thursday with Chefs and the City, a benefit for Heartland Health Outreach, which helps Chicagoans living with AIDS/HIV live better lives....

Second City is in denial. Donald Trump is our president, and along with that comes a host of issues regarding race, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and police brutality, among other things. The cast of the brand-new yet already outdated main-stage revue Dream Freaks Fall From Space tackle these loaded topics by mentioning them, then moving right along. And speaking of denial, scenes break one of the most fundamental rules of improvisation—embody the spirit of “yes, and ....

Jason Wilber is known to audiences around the world for his impeccable guitar tones and tasteful playing in support of the late John Prine over the past 25 years. As Prine’s musical director, Wilber helped steer him back to the minimal sound of his records from the early 70s and, in the process, showcased that material’s lyrical and emotional weight. Throughout, Wilber also released his own impressive body of work. His latest album, Time Traveler, is his finest hour; its transfixing songs are as quiet and sparsely arranged as Prine audiences have come to expect from Wilber onstage, but the style is unmistakably his own....

When Bertha Garcia was a kid, she used to help her aunt sell barbacoa on blue corn tortillas at an open-air restaurant on the road just outside La Marquesa National Park. Situated between Mexico City and the satellite city of Toluca, it was a rustic, woodsy spot where they also made bone marrow tacos grilled on the plancha with marjoram, earthy epazote, or minty yerba buena. They also griddled tlacoyos, which, back then, were ovoids of the same masa azul, hand-pattied and stuffed with creamy requesón cheese and mashed fava beans, topped usually only with guajillo salsa, onions, and cheese....

Shortly after the 2006 death of James Dewitt Yancey, best known as J Dilla, Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist, arranger, composer, and producer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson began creating orchestral homages to the Detroit hip-hop producer and rapper. Though Yancey had spoken publicly about his health struggles, his passing at age 32 (due to complications from lupus and a rare blood disorder) left the musical world mourning the loss of a beloved artist and his unrealized potential....

In this time of isolation and general slow-down, many of us are spending an unprecedented amount of time at home, among the inanimate objects and living beings that add texture, sound, and color to our daily existence. Perhaps we’ve started cleaning more out of boredom, or rearranging our books, or trying new recipes. We may be cuddling with pets or kids like never before. And we may be looking at our houseplants and feeling the urge for more....

Food-focused folk over at LTHForum this week are mourning the passing of Steve Zaransky, one of its earliest, most knowledgeable, and most prolific posters—and an all-around mensch. I was among many fortunate to share lots of unforgettable food with stevez (his handle), some of which he cooked himself. An egg roll enthusiast, so enslaved to the pleasures of waterfowl that he was known as “Duck’s Bitch,” he was a sweet and multitalented guy (whose photos occasionally appeared in the Reader)....

One day in April 2019, DL Mullen was wandering around Halsted and Grand. Right before then, she had just left another project that she was trying to get off the ground, Athenaeum Librarium, which was supposed to be like a Soho House for book lovers. From construction delays to the building flooding, things kept going wrong, and Mullen knew that she’d have to put it on hold. Her dream of founding a luxurious membership club, library, and coworking space would have to wait, even after partnering with tech giants like Google....

The debate was first sparked in Chicago by the death of Marlon Horton, a 28-year-old man fatally shot by off-duty officer Kenneth Walker outside a west-side Chicago Housing Authority building in September 2013. Walker worked as a security guard at the site; Horton had been unarmed. The lawsuit is still pending, but Granich says that both Moore and Walker have testified that they had first aid training. In addition, Dean Angelo Sr....