Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. A generation ago, Americans looked to the federal government for more enlightened policies in areas of civil rights and criminal justice reform. Today, the tables have turned. Progressive ideas are now getting a hearing only in statehouses while the federal government has turned its back on the poor and politically powerless. No policy that threatens the investment returns of the major campaign donors to the Democratic and Republican Parties can get a fair hearing in the halls of Congress or at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue....

When Clickhole launched a year ago this month, it quickly became clear that the Onion sibling was the right site for the right moment. Designed to resemble the host of Facebook-feed-clogging traffic generators such as Upworthy, Distractify, Playbuzz, Viral Thread, and Shocktopia, Clickhole’s mission is to make a mockery of online media’s most gimmicky behavior (lists! quizzes! sales-pitch headlines!) and overreliance on viral-ready subjects such as celebrity gossip, 90s pop-culture nostalgia, reactionary politics, and personal essays....

Q: I remember the day I was able to come to your show in person. What a joy! It seems like years ago now. How do you maintain your sanity until we are able to go to concerts, theater, museums, and dinner with friends again? I strive to be a good human but so struggle to stay my upbeat self. Q: I need someone to tell me that it isn’t a sign that I see my ex’s name at least four times a day, every day....

Deanna Isaacs Kris Bryant’s first day at Wrigley Field Who knew? Our new third baseman is a defensive star.

Tayla Nebesky Marta Sánchez Quintet It’s a well-established fact that New York remains a magnet for jazz musicians from all over the U.S. For years Chicagoans have migrated east to be in the thick of it—the heart of the jazz industry, if not its creative center. Greg Ward, Marquis Hill, Christopher McBride, and Milton Suggs are just a few examples of local talent that are no longer local. But it’s not just Americans that flock to the Big Apple—players from all over the globe gravitate there....

The eggs taste salty and tart, Cikowski says, and smell oddly like coffee beans. She and Kulp used them two ways, sticking to what they know best: fried chicken wings. For a Thai twist, they made a fish-sauce caramel with jalapeño, red onion, garlic, lemongrass, and sugar cooked together until sticky; after being fried the wings are glazed with the caramel and tossed with ant eggs and fried garlic bits. On top goes a garlicky aioli made with lemongrass and ant eggs (crushed together with a mortar and pestle, which Cikowski says makes the eggs smell like cumin), egg yolk, and the oil in which the garlic was fried, plus a bit of salt and vinegar....

Jonathan Pitts, the cofounder of the Chicago Improv Festival, believes that podcasting is the fastest-growing art form of this century. Podcasts have certainly gained momentum in the past three years—according to a Pew report listenership has steadily been on the rise since 2013 and there were more than 3 billion podcast downloads in 2015 alone. That helps to explain why Pitts turned his attention to the medium and created the Chicago Podcast Festival....

When I spotted this Washington Post headline, I finally understood what’s been going on with the Republicans: “John McCain still supports Donald Trump, even though he lacks ‘the necessary strategy’ in foreign affairs.” Here are some other examples: For a time Illinois senator Mark Kirk said he’d support Trump too. But eventually he decided Trump is “too bigoted and racist for the Land of Lincoln” and “does not have the temperament to command our military or our nuclear arsenal....

The house music scene that dominated Chicago in the 80s comes alive again at the Chopin Theatre, which the Urban Theater Company has transformed into a nightclub with neon lights, jungle juice, and battling dance crews. Based on José “Gringo” Echeverria’s memoir The Real Dance Fever: Book One, The Beginning and written by UTC artistic director Miranda González, who codirected with Raquel Torre, Back in the Day follows the north-side dance crew the All-Stars and their frenemies the Culitos and Imported Taste as they use dance as a means of finding family and acceptance....

While the sauce called mojo originated in the Canary Islands, varying forms of it are popular in Cuba, the Caribbean, and Puerto Rico. But for Sable Kitchen & Bar bartender Pito Rodriguez, the truest form is made in Puerto Rico by his aunt Titi. Rodriguez says that Matthew Jannotta, the Soho House Chicago bartender who challenged him to make a cocktail with mojo, visited Puerto Rico with him a couple years ago and got a chance to try his aunt’s mojo, which consists simply of cilantro, garlic, olive oil, and salt....

This story was published with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

With teacher insurrections breaking out from one side of the country to the other, it’s time to pay homage to Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union. In terms of organizing, they’ve taken a page from Chicago in how they organized. Soon after she was elected president of the union in 2010, Lewis hired a community organizer or two and sent them to build networks throughout the city. Apparently, teachers are making inroads with residents who can’t understand why it’s a good idea to pay crummy wages to the people who teach their children....

Over the past few years Second City has lived in my mind as a stale representation of the comedy world. While I’ll never deny the impact the theater/training ground had on some of my favorite talents, like Bill Murray and Chris Farley and the queen herself, Miss Tina Fey, the shows themselves haven’t broken free of the same sort of Murray-Farley-Fey formula. Yes, Second City revues will always be entertaining; I could watch comics do their own version of Chris Farley’s Matt Foley sketch over and over again and still laugh....

More than a thousand years ago the Wari people built a brewery on a remote mountaintop in southern Peru where they brewed enormous batches of chicha, a corn-based beer that they consumed in copious quantities. When the empire’s reign came to an end around 1100 AD, the Wari set fire to the brewery and smashed their ceramic drinking vessels into the ashes of the burning building. Field Museum scientists discovered the remains of the brewery in 2004, and based on analysis of residues from the drinking vessels, learned that the beer was brewed with berries from the Peruvian pepper plant (also called molle berries)....

We’ve rounded up some of the best Instagram photos of the costumes and props that fans and cosplayers prepared for C2E2, the comic, games, movies, and everything expo that hit Chicago this weekend. [content-1]

Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard, who moved here for school and still attends Columbia College, is one of Chicago’s most promising young MCs. His debut, Childish, was among the best overlooked local hip-hop releases of 2016, and on Friday he drops his second full-length, Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive. In its loose narrative, framed by dramatized phone messages, Curtis-Beard holes up at home while his friends have a wild night out. “I just wanted to tell the story of going out to pointless parties and staying locked in my room, from both sides,” he says....

Austrian guitarist Martin Siewert has always stood out to me for using his instrument like an arsenal of paintbrushes. In his many projects, including improvisational and experimental outfits Trapist and Efzeg, he thoughtfully applies his sound upon whatever canvas the group conjures. And since joining the Viennese trio Radian in 2011, he’s brought the group’s dry, instrumental strain of post-This Heat noise and rhythm closer to rock than it’s ever been—though any band that has a rhythm section of drummer Martin Brandlmayr and bassist John Norman will never sound like a normal rock band....

ARTIST: Dan Grzeca SHOW: Dark Lord Day at Three Floyds Brewing on Sat 5/19 MORE INFO: groundup.bigcartel.com

This COVID-19 interlude will have a place in history. We can too. There’s more information about “In This Together” at chicagohistory.org/covid19history/. Contributions can be made here.

Two weeks ago, a longtime reader challenged me to create a new sexual neologism. My two most famous and widely used neologisms—pegging (2001) and santorum (2003)—have been around so long that they’re practically paleologisms at this point. So I accepted the challenge and proposed “with extra lobster,” which sounded like it was a dirty euphemism for something equally awesome. I offered up my own suggested definition—”Someone who sticks their tongue out and licks your balls while they’re deep-throating your cock is giving you a blow job with extra lobster”—and invited readers to send in their own....