The Ghost Network is a mystery novel at least once, but up to three times over. At the center is pop superstar Molly Metropolis, who disappears without a trace hours before a sold-out performance at the United Center. Following her disappearance, three underemployed Chicago hipster intellectuals—Gina, Molly’s personal assistant; Nick, one of Molly’s closest friends; and Caitlin, an aspiring music journalist they team up with—spend months combing through the journals and projects Molly left behind trying to discover where she went, until one night Caitlin disappears as well....

The Reeling International Film Festival returns this week for its 37th year to—as The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Girardi has famously said—give the gays everything they want. Reeling’s crop of documentaries offers an equally wide breadth of stories, with films that tell and preserve queer history, films that represent what it’s like to be queer in this very moment, and films that investigate wonderful, niche queer subcultures. “This is a culture that you do not see represented,” says Knight of the films....

Published nearly 200 years ago, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” tells of a man who falls asleep during the colonial era and wakes up two decades later, after the American Revolution, to find himself living in a different nation. This notion of a long sleep and a rude awakening is tailor-made for social satire—think of Chance the gardener, the graying simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), who has spent his entire life cloistered in a rich man’s home but, upon the man’s death, is turned out onto the mean streets of Washington, D....

The Onion’s satirical website Clickhole is famous for lists, videos, and articles with titles like “8 Bullshit Cats We Wish Judas Could’ve Betrayed Instead of Christ,” “Inspiring! People Describe the First Time They Drank Gatorade,” and “The Kindest Man Alive: Jon Hamm Makes Crepes For A Beached Whale.” Behind every giggle-inducing page on the site is a staff of writers, editors, and producers who are stepping onstage to show off their chops for The Clickhole Writers Present Amazing: A Live Show....

When I heard the latest news about my not-so-beloved Chicago Bears, I thought I’d left the real world and entered the realm of some drug-induced fantasy. “We recently submitted a bid to purchase the Arlington International Racecourse property. It’s our obligation to explore every possible option to ensure we’re doing what’s best for our organization and its future. If selected, this step allows us to further evaluate the property and its potential....

Mike Sula Lamb and coriander guan tang jiao zi Legitimate soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, have been and remain about as common as Sasquatch in these parts. Every now and then they make an appearance but rarely stick around for long. It’s not like the little bundles of love can’t be produced well, with delicate wrappers that maintain the strength to hold their precious liquid cargo long enough to be nibbled and slurped....

Over the years the gnarly, impolite improvising trio called the Thing (saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love) has performed and recorded with many guest musicians: Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O’Rourke, Neneh Cherry, and Barry Guy among others). The hard-hitting group have proven an ability to accommodate a wide array of approaches, perpetually modulating their rough-and-tumble sound to the needs of a given context....

It’s Transgender Day of Remembrance as I write this and this year it feels more urgent than ever to take time and remember the transgender people whose lives were taken due to anti-transgender violence. Our lives right now during these times of COVID-19 are getting more and more isolated, even as our technology makes it possible for us to have what seems like a constant stream of information from the outside....

will feel, think, and do in the future, and powerful aids in explaining why. In the realm of politics, psychologists have recently demonstrated how fundamental features of human personality—such as extroversion and narcissism—shaped the distinctive leadership styles of past U.S. presidents, and the decisions they made.” No one could accuse Johnson of neglecting himself. Early in All the Way, director Jay Roach (Trumbo, HBO’s Recount and Game Change) delivers a tour de force scene in which the president strides around the Oval Office like a king, dispatching various problems as his tailor trails after him....

With former Police Board president Lori Lightfoot now in the mayoral race (the Sun-Times‘s Fran Spielman has a shrewd assessment of her candidacy here), it’s going to be harder than ever—and it’s always hard—for mayoral candidates to get the nominating signatures they need to qualify for the ballot. It takes 12,500 signatures to get on the mayoral ballot—and not just any old signature will do. They must be valid signatures that can withstand the careful scrutiny they’re all but certain to get....

Photographer Joeff Davis is documenting all the action in and around the Wells Fargo Center during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week. (Check out his photos of last week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland.) Davis’s photos from outside the convention hall depict a more tumultuous atmosphere: demonstrators (still!) feeling the Bern, scores of arrests, and someone in a Hillary mask and crown parading around as “the queen of regime change....

Imagine a giant, adorable seal demolishing a village and a barbarian killing an evil version of Santa Claus. Imagine Steve Bannon and Mitch McConnell having a face-off in which their faces literally slide off. If you can’t imagine such things, veteran comic-book writer and artist Mike Norton can. His Eisner-winning Battlepug will be available in a massive “Compugdium” January 23 from Image Comics, which also published a collection of Norton’s Trump satire Lil’ Donnie last year....

You know the type. You might even be the type. These self-appointed judges perpetuate an interlocking set of arguments about who or what counts as Authentic Chicago. Then there are the food-related arguments: Deep-dish is just for tourists, they say. Real Chicagoans prefer thin-crust square-cut pies, delivered from a neighborhood joint that’s been there so long the phone number listed on signage still starts with an obsolete alphabetical exchange abbreviation.

The Pew Research Center has put its finger on something that Clinton supporters and Trump supporters agree on. It isn’t that it’s high time for the Cubs to win a World Series. Pew says its latest study shows that differences between the two groups of voters run so deep they “even extend to disputes over basic facts.” In other words, they don’t agree on reality. But everyone knows this. Pews says 81 percent of the Americans it polled “say that most supporters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump not only disagree over plans and policies, but also disagree on ‘basic facts....

You might have heard something about a runoff election for mayor between incumbent Rahm Emanuel and challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Or maybe you’ve heard far more than you’d like and wonder if anything they’re saying is true. Here’s a primer on what’s really going on. The short answer is that a lot of voters don’t like his style, which is often seen as imperious, dictatorial, arrogant, nasty, vindictive, shallow, deceitful—...

As the populist question goes, “If work’s so great, how come they have to pay you to do it?” That attitude provides the jumping-off point for Working, the musical based on Studs Terkel’s 1974 book of interviews where “people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Originally adapted in 1978 by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, the show got a revision several years ago from writer-director Gordon Greenberg....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Salem is curious what’s in the rotation of . . . Tasha’s Audiotree Live session Tender musical experiences like this make me feel proud to be from Chicago. Tasha and Audiotree: together, they’re magic. This recent collaboration is sure to touch you in all the deepest places. Audiotree takes great care to capture Tasha and her wickedly talented band, and the result is a robust, transcendent sound....

Since the early 90s, Steppenwolf Theatre has hosted local performing arts companies in its ever-expanding space on North Halsted. While Garage Rep was solely focused on theatrical productions, LookOut covers a broader range of performances. Both productions also have ties to key players in Steppenwolf’s current season—Plano is directed by Audrey Francis, a Steppenwolf ensemble member most recently seen in Dance Nation, and White was written by James Ijames, who also wrote The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, which will run semi-concurrently with White at Steppenwolf later this spring....

The Commuter, which is now playing in general release, is top-shelf entertainment, with nail-biting suspense, captivating mystery, and loads of visual imagination. It confirms that Jaume Collet-Serra (Non-Stop, Run All Night, The Shallows) is one of the best genre directors working today. The film features one inspired set piece after another; Collet-Serra takes great pleasure in moviemaking, and his enjoyment is infectious. That the story is wildly implausible doesn’t detract from the immense satisfaction it has to offer....