There is a deeply complex science behind cookie baking. Aside from the question of butter versus margarine versus Crisco (butter, always), it’s something I never really bothered to consider until a few months ago when I saw it had been given the full J. Kenji López-Alt Food Lab treatment on the website Serious Eats. (The Food Lab, for the uninitiated, delves deeper into the science of cooking than you thought anyone would ever want to go....

On his energetic new album Three Letters From Sarajevo (Wrasse), Bosnian composer and guitarist Goran Bregović displays his broad-minded ability to express the full splendor of vintage eastern European traditional and folk music. He’s been charged with brazen acts of cultural theft in the past, such as translating the gritty sounds of a singer like Šaban Bajramović, known as the King of the Romany, for a mainstream listenership. While that remains debatable, there’s no doubt that he’s popularized music from the region, notably scoring films by Serbian director Emir Kusturica and touring the world with his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra....

Punk musician and engineer Blake Karlson launched Chicago Research in late 2018, and since then he’s used the label to document every scrap and fleck of gunk he can dredge up from the dark underside of local electronic music. In less than a year, he’s racked up more than a dozen releases, most on cassette and all available to stream or buy on Bandcamp, and each one provides insight into glorious and sometimes grotesque new sounds....

Thursday, August 29 Chicago Cultural Center Claudia Cassidy Theater 11 AM–noon Red Rose Ragtime Band, programmed in collaboration with the Illiana Club of Traditional Jazz Preston Bradley Hall 11 AM-noon What Is This Thing Called Jazz? Trumpeters Corey Wilkes and Pharez Whitted in conversation with pianist Miguel de la Cerna (and in performance with bassist Micah Collier and drummer Jeremiah Collier) 6:30–7:25 PM Mike Reed’s The City Was Yellow celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, with cornetist Rob Mazurek, flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonists Ari Brown and Geof Bradfield, trombonists Steve Berry, guitarist Jeff Parker, and bassist Matt Ulery...

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Today marks a quarter-century of color-coded el lines. Yes, back in the day, you didn’t ride the blue or brown line. You rode the Douglas or the Congress or the Ravenswood, and if you wanted to get from the far south side to Evanston, you had to take the Dan Ryan and then transfer to the Howard at Lake Street....

On the first-floor stage of iO Theater eight years ago, the members of Cook County Social Club started performing scenes about fellatio. Why? It’s unclear. Cook County Social Club moves at lightning speed—troupe member Brendan Jennings got on his knees without hesitation, ready to perform stage fellatio on Mark Raterman, as per the scene’s needs, and Raterman immediately turned around and dropped trou. Cook County Social Club consists of Jennings, Raterman, Bill Cochran, Greg Hess, and Tim Robinson (who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live for one season)....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, October 26, 2016. Cher coming to Chicago to host a rally for Hillary Clinton Cher will be headlining a rally and fund-raiser for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at an undisclosed location in Chicago Sunday evening. Tickets for the event range from $125-$5,000 and contributions of $1,000 or more will get attendees a picture with Cher. [DNAinfo Chicago]

When DJ outfit Groupie Love, aka rapper Vic Mensa and producer Smoko Ono, played Emporium in Wicker Park late Monday night I managed to catch a little bit of their set. I didn’t stick around long enough to catch Mensa roll out “U Mad,” his latest unreleased collaboration with Kanye West, but I did see Mensa bust out a track Chief Keef dropped at the beginning of October called “Faneto.” Released a few weeks before Keef’s public fallout with Interscope “Faneto” has slowly evolved into an underground hit—it’s garnered more than six million plays on YouTube alone....

This week’s poster is for an outdoor concert that actually happened last weekend, but the location was secret until the last minute. Artist Steve Walters, who has previously appeared in the Reader, designed this poster for west suburban venue FitzGerald’s and its first-ever “drive-in” show, featuring the Waco Brothers. Ticket holders were told that the show would take place within ten miles of FitzGerald’s, and on the day it happened they were notified of the exact location via e-mail....

On my way home from work one night in the summer of 2007, I parked in the lot of a shuttered Pizza Hut while I grabbed a burrito from La Pasadita. I’d made it about three steps out of the parking lot when I realized I didn’t have my wallet, so I turned around and headed back to my car. The apprehension I felt at seeing a man standing next to it in the dark turned into a different kind of dread as he explained that there was a boot on my car, it would cost $75 to get it off, and he would be recording our conversation....

As far as I can tell, Tracy Letts has two basic points to make in his new dark comedy The Minutes, getting its world premiere now in a compellingly strange production at Steppenwolf Theatre. One of them is fairly obvious, almost banal given the current cultural moment. The other not so much. The Minutes unfolds over the course of a single meeting of the Big Cherry city council on a portentously stormy night....

L ast October the Indianapolis Museum of Art—an improbably grand institution for a midsize midwestern metropolis—was either gloriously reborn or notoriously trashed. “[M]useums are cultural treasures, not amusement parks,” Capps argued, pinning the blame squarely on the director: “Venable has turned a grand encyclopedic museum into a cheap Midwestern boardwalk.” Organized in 1883 as the Art Association of Indianapolis, the museum has been in its current location nearly 50 years thanks to the heirs to the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical fortune....

According to the Pew Research Center, Gen Z—young people currently aged 14-22—are even more liberal and politically engaged than their predecessors, the millennials. With Free Street Theater’s Parched (Stories About Water, Pollution & Theft), Chicago gets a sip of this generation’s activism and a grassrootsy dramatization of water politics. Devised over the course of ten months by Free Street’s youth ensemble, students aged 14-19, Parched is driven by vignettes drawn from interviews with researchers, activists, and community members....

Willie Wilson was wearing a suit with an American flag pin on the lapel. He stood in front of a pair of local reporters in a downtown hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, waiting to hear the results of the February 27 Democratic presidential primary. The room was nearly empty, but a few supporters and one Black Lives Matter activist milled about, chatting with each other and with the candidate. “I’m not a quitter,” Wilson said as the results rolled in....

In the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, a curious woman opens a box and releases all manner of evil into the world. Once the box is open, there’s no closing it, and only hope is left at the bottom. This story came back to me as I watched Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Werner Herzog’s rumination on the range of digital systems and devices that govern our world....

Saxophonist Tony Malaby has led countless groups over the years, often tailoring his ensembles to reflect different facets of his aesthetic such as flinty chamberlike interactions, deep dives into harmony, and rich multihorn orchestrations. In addition to his own musical endeavors, over the last couple of decades bandleaders as distinctive and accomplished as Ches Smith, Charlie Haden, Mario Pavone, Marty Ehrlich, Paul Motian, and Mark Helias have enlisted his services, and with good reason: Malaby’s striated tone and sweet-sour phrasing stand out in every context, and he can masterfully alter them to enhance any specific setting....

In the unlikely event you don’t already know the drill: for most of the past year, Bandcamp has passed along its usual cut of sales revenue on the first Friday of the month. This practice began as a one-off to help independent artists and labels make up for income lost to pandemic concert cancellations, but it’s evolved into a dependable monthly shopping spree that’s generated a decent chunk of change. The total sales on 2020’s nine Bandcamp days were $40 million....

On June 21 middle-school math teacher Janice Wendling and her husband, Mark, a power plant engineer, were training for an upcoming charity bike ride near the southwest suburb of Morris. And yet, the Morris Herald-News reported that, earlier that month, the boy had been clocked by police doing 87 in a 55 mph zone on I-80 in Joliet. And earlier on the day of the crash, he’d been ticketed for driving 24 to 36 miles over the speed limit in nearby LaSalle County....

When current mystery novelist and former Reader theater critic Lenny Kleinfeld (aka Bury St. Edmund) first met Stuart Gordon in 1968, it was at a rehearsal for Gordon’s student production of Peter Pan at the University of Wisconsin. But instead of trafficking in J.M. Barrie‘s Victorian sentimentality, Gordon’s version reflected the upheavals that had ripped through Madison and the rest of the country in the late 60s. The company also had hit productions of David Mamet‘s Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Bleacher Bums, created by the ensemble from Joe Mantegna’s original concept about a bunch of long-suffering Cubs fans hanging out at Wrigley one afternoon, back when afternoon baseball games were the only ones in town on the north side....

Imagine a county agency that doesn’t rely on taxpayer dollars to operate. And not only that, but it also generates wealth and helps revitalize struggling neighborhoods. This may not seem like a lot, but the land bank began acquiring properties two years ago with just a $4.5 million grant and a landscape of more than 51,000 abandoned addresses throughout the county—one main result of the subprime mortgage crisis. The nine land bank properties that have thus far completed the “full cycle” from abandoned to inhabited are located in Avalon Park, Grand Crossing, South Shore, Chicago Lawn, and in suburban Hillside....