“New Urbanist Memes for Transit­-Oriented Teens,” known as NUMTOT, the 139,000-member Facebook group of people whom The Guardian has called “millennials who find fixing public transport sexy,” was launched here in Illinois by University of Chicago students. About 4,900 of the group’s members say on their Facebook profiles they live in Chicago, the second­-most of any city. (New York is first.) Metra’s board and staff warn that service is jeopardized by the fact that the commuter rail agency is billions short on the capital funding needed to repair and replace its aging infrastructure....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been suspended until at least the end of March. Contact the box office for further information about exchanges or refunds. What is it like playing someone you know? There are actual teen debaters in the show who join you in debating the Constitution in the second half. What do you think it’s been like for them? I remember how it felt to do that, to have memorized a speech or to have written my own speech and be delivering it for the first time....

We’ve survived 364 days of this arduous year, so let’s make the last one count. Kick 2017 to the curb, then kick it at one of our recommended New Year’s Eve events: New Year’s Eve Dance Party At Uncommon Ground (3800 N. Clark), DJ My Boy Elroy herds drunks onto the dance floor while others scarf down food from a prix fixe menu that includes apple-and-pear brioche bread pudding and brown-sugar balsamic-braised short ribs....

This holiday season may God (or whatever you believe in, higher power or otherwise) bless us, everyone, but especially Shawn Childress (aka rapper-producer Awdazcate), who in 2011 brilliantly created an event where people could gather to eat and watch different generations of local hip-hop acts. Waffle Fest has been going strong ever since. Near the top of this year’s yuletide iteration is Chris Spencer, aka rappers Chris Crack and Vic Spencer....

When it comes to gay nightlife in Chicago, the Lucky Horseshoe occupies a category all its own. Known to regulars as “the ’Shoe,” the Boystown joint at the corner of Halsted and Belmont is the city’s only bar featuring a daily lineup of male dancers. My ritual is always the same: scoop up an empty stool and scan the room to figure out which comely lad in a jockstrap shall be the recipient of the wad of singles the bartender has handed me....

Chicago’s skyscraper modernism—the Hancock, Marina City, Sears/Willis—is the city’s treasured calling card. What’s less known and much less appreciated is our area’s parallel cache of modernist residential architecture. Modern in the Middle, a new book by historian and preservationist Susan S. Benjamin and IIT professor Michelangelo Sabatino, sets out to fix that. At a time when great urban centers were considered the hubs for everything serious and sophisticated, “What we tried to show is that these clients were perfectly fine with living in the suburbs,” Sabatino said in a phone interview last week....

For Chicago sports fans suffering through a pretty miserable January, baseball can’t come any sooner. But 120 years ago, this time of year was the height of the winter baseball season—indoor baseball, a game that once packed arenas across the city. Indoor baseball spread throughout the country, but nowhere did it attract as passionate a following as it did in Chicago. A little more than four years after the first game played at the Farragut Club, a charity match at the Auditorium Theatre drew a crowd of 3,500....

I’ll watch any movie shot in Chicago. I’ve lived here nearly 30 years and seeing the city on screen makes me happy. It’s great when the movie is entertaining like The Fugitive, exciting like Thief, alternately inspiring and depressing like The Interrupters, or horrifying like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. These and dozens of other great films show off the city while also having a story to tell, but there are countless others set here, which, aside from their setting, don’t have much to recommend them....

“My dream was to have a company. My dream was to create a space that was inclusive in every way, diverse, but really personable and connected,” says Nick Pupillo, founder and artistic director of Visceral Dance Chicago. “It’s in my body and my blood. My mom holds something in my scrapbook—in fifth grade I wrote about having a dance company someday! I always wanted to dance, but more than that, I loved programming, designing, producing, costumes, music—all the elements that go into it....

When the project ended, the media attention dissipated, the students returned to their regularly scheduled high school programming, and after a couple additional days during which he painted two more murals at Rush University Medical Center, Haring went home to New York. The Grant Park mural stood for about a week before it was dismantled—and that was the last time it was ever displayed in its entirety. Haring died of AIDS nine months later at the age of 31....

I’d been thinking about Silk Road Rising, the mission-driven performing arts company founded by Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani in 2002, before I got an e-mail from Khoury last week. According to Arts Alliance Illinois (citing a survey by Americans for the Arts), 42 percent of Illinois arts organizations “are not confident they will survive the impacts of COVID-19.” On September 13 last year, Khoury told me, Gillani, then 49 years old, collapsed with a heart attack in the 150 N....

In April, Republican legislators set their terms for supporting social justice measures, telling Democrats in so many words: If you want our support, you have to give us something in return. Rauner’s amendatory veto came on HB 1468, proposed by state rep Jonathan Carroll, a Democrat from Northbrook. It would require a 72- hour wait before purchasing an assault weapon, a sensible piece of legislation if ever there was one. At least, it might give relief from the demons that lead someone to take another person’s life....

I always leave the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) graduate opening reception sweating. With more than 100 artists, it’s a marathon art-viewing experience. Bring your water, grab some cookies, and take it all in. Every year I leave saying, “I’m exhausted.” However, this year, things look a lot different. “Process has always been at the core of my image-making practice,” Emuakhagbon says. Her photographic project began in Dallas while working on a series that focused on family and her uncle’s migration from Nigeria to Japan....

On most of Olivia Block’s records, what she does to sounds matters much more than how they were originally made; using field recordings, instrumental passages, or electronics, she cuts, distorts, and layers the material until even the quietest passages feel packed with multiple meanings. But in concert, things can happen for a long time without intervention; the sustained organ notes and prerecorded electronics of 132 Ranks, which she performed last April at University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, turned the building’s interior into one giant instrument for an hour....

Putting together one musical is hard. Wrangling multiple original productions from different creators and producers sounds like a nightmare, but it’s how Underscore Theatre Company advances its mission to support new musicals. Since 2014, the Chicago Musical Theatre Festival (CMTF) has enabled local and national artists by helping them develop full productions that will be performed before a paying audience. After three years of summer festivals, Underscore is making a big change for the fourth CMTF, moving to February to take advantage of Chicago Theatre Week and avoid pesky street-fair conflicts....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Langhorne Slim (check out his song “Private Property”) What we’re ordering:

The need for care has never been so vital—and so exhausting. While a long summer of protest pushed the boundaries of what must happen to make Black Lives Matter, often resulting in violent reprisal, the impending presidential election continues to narrow this open terrain of communal support and anger into the compromised binary of America’s two-party system. Hovering over everything, of course, are the hundreds of thousands of global COVID deaths that cannot be mourned in any traditional way, the very impulse to grieve together a major contributor to the virus’s continuation....

The morning-after crowd is hammering Donald Trump for intellectual incoherence, but it’s a bum rap. I’ve gone back over the transcript of his Monday night debate against Hillary Clinton, and what I find are more provocative proposals than he quite knows how to organize. But it’s clear where he’s going, and by the second debate next month Trump should be able to present a national economic strategy that will sail him into office....

AMC Josh McDermitt as Eugene, a man with no plan AMC’s The Walking Dead has offered a lot of scares and surprises in its five-year run. But one of the biggest shocks of all (spoiler alert) was when Eugene Porter admitted that he’d lied about being a scientist with a direct line to the Pentagon and a bead on a cure. Our band of heroes now runs low on everything, including hope....