Duane Hall/Chicago Sun-Times Women at Daley Plaza during the Women’s Strike on August 26, 1970. Mary Jean Collins moved to Chicago in 1968 and immediately joined the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. “Everything was happening,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “Everything was exploding. It was so much fun to be on the ground floor and starting an organization that was attacking everything.” Dore hopes that when She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opens at the Music Box tomorrow, Chicagoans will know who Mary Jean Collins is....

One of the strangest parts of this extremely strange year for me was that for roughly six weeks, between the end of September and the aftermath of the election, I was completely unable to read a book for pleasure. Instead of losing myself in another world, or in someone else’s brain, which is the reason I usually read, I kept groping for my phone to check the news. There was too much happening and too much to be anxious about....

In 2017, members of Chicago’s Theatre Y made an extraordinary excursion, walking across Spain’s Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile route that fellow pilgrims have taken for centuries. Starting on the French border and ending in Finisterre (or “the end of the world” in Latin), it inspired the creation of The Camino Project, a mini pilgrimage through Bucktown and Humboldt Park, directed by Melissa Lorraine, written and conceived by Evan Hill, and choreographed by Dénes Döbrei and Heni Varga....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, March 3, 2016. Chicago’s gun violence, police problems inspire art, TV, and comedy The city’s ongoing issues with police brutality and gun violence have inspired a variety of art and entertainment, according to DNAinfo Chicago. NBC’s Chicago PD tackled the tragic murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee in a recent episode, a local artist has created a wall inspired by the Vietnam Memorial listing all the names of people murdered in Chicago since 2012, and Chicago native Hannibal Buress addressed police brutality in his latest stand-up comedy special....

Q: When I started dating my husband, he told me he had a low libido. I said I could deal with that. We waited several months before having sex, and then after we started, it was infrequent and impersonal. There was some slow improvement over the three years we dated. Then we got married, and suddenly he had no libido at all. He blamed health problems and assured me he was trying to address them....

A few years ago, in my former neighborhood in Queens, I passed an ornamental column amid the sidewalk trash. Regret prompted me to backtrack and haul the plaster orphan home. It’s since moved with me to Chicago, where, bearing a pothos, it receives many compliments. While Jones was cooped indoors last year, she began thinking about ideologies of whiteness that are baked into everyday domestic life. She bought ornamental columns from local sellers on Craigslist and Facebook, made of cheap materials such as plastic, wood, plaster, or metal....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, September 30, 2016. Series of attacks on females puts runners on alert Over the last week a number of female runners have been attacked while jogging in city areas ranging from South Shore to River North to Albany Park. In response, the Chicago Area Runners Association recommends running in groups, avoiding wearing headphones, staying in well-lit areas, and wearing reflective gear. The group is also planning a safety seminar for runners with a Chicago Police Department officer at its winter kickoff event (date and location as yet to be determined)....

If Saturday night’s baseball game had been an ordinary game, we might have said it was settled in the first inning, when a double, a single, and a dropped fly ball put the Cubs up 2-0 against the Dodgers, and the pitcher who’d shut them out the last time, Clayton Kershaw. Already the Cubs had one more run than they’d need. I was telling a friend of mine about these women....

Q: I’m a middle-aged gay man and I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. This is a disorder caused by the soft tissue in the throat collapsing during sleep. On top of making me feeling tired and awful all the time, sleep apnea is associated with a long list of health complications. I’m writing you because I’m into very rough oral. I like it when a guy treats my throat like a Fleshlight....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

In that sad little circle of social-media hell reserved for the compulsively indignant, some bloggers have been decrying the fact that apparently able-bodied actors Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore won Oscars Sunday for playing disabled characters—Redmayne for impersonating ALS-afflicted Stephen Hawking, Moore for pretending to be a woman with early-onset dementia. “You know who would be remarkable at transforming themselves into disabled people? Of really getting into the mind of someone in that situation and understanding their motivations?...

As far back as Ecclesiastes 3:20—”All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return”—dust has been acknowledged as an elemental constant in the natural world. However, certain types of the powdery substance aren’t so beneficial to Mother Nature. Take petcoke, or petroleum coke, the dustlike carbon material derived as a by-product of the oil-refining process. Around four years ago, Chicago’s southeast-side residents began to notice that the mountains of black dust along the banks of the Calumet River were having a negative impact on air quality and public health....

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. “Why Don’t You” by Cleo Sol “Insane” by Madison McFerrin “Green & Gold” by Lianne La Havas What we can’t wait to try:

Japanese metal trio Boris have been at it for nearly 30 years, and over the course of nearly 40 full-length releases and collaborative albums they’ve covered nearly the entire spectrum of loud, harsh, and heavy music. On the band’s latest single, “Love” (the first taste of the upcoming album LφVE & EVφL), they blur the lines separating all the genres they’ve mastered in the past: massive waves of doomy sludge give way to smeared, hazy, psychedelic shoegaze vocals, which makes the track sound crushingly miserable, pensive, and uplifting all at once....

Chicago R&B artist Hxry got his start as a producer—at least as far back as 2016, he was releasing stylistically scattershot instrumental tracks on Soundcloud—but he got his first real taste of success as a vocalist, with his 2018 song “Reasons.” Atop a fluttering synth melody and a suave, minimal rhythm section, Hxry gently sings sweet nothings in a watery, processed voice, occasionally blurring his words even as he crystallizes his romantic intentions....

For a lot of performing arts organizations, the holiday season is when the cash cow gets milked for all it’s worth. Obviously this year it’s different. (If you’ve been in some sort of Rip Van Winkle scenario for the past nine months, congratulations. You might want to see if you can go back there for another six or so.) The narrator-star of this show is Aunt Trudy (N. LaQuis Harkins), a recently widowed woman with no children of her own....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

On their current tour, Pennsylvania’s fast-rising technical death-metal stars Rivers of Nihil are trying their hand at the full-album- set format, focusing on last spring’s mesmerizing Where Owls Know My Name (Metal Blade). The traditional surprise-set-list show has its advantages for sure, but it’s good to see this format getting so much traction for new releases as well as old classics. Rivers of Nihil’s third full-length is a fantastic candidate for this treatment: it’s a loose concept album about the last human on earth, who’s made immortal to bear witness to the death of the planet itself....