In last year’s race for governor, Bruce Rauner campaigned as a reformer who would run the state as though it were a private business—a fitting theme for someone who became a billionaire by buying and selling companies. Even as he touted his business credentials during the campaign, Rauner blasted predecessor Pat Quinn for not telling voters how key decisions were made. “This is about transparency and accountability,” Rauner declared. In short, Rauner lawyered up....

Jim Watson/Getty The Confederate flag still flew outside the South Carolina Statehouse as state senator Clementa Pinckney’s funeral procession arrived today. During a discussion several years ago over renaming Confederate Memorial Hall at Vanderbilt University, a black professor made a shocking statement that might be correct: “The race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless free slaves....

Activist and poet e nina jay calls her new book Bricks, Blood & Water a “walk through the valley of my thoughts and feelings.” In the foreword to Bricks, Blood & Water you write, “the world is painful to me these days, inside the skin. my voice feels small. my rage tempers and flares.” What does it mean to exist as a Black lesbian today? How did you find your voice?...

Local Option brand ambassador Alexi Front has been into heavy metal for a long time. In 2001—when he was just 15—he and some friends started the zine Pivotal Rage, writing about all types of extreme music but focusing on death metal from Sweden. By 2004 Pivotal Rage had evolved into the label Pivotal Rockordings, releasing records by Swedish bands such as Sonic Syndicate and Blinded Colony. (Fun fact: former Blinded Colony vocalist Karl Johan Schuster, now better known as producer Shellback, has worked on songs by the likes of Taylor Swift, Kesha, Usher, and Carly Rae Jepsen....

Dick Klein knew there would be blood. Before the Chicago Bulls played a single game, the team’s founder seemed acutely aware that if there was to be any glory in the organization’s future, there would also be heartache, clashing egos, bad behavior, run-ins with the law, sweat, tears, and, yes, actual blood. Father Bull, as Klein became affectionately known, didn’t want to see the struggle sanitized. His team would embrace the savage competition of pro sports, and make it part of the brand....

Nancy Pelosi is having her moment. From her literal clapback at President Trump to her dogged and confident management of the impeachment process, she has solidified her position in history as a groundbreaking political leader and feminist. The Adult in the Room, a Broadway Factor NYC world premiere penned by Bill McMahon and directed by Heather Arnson and Conor Bagley, fails to do such a storied career and complex personality justice....

In a way, Irvine Welsh is responsible for Bill Hillmann’s new memoir, Mozos: A Decade of Running With the Bulls of Spain. The two met outside a White Sox game a decade ago. At the time Hillmann was 23, a former Golden Gloves boxer, a current coke dealer, an aspiring novelist, and a self-described complete mess; Welsh was twice his age and already famous as a chronicler of Edinburgh’s low life in novels and screenplays, most notably Trainspotting....

Two love stories that started on the pages of the Reader How do you cut the cord when you’re surrounded by couples tying the knot? Four places where relationships sunk How do you mend a broken heart? Twitter has some answers. A Valentine’s Day bar guide based on relationship status Single people can celebrate February 14, too! A journalist turns her breakup into art and politics with a breakup zine....

This illustration was made possible by a grant from Forefront administered by Public Narrative.

Steven Spielberg’s empty sci-fi epic Ready Player One takes place in a 2045 so dystopian that people spend all their time under headsets, inhabiting a virtual reality known as OASIS. The hero, 18-year-old Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), lives in Columbus, Ohio, in a slum made of stacked-up trailers, so you can’t blame him for focusing on his virtual life, where he commands an avatar named Parzival and tries to win an Easter egg hunt embedded in OASIS by its mysterious creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), that will grant the winner half a trillion dollars and full ownership of the invented world....

Like so many other musicians based in New York, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and pianist Kris Davis migrated there. Davis moved from Canada in 2001; Laubrock was born and raised in Germany, then spent nearly a decade in England before moving to the U.S. in 2009. For as long as they’ve lived in the same neck of the woods, they’ve appeared on each other’s records, and for a time they played together in the trio Paradoxical Frog with drummer Tyshawn Sorey....

Ata KakObaa Sima (Awesome Tapes From Africa) DJ ClentLast Bus to Lake Park (Duck n’ Cover) This anonymous black-metal act, which originally claimed to be from Chong­qing, China, recently confessed that it’s based in Minot, North Dakota. But the only thing lost with the unraveling of this fiction is an exotic origin story—the new Moonlover, recorded with Michigan-based engineer Josh Schroeder (one early hint that the band’s biography was bogus), is atmospheric, almost lyrical black metal with no perceptible Chinese character....

YouTube Earlier this month, when I first saw Mayor Rahm’s “Mister Rogers” ad, the one in which he wears a sweater and humbly admits that he can sometimes rub people the wrong way, I laughed. Then I felt a bit sad that Rahm’s campaign had spent so much money to make him appear at least as likable as Chuy Garcia and his big, cheerful mustache and ended up with something that at any other time might have been mistaken for performance art....

Longtime Reader music writer Peter Margasak began the weekly Sunday-night Frequency Series in May 2013 at Constellation (3111 N. Western), the eclectic music venue that had been opened by jazz drummer and all-around mastermind Mike Reed only a month prior. The series provides a regular stage for a burgeoning and adventurous new-music scene that before was plenty accustomed to occupying relatively unconventional spaces such as storefronts and galleries. And as evidenced by a marathon Frequency Series performance this last month in which pianist R....

The Dove Flyer

Warning: This review contains spoilers. But with tear gas, police surrounding protesters, and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s vow to increase police and National Guard presence, the protest visuals looked eerily similar to recent events, as people across the country took to the streets to protest the police killings of Black people this summer, set off initially by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (According to the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence later, police did in fact cause the violence during the 1968 DNC protests....

Q: I’m a 25-year-old woman currently in a poly relationship with a married man roughly 20 years my senior. This has by far been the best relationship I’ve ever had. However, something has me a bit on edge. We went on a trip with friends to a brewery with a great restaurant. It was an amazing place, and I’m sure his wife would enjoy it. He mentioned the place to her, and her response was NO, she didn’t want to go there because she didn’t want to have “sloppy seconds....

At the beginning of the year, Theatre Y had big plans to celebrate its upcoming 15-year anniversary. But once the realities of the pandemic set in and shows, tours, and theater festivals were canceled, the company had a clean slate of time and still wanted to celebrate its birthday. “Now that we are in this period of isolation, choosing from his body of work and sending something out weekly felt even more appropriate because András has a great deal of experience with a crisis of this scale, which most Americans are not professionals at,” Lorraine says....

How and from where do we get our news? The Pew Research Center just released a new study on the news preferences of the American public. The findings make for unsurprising reading, but as I read, I began to think about the study itself. But what is news? The result is a certain credulity. The Pew report tells us that when people get news online their most common way of responding to it is to have a conversation....

Walking into the Chicago History Museum’s new exhibit “Amplified: Chicago Blues” is like walking the streets of 1960s Chicago—when the music dominated clubs and living rooms across the city. The museum created the exhibit after purchasing 45,000 artifacts—including 40,000 photos—from the estate of Raeburn Flerlage, a music promoter, salesman, and radio host. Flerlage also worked as a freelance photographer for publications including the Chicago Daily News and DownBeat from 1959 to 1970....