The Victory Monument on King Drive near 35th Street honors Black Chicagoans who fought in France during the First World War. Nearby is a plaque for their former commander, Colonel Franklin A. Denison. Beloved by his troops, Denison was removed from command before he could lead his men into battle. He subsequently came under the attention of the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor of the FBI. Its Chicago office identified Denison as “the chief individual agitator” of the 1919 Chicago race riot....

One of the highlights of my Father’s Day celebration was reading press coverage of President Trump’s colossal bust of a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Was it the rows and rows of empty blue seats? Or that one leader of the TikTok rebellion was Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-year-old Mayor Pete supporter from Fort Dodge, Iowa, who had this vision of the “19,000-seat auditorium barely filled . . . leaving Trump standing there alone on the stage”?...

Jay Janner/AP Photos A guy who thinks the military is going to overtake Texas The recent order by the governor to the Texas State Guard to keep an eye on U.S. Army maneuvers in the vicinity should be contemplated by serious Chicagoans with a twinge of envy. Illinois doesn’t have a state guard. A pity. So he pointed out “the ‘militia’ in colonial America consisted of a subset of ‘the people’—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range....

Tonya Crowder is a good cook, and last Christmas was extra special. She expected to have her fiance, Roosevelt Myles, join her at home for the holiday for the first time. So she drew up a menu: greens, chicken and dressing, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, pie, caramel cake. “According to everything that I see, the only decision that [the judge] can make is either ‘Come home,’ or even if he does continue to start the hearing, they should release him because he was wrongfully sentenced,” she says of her mind-set before last year’s hearing....

It’s a dangerous thing to marry a stranger: the beautiful girl passing through town; the impetuous boy taken with her at first sight. My parents discovered this, to their eternal regret. But that’s another story. The story at hand is The Light in the Piazza—a rental production of Adam Guettel’s rapturous musical adaptation (book by Craig Lucas) of the 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer in a holiday-season run at the Lyric Opera House....

In a recent article for the London Review of Books titled “You Are the Product,” John Lanchester takes a rather skeptical view of Facebook and Google, arguing that these sites don’t exist to bring people together or provide information, but rather to collect data on their users that they can sell to advertisers. Lanchester goes so far as to deem Facebook “the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind,” adding “it knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government agent has ever known about its citizens....

Don’t let the polar vortex scare you, layer up and get out of the house. There’s plenty to do this weekend, here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 12/16: Michelle Visage hosts Christmas Queens at the Vic (3145 N. Sheffield). This touring holiday show features seasonal performances from former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants Detox, Ginger Minj, Jiggly Caliente, Katya, Manila Luzon, Sharon Needles, and Thorgy Thor. 8 PM

On a mild morning in early May, two teenage boys sat on the porch of a house in West Humboldt Park on busy Chicago Avenue. From there, they could see a string of abandoned stores, boarded up and painted in bright colors. Occasionally, a CTA bus would pass in front of them, carrying commuters from the distant edges of the city to the Magnificent Mile shopping district eight miles to the east....

After my first listen to last year’s, Forever Neverland (Columbia), the latest full-length from Danish singer-songwriter MØ I realized that I had stumbled into a bizarre experiment. When I listened to the electro-pop album on Spotify, I hardly noticed the typically disruptive between-song ads (no, I don’t have a Spotify subscription—what of it?). I read this result a couple of different ways, neither wholly negative or positive. Ultimately, though the record is being spun as a sort of art-pop tour de force in line with the work of luminaries such as Grimes, it’s mostly just a bunch of middle-of-the-road club bangers....

The posi vibes of bop can spread like a Dlow viral video, but for all the times the dance and its music have lit up parties or landed on TV, they seem to have hit a glass ceiling when it comes to public familiarity. Sure, Dlow’s “Bet You Can’t Do It Like Me” keeps growing—the bop king’s latest video is closing in on 50 million YouTube views. But a recent Wall Street Journal profile on Dlow makes it sound like his dance moves and his music sprang into being without precedent, which is a frustrating level of ignorance to see from such a respected outlet....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, May 17, 2016. City want to ban mention of CPD “code of silence” in courtroom case Two Chicago Police officers filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in 2012 claiming that they were given the cold shoulder for breaking the police “code of silence” by reporting other cops’ wrongdoing. Now lawyers for the city are trying to ban the phrase “code of silence” from the courtroom, even though Mayor Rahm Emanuel mentioned the police department “code of silence” in his post-Laquan McDonald scandal speech to the City Council....

When Leela James released her first album, A Change Is Gonna Come (Warner Bros.), in summer 2005, she was widely heralded as the newest incarnation of the classic soul diva from times gone by. This would be a lot of hype for anyone to live up to, but James obviously had the chops to do it. She was right in the vanguard of the entire neosoul trip of that era, and since then, she’s enjoyed fairly steady success....

If Donald Trump really intends to punish his enemies and reward his friends now that he, gulp, has all the power in the land, I think we should consider moving to the 54th precinct of the 19th Ward. That’s the very same number of votes that I got from that west-side precinct. In this case, I was in step with Chicago. Hillary Clinton won about 84 percent of the Chicago vote, while most of the rest of the country was igniting the Trump revolution....

Mike Sula Pholourie, Taste of Trinidad My friends over at LTHForum beat me to the punch about Taste of Trinidad, a new spot in Rogers Park that brings the number of places in the city where you can access the food of Trinidad and Tobago up to precisely two. That the menus are almost identical might have something to do with the fact that Grand Boulevard’s excellent Cafe Trinidad is owned by the brother of ToT’s proprietor, according to Taco Scholar Titus Ruscitti....

Nat Gelb grew up in a house off a dirt road in a tiny town in upstate New York. “Really off the grid,” he says. His family never went to restaurants; his parents cooked all their food. When he moved to New York City, he says, “I was blown away by all the amazing restaurants, but I missed being able to form a human connection to the people who were making the food I was eating....

Ted Cruz was first out of the gate among the Republican presidential contenders insisting that President Obama should keep his hands off the nomination of Antonin Scalia’s successor. “Justice Scalia was an American hero,” Cruz tweeted, when the news of Scalia’s death was an hour old. “We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement.” Scalia would have been a more influential justice, pundits have observed, if he’d been more political, forming coalitions and seeking middle ground....

It’s comforting to regard the premise of Lucy Kirkwood’s eco-thriller with a smug sense of that-would-never-actually-happen. Humans would never be so stupid as to build a nuclear reactor in a flood zone, right? And even if they did, they surely wouldn’t put the backup generators in the basement. Except that’s basically the setup that led to disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. In The Children, married nuclear scientists Hazel (Janet Ulrich Brooks) and Robin (Yasen Peyankov) are living in the wake of a Fukushima-like disaster....

For years, I’ve been really trying to bring the TIF program to life in an often-futile attempt to make this abstract concept tangible and real. Pappas had her office’s computers sift through last year’s tax data to determine which TIF districts in Cook County got how much in property tax dollars. But it’s become a reverse Robin Hood program, thanks to a flaw in the law that makes almost any area, no matter how rich, TIF eligible....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. “Can we go smoke a cigarette?” Vic Mensa asks. We’re inside Hyde Park Records, on 53rd Street, one of the 24-year-old rapper’s favorite teenage hangouts, catching up with the Roc Nation signee before he packs up his hometown apartment and heads for Los Angeles to record—though he’s not sure when he’ll move....