Originating on the streets of Argentina, filtered through European high society, blending African rhythms and immigrant spirit, tango, like a fine perfume, marries sophistication with an undertone of flesh. But if your primary association with tango is corniness, Sombras Tango Cabaret, created and directed by Jorge Niedas and Liz Sung for Tango 21 Dance Theater, with choreography by Niedas and writing by Sung, brings it to another level. You won’t see roses clenched in anyone’s teeth, but this pastiche of Cabaret and every summer stock show there ever was makes for a mostly cringeworthy evening....

My search for a Detroit-style pizza in Chicago that bests the chain squares from Jet’s continues. I already told you about the Logan Squares at Paulie Gee’s—limited edition, almost faithfully executed, buttery, cheesy-crusted wonders that suffer from one fatal flaw: cold sauce. So I was eager to check out the pies from Union Squared in thronged Revival Food Hall, the second outpost of Evanston’s Detroit-style joint from the folks behind the bustling Neapolitan spot Union Pizzeria....

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs,” declares Bathsheba Everdene, the young heroine of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far From the Madding Crowd. For a Victorian writer, Hardy has always struck me as unusually modern—especially in his simple, exacting, observational prose—but Bathsheba’s statement is positively postmodern in its understanding of how words create their own value system....

White Earth Tonight the Music Box Theatre will screen all five of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts in two separate programs. The first, which contains the Polish character portrait Joanna and an American social-issue doc called Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press, screens at 7 PM (and repeats this coming Saturday and on Sunday 2/15 at noon). The second, which screens at 9 PM (and again this coming Sunday and on Saturday 2/14 at noon), features the remaining three: White Earth, a tone poem about oil-field laborers in North Dakota; The Reaper, a study of a stoic Mexican slaughterhouse worker; and Our Curse, another Polish submission, a personal essay by the parents of a child with a rare, life-threatening illness....

Q: I’m a 38-year-old bi woman who has been sleeping with a married male coworker for the last eight months. We’re a walking cliché: I’m a nurse, he’s a doctor, and one night he ended up spilling a lot of personal information about his marriage to me (sexless, non-romantic, she might be a lesbian) before asking if he could kiss me. I declined. Three months and many text messages later, I met him for drinks....

As the novel coronavirus pandemic takes an ever-increasing toll on the United States, it’s now widely publicized that COVID-19 deaths haven’t been experienced evenly across all segments of the population. Across the country, Black people are dying from the disease at disproportionately high rates. One of the first researchers to identify the severity of this trend was Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine....

Chicago is kin to the south. No other U.S. city has more ties to the lower half of the country, specifically the Mississippi Delta, aka the Most Southern Place on Earth. All you have to do is spend ten minutes in the presence of Yoland Cannon to understand this. On the 900 block of North Laramie, Cannon is the Tamale Guy. No one talks about Claudio. Most afternoons, weather permitting, he sells Mississippi Delta-style tamales from a yellow cart parked on the sidewalk: ground-beef-stuffed cornmeal magic wrapped in husks and simmered in an oily, peppery brew that delivers the same immediate sensory impact as a shot of whiskey....

Aimee Levitt A dog desperate for a trip to the dog park and canine companionship Just in time for fine spring dog-walking weather, vets at Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin teamed up to drop some more crappy news on the dogs of Chicago: the outbreak of K9 flu, which has infected more than 1,000 dogs, emptied dog parks and doggy day cares, and given even the most innocent sidewalk butt-sniff the feel of a criminal activity, is even worse than we thought....

On December 14, President Trump promised to liberate free markets, propel the economy, and—what else—”make America great again”—all by cutting federal red tape. Well, apparently, Trump forgot to break the news to the burgeoning medical marijuana industry and businessmen like Joseph Friedman, the chief operations officer for PDI Medical, a dispensary in the northwest suburbs. [content-8] “The bank’s stance is that protecting their customers is paramount,” a Bank of Springfield spokesman told reporters on April 3....

I used to drink so rarely that my doctors considered me a nondrinker. I used to safely estimate my drinking to be around one drink a month. I used to joke that I wanted to drink more, wanted to be able to appreciate fancy cocktails and fine wine. But I’m not alone in this journey. I have friends with eerily similar experiences, friends who have started regularly drinking at 3 PM, others who are nearly constantly stoned during the day....

Caroline Roe Tiki Terrace in Des Plaines It was an announcement to warm any exotica-listening hepcat’s heart: one of Chicago’s hot nightlife entrepreneurs was opening a new tiki bar in a hot neighborhood, where you’d be able to drink classic tiki cocktails that weren’t made out of grocery store-grade mixers. Here was a sign that the midcentury celebration of a South Seas fantasy as a rebellion against the conformist 1950s was coming back and hipper than ever, even as the original wave of such places from the 1940s through 1960s faded into obscurity in malls in second-tier suburbs....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 11, 2016. Jon Stewart visits University of Chicago, calls Trump a “man baby” Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart has mostly stayed out of the spotlight since handing over the show to Trevor Noah. But the comedian stopped by University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics Monday to tape a podcast with David Axelrod. While he was there, he called presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump a “man baby....

Jimmy Katz Rudresh Mahanthappa Like so many of today’s most interesting jazz musicians, the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa regularly creates disparate contexts, hybrids, and concepts to develop new music. The son of Indian immigrants, he’s explored the music of the subcontinent in multiple environments: some have been explicit, such as the remarkable 2008 album Kinsmen (Pi), where he collaborated with the Indian classical-music saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath; others have been more subtle and integrated, such as the 2006 duets collection Raw Materials (Savoy) he made with pianist and fellow Indian-American Vijay Iyer....

Jennifer Hall is one of Gossip Wolf’s favorite local indie singer-songwriters. She released the dazzling LP In This in 2011 to not nearly enough fanfare, and this week she’s following it up with more studio material on the EP Jennifer Hall. Her clever alt-pop hooks, dash of Sondheimesque theatrics, and astonishing range and technique make for a dynamite combo. On Fri 6/12 Hall plays a release show at Subterranean, where she’ll have vinyl copies of the EP....

ARTIST: Adam Noelle SHOW: God Awful Small Affairs, Bernie & the Wolf, Lettering, and Lili at the Empty Bottle on Sun 6/2 MORE INFO: Braver Spaces/Adam Noelle

The torrent of “best of 2017” content started last week, with album lists at Rolling Stone, Paste, and Consequence of Sound. Like Christmas lights and “Winter Wonderland,” these lists seem to arrive earlier every year—and I can’t say I look forward to scrolling through a “year in review” list as I digest Thanksgiving dinner. December is usually a quiet month for new music, but there’s some precedent for dropping great music then....

Vivre Sa Vie Starting this week and running all the way through March, the Gene Siskel Film Center is hosting a partial retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard films. Titled “Godard: The First Wave,” it includes most of the films from his seminal New Wave period, plus a small collection of later-period stuff, including Hail Mary and Every Man for Himself. The series runs concurrently with the master director’s latest film, Goodbye to Language 3-D, making its long-awaited Chicago debut with a monthlong run at the Film Center....

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. Not for nothing but if you read the entry about Mike & Molly above this, you probably already have an idea about our diminished capacity to turn it off and read this week....

As the Chicago’s Public School system heads towards teacher layoffs and a possible strike, Governor Rauner flew home from his vacation in the Moroccan desert to continue his fight with Mayor Emanuel. Fired up from the camels and the tents, Rauner called Rahm “tone deaf” for resisting investigations into the police and law departments. The mayor also told reporters that Rauner’s using the schools as pawns in his political game against House Speaker Michael Madigan....

Viceland, Vice Media’s TV channel, debuted at the end of February, and last week its music program, Noisey (which shares its name with Vice’s music site), dedicated a 45-minute episode to Chicago’s hip-hop scene and the city’s violence epidemic. If the premise feels familiar, it should: in 2014 Vice debuted Noisey: Chiraq, an eight-part video documentary series on the local rap scene. At best the series sketched the characters central to the drill sound, which consumed most of the oxygen in Chiraq even though other kinds of Chicago hip-hop had made their presence felt on an international scale by that time....