Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

ARTIST: Jay Ryan SHOW: Electrical Audio’s 20th Anniversary Adventure at the Hideout Block Party on Sun 9/24 MORE INFO: thebirdmachine.com

Jeffrey Marini He’s the good news. Here’s the good news: the Chicago Park District announced today it has appointed playwright and 2014 People Issue person Ike Holter to curate the upcoming season at Theater on the Lake. The last time we checked in on this process, the Park District was looking for applications from developers who would design, build, and operate a renovated theater/restaurant facility on the lakefront site. Deadlines came and went, but a park district spokesperson today was unable to provide any further information on the status of the project....

I’m not sure I follow the thinking in the Tribune‘s editorial Sunday addressing the vacancy on the Supreme Court. President Obama wants to nominate a successor to Antonin Scalia; the Republicans vow they’ll ignore the nomination. Said the Tribune: “May we suggest there is indeed a middle ground.” The Tribune knows that won’t happen.

Decades of playing together have given percussionists Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph an almost clairvoyant rapport. They met as teens at a Chicago drum shop, and in the 70s they formed the Mandingo Griot Society with Gambian kora player Foday Musa Suso. Rudolph moved to New York in the 80s, but he and Drake have continued to collaborate, most notably in Moving Pictures. Last May, they recorded improvisations at NYC venue the Stone with saxophonist and flutist Dave Liebman, an NEA Jazz Master whose arid, biting timbres grace fusion-era Miles Davis classics such as On the Corner and Dark Magus (among hundreds of other albums)....

The streaming-video channel FilmStruck is currently featuring a small but potent package of crime films and thrillers focused on undercover cops. The fact that two are directed by Anthony Mann did not affect our decision to select this grouping for our list this week. Nope. Not one bit. T-Men This crisp 1948 thriller marked Anthony Mann’s emergence from B movie obscurity, setting him on the path that would lead to his great westerns of the 50s....

Once again, the Printers Row Lit Fest, the midwest’s largest literary festival, takes over Dearborn Street from Congress to Polk. There are books to buy, lectures to listen to, and autographs to obtain. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, here are some of our suggestions for the weekend’s best bets. Welcome to the Neighborhood, Saturday 10:30 AM Five writers tell stories about their neighborhoods for Paul Dailing and Rachel Hyman’s continuing itinerant live-lit series....

Richard Gere in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I have no plans to see The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel anytime soon, though I’m sure I’ll end up watching it some night down the road when I’m trying to fall asleep. The movie features Richard Gere in a supporting role, which makes it grade-A insomniac viewing as far as I’m concerned. I find Gere to be a soothing presence in everything he’s done post-Dr....

Savage Love Live stormed into Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. Comedian Corina Lucas absolutely killed it before our sold-out crowd, singer-songwriter Elisabeth Pixley-Fink performed an amazing set, and two lovely couples competed in our first (and most likely last) Mama Bird Cupcake Eating Contest. I wasn’t able to get to all of the audience-submitted questions, so I’m going to power through as many as I can in this week’s column....

I was reading an article in the New York Times about the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference when I spied the following sentence. But the Illinois State Board of Elections, hacked? I’ve been going around for the last few days asking people what they know about the story. And most folks didn’t know the state’s election board had been hacked, much less by Russian operatives. The only people who claimed they knew about it were reporters....

When Seratones released their 2016 debut album, Get Gone, it seemed they were on to something special: though they’re from Shreveport, Louisiana, their soulful punk sound came across like it had grown out of a musical road trip across the U.S., with stops in the deep south, Motor City, Memphis, Paisley Park, and assorted California beaches. The band’s new album, Power, tamps down the fuzzed-out atmospheres of their early material in favor of soul-pop sophistication without losing any of the music’s bustling eclecticism or the fire that blazes at its core....

Q: I’m a guy, 35, and a cheating piece of shit. I’m engaged to a woman I love, but earlier this year I cheated on her. I have no excuse. She discovered the dating app I used, and we worked through that. But she doesn’t know that shortly after her discovery, I went ahead and cheated. To my meager, meager credit, I did seek out only women who were looking for NSA hookups....

I was once a regular at Logan Square bar Golden Teardrops’s Thursday night karaoke, but singing in a crowded basement is the opposite of safe during an airborne pandemic. I was resigned to lingering in livestream comment sections until mid-April, when my friends Erin McAuliffe and Matt Munhall sent an invite to virtual karaoke. Virtual karaoke is just singing in your home, cueing up your own backing track on one device as you sing into the webcam of another....

Still, I’ve found it impossible to shake the feeling that I could attend the Dogs’ open tryouts and get called up to warm the bench if the whole team suddenly became stricken with food poisoning. This is part of their charm; it feels like anything can happen at a Dogs game. I’ve seen the Dogs commit more errors than in most MLB games I’ve witnessed, but also a lot more home runs and squeaky plays that left me on the edge of my seat too....

ARTIST: Joe Schorgl SHOW: Tacos vs. Pizza with Vamos and ShowYouSuck at Empty Bottle on Thu 10/6

Jake Chessum/Oxygen The Prancing Elites: Adrian, Tim, Jerel, Kareem, and Kentrell If you wanted to make reality TV sound infinitely more constructive than it is, you could say a thing that it does is showcase diversity. Besides competitions, where there’s generally no place for male teams, parades are the main venues for J-Setters to perform. Which presents another obstacle for the adorable team of misfits. The Prancing Elites are based in Mobile, Alabama, and any cultural strides that city’s made haven’t necessarily extended into the rest of Alabama, particularly the places where parades are major civic events....

The upcoming Strange Foods Festival started with an Instagram account. A year and a half ago Keng Sisavath, a 36-year-old dental technician, launched @strangefoodschicago to “introduce the food of my motherland,” he says. Sisavath, who was born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Laos, came to the U.S. as a toddler and was raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, by Lao relatives. The problem with trying to photograph Lao food in the Chicago area according to Sisavath, is that there isn’t much: unlike Green Bay, Chicago doesn’t have a significant Lao population....

The future of reality TV has arrived! It’s called The Circle, and it’s fuckin’ weird. The catfish on the show aren’t the only things that aren’t quite what they seem. Nearly every time the camera pans to the city where The Circle is happening, we get sweeping views of the Chicago skyline, overhead shots of the Adler Planetarium, and the lakefront—all interesting choices when you consider the show is actually filmed in England....

A year of the COVID-19 pandemic has left millions jobless, hundreds of thousands dead, and many turning to neighbors and mutual aid groups, instead of the government, to make ends meet. These hyperlocal organizations have had to step up their operations exponentially in part thanks to the government’s shoddy response to the pandemic. And activists say it shows the need for what many are calling the “solidarity economy,” an economic system based on equity, justice, and democracy....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Yablon went on to debunk most of the other “research” presented in the Journal story by requesting the same data Duff had cited and examining it herself.