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Every editorial is a nose thrust into the people’s business by somebody nobody elected, so it’s surprising to read an editorial that disparages someone else’s nose on the same basis. Nevertheless, the Sun-Times, in a weekend editorial championing the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, had this to say: “The rumor mill rumbled all Friday that Friends of the Parks, a small group of lakefront protectionists elected by nobody, might be willing to drop their opposition to building the museum on Chicago’s lakefront....

Life’s no bed of roses for murder convicts after they’re exonerated, Chicago journalist Alison Flowers shows in her new book, Exoneree Diaries. Flowers investigated potential wrongful conviction cases for Northwestern University’s Medill Justice Project from 2011 to 2013. She works at the Invisible Institute, the south-side nonprofit led by Jamie Kalven that has been instrumental in monitoring police misconduct. Exoneree Diaries is based largely on a series of Flowers’s reports for WBEZ in 2013 and 2014....

Here is how you explain to a doctor that, despite the fact that you seem OK and are not visibly dying, you do have a rare illness that requires immediate medical attention. You do it calmly, because if you reveal that you’re freaking out, then they’ll know you’re a lunatic. Panicking is intimate; it’s meant for the close friends and family, if any, that you’ve been frenetically recounting your symptoms to as they talk you down....

In a formerly vacant lot in Albany Park at the intersection of Pulaski Road and Wilson Avenue stand two tipis—one perhaps 20 feet tall, the other half that height—surrounded by dry, yellowed grass rising up from the cold earth. Across the street to the north is a Citgo gas station, and to the west is the large parking lot of the 17th District Chicago Police Department. The Chi-Nations Youth Council, a grassroots organization that champions environmental and social justice while creating safe spaces for Native American youth, and the American Indian Center, the oldest urban Native American cultural center in the nation, have leased the lot together with the intention of growing a garden....

Yet again, Antonin Scalia has given us reason not to trust the court he sits on. When he scolded the Supreme Court in his dissent to its ruling that sanctioned same-sex marriage, I could understand it. His side had lost, and what explanation for that could there be other than that the winners were unfit to judge? And so he wrote, “To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. CPS alters plans to shut down three Englewood high schools over the summer, will phase them out instead Chicago Public Schools is backtracking on its controversial decision to shut down three Englewood high schools at the end of the 2017-’18 school year and now says it won’t close them until the current freshmen graduate. Harper, Hope, and TEAM Englewood high schools will be phased out over the next three years, and a fourth high school, Robeson, will likely close over the summer, according to CPS chief executive officer Janice Jackson....

Throughout history Jews have been on the move, often out of necessity. Ever since the Babylonian exile, the story of the Jewish diaspora has been by definition one of journeys, as Jews were either expelled or forced by circumstance to search for opportunity elsewhere. So it’s fitting that Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership has organized its first Sunday Cinema series around the theme of Jewish journeys. All four titles are distributed by The National Center for Jewish Film, and all have postshow events curated by Spertus....

This week’s cover story is an excerpt from my just-published book The Lives of Robert Ryan, a biography of the Chicago-born actor who starred in The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen, Bad Day at Black Rock, and The Set-Up—the last of which which I’ll introduce on Sunday at the Music Box. A Q&A follows with Matthew Hoffman of Park Ridge Classic Film and Lisa Ryan, the actor’s daughter. Elsewhere in this week’s issue, Ben Sachs reviews Amour Fou, the latest from Jessica Hausner (Lourdes), about the suicide pact between the tormented Prussian writer Heinrich von Kleist and an aristocratic woman dying of cancer....

If you have any time for tense, startling improvisation, Both Will Escape (Family Vineyard) is 2016’s record to beat. Recorded in spring 2015, it captures the thrill of discovery as guitarist Tashi Dorji and drummer Tyler Damon play together in a studio for the first time—and for just the third time in any setting. Their sound is not without precedent: its jagged edges and unpredictable turns recall the drums-and-guitar duo of Han Bennink and Derek Bailey, and Dorji and Damon occasionally achieve a sandblasting intensity on par with that of Rudolph Grey’s Blue Humans....

I go to a lot of concerts—one recent year I counted 139—and aside from the occasional festival, jazz and improvised music almost always happen indoors. For more than a year now, the pandemic has kept me from my regular haunts—Constellation, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio—but it’s also brought me a new kind of show. For a few months this past summer and fall, saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Tyler Damon played regularly, usually on Friday evenings, in Margate Park near Foster and Lake Shore Drive....

In 1987, Ben Hollis and John Davies pitched Chicago PBS station WTTW on a program that would capture the city’s obscure corners, unusual characters, and fringe phenomena. To show the station what they had in mind, they’d shot a “guerilla demo” at a spot Hollis already knew: the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Belmont and Clark in Lakeview. He’d often driven past it late at night and seen groups of young people hanging out in the parking lot, and he figured it’d be worth investigating....

With the City Council-led process known as reapportionment ready to begin, the time has come for me to offer my guide to ward mapping. So we care more about sacred principles when it comes to electing Chicago aldermen than presidents. I can’t justify our system—only try to explain it. Or we could put 50 aldermen in a back room and let them do their thing. As practical as it sounds, there are drawbacks to having computers blindly redraw the wards....

As excuses never to leave the house go, Cristiano (Rolando Serrano) has more than his fair share. He’s a former world champion at competitive online soccer who made so much money gaming that he could support his whole extended family, all without getting off the couch except to travel to tournaments. He had plans to shock the FIFA community by one day revealing his secret queer lover, but now that lover is dead; shortly after he died, Christiano’s father died too....

Before Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was released in theaters a little more than a month ago, Hollywood insiders speculated that the movie could be a rarity: an intellectually rigorous blockbuster that could connect with mainstream audiences and Academy voters. Once 2049 underperformed at the box office it was treated as a misfire, proof that audiences don’t like to be challenged, or that the marketing campaign didn’t try hard enough to appeal to millennials or women, or that the distributor’s overzealous attempt to police spoilers wound up constricting the conversation around the film....

Back in the 1880s, railroad magnate George Pullman became a pioneer urban planner of sorts when he decided to design and build a model town where his employees could live and build railway cars without having to face the crime and temptations of the city or a long commute. With the help of architect Solon Spencer Beman and landscape architect Nathan F. Barrett, he created an entire town from scratch on 300 acres near Lake Calumet, just south of what was then Chicago’s southern border....

We are facing a test and we are failing. Police and prosecutorial reformers across the country are watching us and Kim Foxx. They are watching the media attack her for the Jussie Smollett investigation and prosecution, watching the success of forces invested in taking down her mission and vision of reform. Across the country reformers like Kim Foxx are learning to be afraid. Kim’s changing the conversation, bringing prosecutors into neighborhoods disinvested for generations and struggling with violent crime....

Q: I had a stroke a year ago. The woman I was dating at the time stepped away. I have no hard feelings but I long for intimacy again. I am profoundly grateful that I don’t have any major outward injuries from the stroke, but my stamina is still very low and might always be. That makes me self-conscious and insecure about sex. Would it be “oversharing” if I told someone about my stroke before we go to bed for the first time?...

Singer and guitarist Sophie Brochu has been a mainstay in the Chicago shoegaze scene for nearly a decade, both with the five-piece Videotape and in the live lineup of Scott Cortez’s long-running Astrobrite. In 2017 Brochu debuted her own project, the introspective Fauvely, with the excellent Watch Me Overcomplicate This, and on Friday, May 17, she releases her best work yet—the EP This Is What the Living Do (via local label Diversion)....

South-side native Kwyn Townsend Riley, aka Kwynology, is in love with the city of Chicago. Her hopes for its people, her pride in its culture, and her appreciation of its influence on her individually were recurring themes in my conversation with her. They also appear in her recent poem “Windy.” In the emphatic spoken-word piece that is as sobering as it is starry-eyed, Kwyn delivers a sermon on what her hometown means to her and expresses her gratitude, optimism, criticism, and vision for “Windy,” which she personifies as a hurt person who only wanted to “burn blunts, blow trees, and do poetry, and be free” but has ended up burning “childless dreams....

As the sky turned pink and baby blue on the east end of 71st Street in Englewood, teachers and staff from Carrie Jacobs Bond Elementary School began to arrive for a four-hour picket on the first day of their strike over stalled contract negotiations with Chicago Public Schools. Bundled up with union T-shirts pulled over thick hoodies and warm coats, they exchanged cheerful greetings, set up a table of donated food for kids, and handed out picket signs....