Michael Gebert Scott Malloy People are always on the move in the restaurant business, and I’ve known plenty of chefs on the way up. But there’s something different about the moves made by a cook named Scott Malloy, who currently works at Momotaro’s izakaya. A Tennessee native, Malloy didn’t have Japanese food till he was nearly an adult, but he’s made up for lost time by being obsessive about it ever since....

Journalists are studying their navels again. As they’re hammered—by readers, partisans, and the candidates’ own camps—for their coverage of the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they’re asking themselves fundamental questions: Are we being fair? And fair to whom—the candidates, our readers, the needs of the nation, our own principles? And are we even supposed to be fair? Spayd showed some sympathy for this critique, but in the main she believes reporters should simply dig into their stories and let the chips fall where they may....

UPDATE Monday, March 16: this event has been indefinitely postponed. Refunds available at point of purchase. In the painfully honest spirit of Lenny Bruce, let’s begin with a couple of blunt observations. The first is that the very issue Bruce fought and died for—free speech and the right to say anything—has devolved in recent years into a gleeful incivility in which haters, trolls, and fools feel they can say anything, hurt anybody, and then hide behind the First Amendment....

Chicago hip-hop trio Hurt Everybody made experimental-leaning tracks that blurred the boundaries between rap and pop, but earlier this year they broke up. Fortunately I’ve found other young acts who seem to have learned from Hurt Everybody, including local four-piece Beach Jesus. They’ve been relatively quiet since releasing the EP This Time Last Year in February, but their members have kept busy—last week Beach Jesus producer Jaro dropped La Bleue, a wistful four-song EP featuring some of his bandmates....

In October leaders from the local Black Lives Matter movement talked with me about factors that affect travel options for African-Americans in Chicago, but that are sometimes overlooked by decision makers. These include subpar public transit service, unsafe walking conditions, and limited access to bike facilities, as well as expenses like train fares and traffic fines that can be significant for poor and working-class people. Worries about street crime and police abuse also influence their transportation choices....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 6/19: Jazz quartet Broken Shadows take on the music of saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Julius Hemphill. 8 PM, Bourbon on Division, 2050 W. Division, $25, $20 in advance, 21+

Giving Tuesday is over, but if you’ve still got a few dollars to spend, you could do worse than donating them to the kids at Horace Mann Elementary School in the South Chicago neighborhood. They’re trying to raise money for more instruments and supplies for their school band, the Marching Mustangs. CPS band programs typically don’t start till high school, but Horace Mann students can join the Marching Mustangs as early as fourth grade....

You may have had a marijuana­-related arrest, charge, or even sentence years ago and feel that your past is behind you. Perhaps you were arrested as a teenager for possession but never got charged. You may not realize that, unless you’ve gone through the process of having your records sealed or expunged, they are still public. While there are laws in effect to prevent employers and landlords from discriminating against those with a criminal record, there are many reasons that one may want to have their records sealed or expunged....

If you drive south out of Chicago through the industrial plumes of Gary, Indiana, then around the southern edge of Lake Michigan, then north beyond the towns of Harbor Country, then off the interstate onto a stretch called Blue Star Highway, then you’ll find dirt fire lanes that end in wide sweeps of dune and beach. Here, in a town called Covert, I’ve been weathering out the pandemic with my family for the past six weeks....

Chandler West/Sun-Times Media Layoffs strike again at both the Trib and the Sun-Times. After years of pain and misery, the dark art of telling employees to clean out their lockers may have located its wiser, kinder side at Chicago newspapers. Photographer Chuck Berman was one of ten editorial employees laid off by the Tribune last week, and instead of keying the first delivery truck he saw, he wrote a statement that wound up on Romenesko....

Now streaming on Netflix, Errol Morris’s Wormwood might have made a superb two-hour feature—but as it stands, the series (which unfolds in six parts) runs twice that length. It’s still an engaging and sometimes enthralling work, raising provocative questions about CIA conspiracies and how individuals reconcile with national history. Yet it’s also repetitive and padded out, stuffed with stylistic flourishes that add little to the material. Wormwood continues Morris’s investigation into dark corners of modern American history, making it of a piece with The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and The Unknown Known....

Longtime friends make the best bandmates. Case in point: Floatie. From 2017 into 2019, Floatie operated as a trio. They landed some plum opening slots, including a Subterranean show in October 2018 with Pile and the Spirit of the Beehive. Still, they thought something was missing, and eventually they brought Wisniewski aboard in summer 2019. Floatie’s finally finished full-length debut, Voyage Out, comes out March 26 through Brooklyn-based indie label Exploding in Sound....

Frédéric de Villamil/FlickR A close call waiting to happen? If you’re like me you sometimes think about the close calls you barely survived. These are the ones we never know about, when the coin was sailing through the air but no one told us fate had flipped it. Yet if we’d gone home one way instead of the other we’d have been flattened by a semi at an intersection; if the fiend trailing us down that darkened street while fingering the whetted blade in his jacket pocket hadn’t been distracted by a distant siren, or something, he’d have quickened his pace and sliced us up....

Laura Kelton (Sportsman’s Club) and Carley Gaskin, who co-owns a cocktail catering business called Hospitality 201, are known for their love of snacks and for always carrying some in their purses. A couple years ago they were driving back from a bachelorette party in Nashville, “feeling not so great,” Gaskin says. “We stopped at a gas station and got two huge bags of pork rinds. Before we even got back on the interstate, both bags were gone....

Now that the Lollapasnooza lineup has dropped, more summer festivals are due to make their big announcements—including Riot Fest, which returns to a still-battered Douglas Park from September 16 through 18. Gossip Wolf has a few ideas about who might be on that bill, and at the top of the list are nu-metal survivors Deftones, whose upcoming tour is conspicuously missing an Illinois date. Other possibilities include reunited screamo poster boys Thursday, 311 acolytes Turnstile, friendly MC Biz Markie, and the Velvet Underground of second-wave emo, American Football....

Demo by High Priests Ian’s Party is upon us. The four-day, four-venue punk-rock festival kicked off last night and swings into full gear this evening with stacked lineups at Quenchers, Cole’s, and the Mutiny. There are more than 50 bands playing the party this year, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “What It Was,” comes from one of my favorites of the bunch, newcomers High Priests—they’re set to play the Mutiny on Sun 1/4....

Buffalo Grove’s inaugural LGBTQ pride parade and festival are Sunday, June 2 along a residential route that’s likely to attract throngs of people sporting rainbow-hued feather boas, beads, and maybe even a tutu or two. Just be sure to keep it all family-friendly, suggests Molly Pinta, the 13-year-old student at Twin Groves Middle School who organized the parade along with her mom Carolyn, a Spanish teacher at the school. Once Pinta Pride Project Inc....

The Wicker Man Last week, Sir Christopher Lee, the remarkably prolific actor best known for his run of films with Hammer Pictures and for playing Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, died at the age of 93. Lee starred in more than 200 films, and he worked right up until his death, having most recently appeared in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, part of Jackson’s gluttonous attempt at reeling in more Tolkien dollars....

Julian Leal is a 21-year-old college student majoring in business at Columbia College in the South Loop, but he’s better known by his stage name: DJ Drip. In his Instagram bio, he calls himself “The Midwest’s Youngest + Hottest DJ”—and depending on who counts as a DJ and how you measure hotness, that might even be true. “I’m from northwest Indiana. From East Chicago, Indiana,” Leal says. “That’s actually a city—I was born and raised there....