On Sunday, January 13, a 57-year-old Japanese singer named Anri will play a rare midwestern show for a sold-out crowd at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center. In the mid-80s, while Japan was enjoying the final years of its long postwar boom, Anri became one of the crucial voices of “City Pop”—a fizzy, euphoric form of electronic disco, that was imbued with the optimistic spirit of a New Japan and also took cues from American superstars such as Michael Jackson and Donna Summer....

It’s now conventional wisdom that 2017 was one of the very worst years in recent history. It’s also conventional wisdom that the world can’t be entirely terrible as long as it contains cute baby animals. Therefore: behold the new baby gray seal born at the Brookfield Zoo on December 27 to Lily and Boone. Although gray seals aren’t an endangered species, there are only 25 living in captivity, spread out among ten zoos and aquariums; five of them are in Brookfield....

AP Photo/Las Vegas News Bureau, Steve Spatafore “This could be our year / Took a long time to come” Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the oddly comforting text app Invisible Boyfriend? —Aimee Levitt • David Cronenberg on how Kafka influenced The Fly? —Tal Rosenberg

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who actually thinks homosexuality is a choice, announced he’s running for president. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About a Milwaukee prosecutor who’s trying to reduce the mass incarceration of African-Americans? —Tal Rosenberg • That this weird bike that just raised $973,764 on a $50,000 Kickstarter goal? —Sue Kwong

On January 7, one day after Georgia’s runoff election resulted in its first Black senator and a white supremacist insurrection disrupted the presidential confirmation at the U.S. Capitol, dancers, dancemakers, presenters, and arts organizations convened at “Dance in Chicago 2021: Collecting. Hibernating. Emerging.,” a citywide virtual gathering and information session peer-produced by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Chicago Dancers United, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, Harris Theater for Music and Dance, High Concept Labs, Links Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pivot Arts, and See Chicago Dance....

On June 9, 2017, Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, disappeared. The story of her family’s search for her, and their fight for justice in what tragically became a case of abduction and murder, made international news. The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign has the largest population of Chinese students in the U.S. It remains to be seen what long-term impact this might have on enrollment, but the film shows Chinese students on campus taking more precautions and curtailing their activities....

The name “Breezy Rodio” might sound like it belongs to an alt-country band. In reality, it’s the moniker of a bluesman who just released his third album. Sometimes the Blues Got Me (Delmark) has a straight-ahead big-band sound that does a great job of highlighting the musician’s passionate, Italian-accented vocals and understated guitar. Originally from Rome, Rodio played behind Chicago bluesman Linsey Alexander for a decade before striking out on his own in 2017....

NOVEMBER THEATER PICKS (Kerry Reid) Pygmalion goes pop in Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm’s sardonic comedy about a Canadian bubblegum star hoping to toughen up his image on a reality TV show, with the help of “bad boy” rappers Black and Alexand of Petty Young Goons. Lili-Anne Brown directs the midwest premiere. 11/5-12/21, see website for showtimes, Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway,jackalopetheatre.org, $27-$35. Always . . . Patsy Cline What the Moon Pulls...

Few indie-rock artists are more prolific than singer-songwriter Mike Kinsella, who’s been playing in Illinois bands since the late 80s, including Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, and American Football. The latter band reunited in 2014 following a 14-year break and subsequently released two acclaimed albums, 2016’s American Football (or LP2) and last year’s American Football (LP3). Now the singer and multi-instrumentalist is set to release The Avalanche (Polyvinyl), the tenth studio album from his solo project, Owen....

Make the ghost real. Make Hamlet a genius and a killer at the same time. Make Ophelia’s insanity inevitable. Make Polonius wise. Or is the ghost an illusion through and through? Is Hamlet a privileged monster, a whiny misogynistic fencing enthusiast and creep who commits foul murder with impunity, writes blatantly offensive letters, and enjoys a good four-hour pacing session by himself around the halls at Elsinore? Is it Ophelia’s play, really?...

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP Wrong again Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • That the history of doctoring footballs in the NFL didn’t start with the Patriots and Deflategate? —Mick Dumke • This surprisingly in-depth profile of comedian and Chicago expat Kyle Kinane? —Drew Hunt

Sebastian Willnow/Getty Images RIP Günter Grass Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That the U.S. Forest Service is looking into Nestle’s role in California’s drought crisis? —Drew Hunt • About women in newsrooms? —Drew Hunt

When grieving, outraged crowds marched through downtown Chicago on Saturday, May 30, to protest the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Chicago rapper Femdot was among them. And when Chicago cops began assaulting those protesters, he was among the targets—one or more officers struck him in the head with a baton. Even after a hospital trip to have his injury closed with staples, Femdot—born Femi Adigun—didn’t shrink from the fight against systemic racism and police brutality....

Kanye West drops his seventh album Friday, and it’s currently titled with the acronym T.L.O.P. He’s revised the name a few times, though, and when he tweeted the latest change early Tuesday morning, Kanye offered a prize to the person who guesses what the acronym stands for: a pair of his newest Yeezy shoes plus tickets to Thursday’s rollout for his Season 3 fashion line. Kanye has booked Madison Square Garden for the event, which also serves as the premiere of his new album....

It transpired more than 1,000 miles away, but the mass shooting that killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 hit close to home for Jaden Gray. The 18-year-old Lincoln Park High School senior thought of Cesar—the friend from dance class who was lost in a fatal shooting outside Curie Metro High School in June. There are 2,545 different walkouts planned around the country, according to Empower’s website, including a bunch at schools in the city of Chicago....

The Sex Pistols rewired lots of young minds in 1976, when they began their scorched-earth climb to infamy in London—and within little more than a year, their music had also changed the life of a 24-year-old in Chicago named Terry Fox. On a Sunday night in August 1977, Fox and a couple friends were walking north on Halsted Street in Lincoln Park when someone opened the front door of a squat A-frame nearby and a burst of noise rushed out....

It’s tulip time. Between now and Mother’s Day, masses of these heralds of spring will burst into bloom at the Chicago Botanic Garden, which counts 750,000 bulbs among the treasures on its Glencoe campus. To see them in fields of dazzling color is to begin to understand the mania that seized Holland in the 17th century, driving the price of a single bulb to many times the annual earnings of ordinary Dutchmen....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, June 20, 2016. Dennis Hastert to report to prison in Minnesota Wednesday Former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert will start his prison sentence at the Rochester Federal Medical Center in Minnesota Wednesday. Hastert has the distinction of becoming “highest-ranking elected official in American history to serve time behind bars,” according to the Daily Herald. The disgraced politician pleaded guilty to breaking federal banking laws in order to pay hush money to a man, one of five he is alleged to have sexually molested while working as a teacher at Yorkville High School in the 60s and 70s....

Ever since Mayor Rahm kicked off his reelection campaign, I’ve been reminded of this otherwise forgettable 1960s flick called A Guide for the Married Man. “What?” says Charlie. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” In the end, we won’t make him dinner. But we’ll reelect him, leaving him free to go back to his old ways. And then, a few months ago, his campaign overseers apparently broke him the news that the Chicago electorate is not, by and large, made up of New York pundits and Wall Street types....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Afghan war veteran Miguel Perez Jr. could be deported this week Miguel Perez Jr., a U.S. Army veteran of the Afghan war and a green card holder, is in danger of being deported as soon as this week, according to the Tribune. A federal court denied Perez’s appeal to stay in the U.S. after he finished a prison term for a drug conviction. Perez, who came to the U....