In the first week of August, as he was preparing for his 25th year as a middle school social studies teacher, Rob DiPrima got the call CPS teachers have come to fear. At age 52, DiPrima’s something of a legend at southeast-side Jane Addams Elementary School, where he’s taught seventh- and eighth-grade social studies since 2000. DiPrima was one of roughly 1,000 CPS employees—including 500 teachers—laid off last month because of budget cuts....

On September 14, 2004, a scene unfolded in the West Loop that would have been unthinkable a few decades before. The city unveiled a 3,200-pound bronze sculpture commemorating the Haymarket Affair of 1886. A seminal moment in international labor history, the Haymarket Affair started as a labor strike for an eight-hour workday and ended in a violent confrontation between demonstrators and police. Someone threw a bomb, four workers and seven cops were killed, dozens of people were injured, and more than 100 arrested....

Founded five years ago and recipient of a 2019 Ruth Page Award, the Chicago Dance History Project has steadily built a digital archive of original and collected research documenting theatrical dance in Chicago, hosted and produced numerous public events exploring topics in Chicago dance, and amassed a large collection of performance footage and other historical materials. “We’ve been working with a sense of urgency to capture as many dance histories of Chicago as we can, while we still can, through recorded oral history interviews primarily....

The first thing Blake Karlson did to promote his record label Chicago Research was head to what he calls “the most haunted cemetery in the United States.” Hidden in Rubio Woods Forest Preserve in the southwest suburbs, Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery has been a nexus for spooky apparitions since at least the 1950s, according to Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s 1999 book, Graveyards of Chicago. Witnesses have reported seeing flashing lights, a house that would appear and disappear without a trace, a man with two heads, mysterious hooded figures, and a woman cloaked in white....

Dear Chicago Theater Community, Another loss for young professionals who are just entering the theater community is the opportunity to see Chicago theater at its finest. With the tumultuous political situation and a decade’s worth of struggle, it truly felt that this was the season of making bold statements. Directors from Lili-Anne Brown (School Girls) to Wardell Julius Clark (Kill Move Paradise), to Tara Branham (Little Women), to Brian Balcom (Teenage Dick)—each of their plays opened up gateways for conversation for people from all walks of life: POC, femme, queer, disabled....

Buzzard What would you call someone who suffers from delusions of grandeur and can turn violent at a moment’s notice? “Psychotic”? No, I’m sorry, the correct answer is “famous.” David Cronenberg nails it with his latest nightmare, Maps to the Stars, and our review is here. Also this week, Drew Hunt reviews Joel Potrykus’s outsider indie drama Buzzard, screening midnight Friday and Saturday at Music Box; Hunt joins Potrykus for an onstage Q&A on Saturday at 10 PM....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Mark Wilson/Getty Images He’s a country guy now, folks. • About various attempts to revive dying languages? —Aimee Levitt • About how much Koreans love watching strangers binge eat? —Julia Thiel

The cover of Surf Last night Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment—the band he plays in with Chance the Rapper, Nate Fox, and Peter Cottontale—dropped their highly anticipated album Surf for free via iTunes. Chance is the most prominent member of the Social Experiment, which served as his backing band when he toured on his fantastic 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, and while his distinctly coiled raps, yips, and tender coos are all over Surf, the album is fronted by Donnie Trumpet, aka former Kids These Days trumpet player Nico Segal....

UPDATE: The date of the blackout and the meeting at the Laugh Factory has been changed to Sunday, January 31 in order to accommodate as many female comics as possible. As an alternative, Women in Comedy founder Victoria Elena Nones is encouraging female comics to gather at the Laugh Factory in Lakeview for a panel discussion lead by Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation....

Ready your picnic blankets and folding chairs, because the warm weather brings with it a host of outdoor film screenings. Between the Chicago Park District‘s Movies in the Parks series (which began earlier this month) and the Millennium Park Summer Film Series (which begins Tuesday, June 21), there are nearly 300 free screenings throughout the summer. To help you keep track of the glut of alfresco cinema, here’s a roundup of the movies playing this week:...

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. His wife was named Linda Greene. Or maybe Jennifer. Or Genevieve. And maybe they weren’t even married. The Samaritan Foundation had previously been entangled in a bizarre legal custody battle. Law enforcement officials suspected it had ties to the David Koresh’s Branch Davidians.

A group of unmarried women decide to encloister together on an idyllic estate inherited by their ringleader, Lady Happy. No men are allowed on the premises at any time. The women’s chambers are lush and seasonally thematic. There are fresh flowers everywhere and the wine never stops flowing. Only the choicest cuts of meat are served. Every room has the perfect selfie mirror. And again—no men allowed. “We’re gathering together as a community to tell some really important and impactful stories and celebrate the narratives of the unheard and overlooked throughout history,” says Andrew Coopman, a Seattle-based storytelling interdisciplinary artist, who directed The Convent of Pleasure for Ghostlight....

When local underground hip-hop mainstay Mike “Mic One” Malinowski died in late July, you could see the grief online. On Twitter and Facebook, local rappers and producers—some active since the 90s, some with careers that began this decade—offered their condolences. Malinowski himself got started in the 90s as a member of the Noise Pollution crew, and he had roughly two decades of solo material under his belt—his first album as Mic One, Who’s the Illest?...

Chip Somodevilla/Getty . . . but will Republicans have the last laugh? Shrewd political observers who know better than to take anything at face value will interpret Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare as a devastating right-wing thrust against progressive values. Making matters worse, dissenting Justice Scalia has introduced a deliciously repugnant new term for the evil program—Scotuscare. Republican candidates can now run against not only Bolshevist entitlements but also activist judges who recklessly make law and shove it down the people’s throats....

Ronald Reagan left “a deeper impression on the country and the world than any but a handful of other presidents,” historian H.W. Brands writes in his eloquent new biography, Reagan: The Life. Certainly no political figure in my lifetime has had a bigger impact on the nation—though it’s often been a destructive one. [Image-1] Still—to what end? At a time when the United States has troops in 140 different countries, packs its jails and prisons with the poor and the mentally ill, and struggles to pay for schools, it’s also clear that claiming greatness isn’t nearly enough....

Chicago has no shortage of inventive underground bands that borrow from punk, indie rock, metal, and any other pulse-quickening style to create a deranged, idiosyncratic sound. But no one in town does it quite like the Cell Phones. This three-piece can whip up as much noise as a crash of rhinos—if rhinos had thumbs and the dexterity to pull off tight, supple melodic flourishes on guitar. Bassist Ryan Szeszycki and drummer Justin Purcell flit between burly breakdown grindcore breakdowns and grungy doo-wop with start-stop precision, while powerhouse front woman Lindsey Charles lends the band’s severe sound a playful looseness with her coarse screams and honeyed coos....

One of the most enduring plot devices of classic Walt Disney animations is the separation of a young hero or heroine from his or her family. Dumbo, Bambi, Pinocchio, and numerous other characters all get estranged from their parents or parental figures, and the anxiety that results from the estrangement motors the stories of the films in which they appear. With this narrative trope, Disney and his storytellers mined a universal childhood fear for maximum emotional impact, and for this reason, the classic Disney features remain powerful experiences decades after they were made....

New York-based French composer Daniel Wohl writes concert music that generally follows current trends: it’s notated for orchestral instruments but often enhanced by electronics. On his recordings, though, he pursues a more seamless marriage of acoustic and electronic elements. A couple years ago he knocked me out with his gorgeous album Corps Exquis (New Amsterdam), performed by New York chamber ensemble Transmit with help from So Percussion and singers Julia Holter and Aaron Roche....

The Underflow take their name from the Greek record store where guitarist David Grubbs, cornetist Rob Mazurek, and saxophonist Mats Gustafsson played their first trio gig in May 2019. But the connections joining the three musicians were forged in the 1990s, when Grubbs and Mazurek were associated with Chicago’s postrock scene and the Sweden-born Gustafsson played here so often that he was considered an honorary Chicagoan. Nowadays they’ve scattered across two continents (Brooklyn, New York; Marfa, Texas; and Nickelsdorf, Austria), and it takes a European tour to get them on the same stage at the same time....

Some of the rare bright moments in this slow terror are the random porch presents from masked bandits bearing treasures. Last month, prompted by a text, I leapt from my desk (couch) and found a bag of perfect morel mushrooms at the door, purchased by one friend, delivered by another, and foraged in central Illinois by someone I’d never met before but had been curious about for a long time....