Chicago’s Hamilton franchise opened at PrivateBank Theatre on October 19, the same evening as the final presidential debate. In any other year that might be considered a sweetly symbolic coincidence: the republic seen then and now, at its fiery birth and in stable maturity. But things are a little different this year, aren’t they? This is the time of Hillary and Donald. The season of the lesser evil, when many of us wish we could just mark our ballots “appalled....

I wish the right-wing miscreants in the federal government were as dependable as Chicago rapper G Herbo. For close to a decade, he’s released albums and mixtapes of rapid-fire drill with reassuring frequency, and even his most run-of-the-mill offerings benefit from his pragmatic empathy and lucid descriptions—he brings a distinctive emotional gravity to his detailed lyrics about the harshness of the city’s impoverished Black enclaves. Born Herbert Wright, Herbo grew up in a part of South Shore so besieged by violence it became known as Terror Town, and in his music he captures both the up-close-and-personal feeling of mortal fear and a large-scale view of the structural inequality that created the circumstances of his life....

A scene from Timbuktu, Mauritania’s first Oscar-nominated film Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • The letter from 15 artists—including Anish Kapoor of Chicago Bean fame—protesting Cuba’s treatment of fellow artist and activist Tania Bruguera? —Tony Adler • About another vision of the American Dream, straight out of Englewood? —Qudsiya Siddiqui

Courtesy of Anti Title Fight Title Fight is high up on the totem pole in the young emo scene. A quick look at last year’s Riot Fest schedule can confirm it; of the dozen or so fourth-wave acts on the bill only Title Fight played one of the main stages. The Pennsylvania group has been broadening their sound as their popularity has ballooned, departing from teeth-gnashing posthardcore and skewing towards resplendent shoegaze....

Back by popular demand: The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader senior writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smokey haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the 2020 Chicago-area Illinois primary races—local and Cook County-level and, of course, U.S. presidential. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past?...

AP Photo/Binod Joshi An elephant never forgets (being used in a polo tournament). Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About food-delivery drivers getting robbed in Chicago? —Tal Rosenberg • About the World Elephant Polo Championships? —Aimee Levitt

A water tasting on a brewery tour would usually seem beside the point—the point, of course, being to drink beer. But when you’ve already got a lager in one hand and a hefeweizen is on its way, drinking a little water doesn’t sound so bad. The hefeweizen is another good warm-weather beer, with plenty of citrus that balances out the sweet banana and spicy notes of clove and cinnamon. The rauchbier is full-bodied but not heavy and smells remarkably like smoky bacon—which might suggest pandering to the undying bacon trend if rauchbier weren’t a couple thousand years old....

Flood’s Hall is a nondescript building in Hyde Park, next to the back patio of Mellow Yellow restaurant, that houses nonprofit offices. I visited on a hot day in August, sweating under my cloth mask. There was a sticky note plastered to the front door, instructing people to bring donations to the third floor. Bags of groceries, tampons, soap, hand sanitizer, baby supplies, and other essential items were stacked on shelves and floors....

A History of Violence In this week’s paper, J.R. Jones has a long review of Maps to the Stars, the new film by Canadian master David Cronenberg. The director’s long, varied career has yielded some of the most exciting and rigorous films in recent memory, from his early body-horror chillers to his recent psychological surveys of the social world. His style isn’t readily defined, and he always seems to have one foot in the mainstream and another in the underground....

Esquire caught some hell for its recent cover story on the plight of straight white male suburban teens. But it’s possible to center that demographic with smarts and heart. Grief—or a simulacrum thereof—goes viral in Dear Evan Hansen, the 2017 Tony Award-winning musical about the anxious title character, now in a stellar touring production. Evan (Ben Levi Ross) writes atta-boy letters to himself on the advice of his therapist. When one ends up in the pocket of Connor (Marrick Smith), a sullen classmate who commits suicide, Evan invents a friendship with Connor, both as a way to assuage the pain of Connor’s family and to build his own social profile....

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Donald Trump is not allowed to rock in the free world. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That noncitizen immigrants can be deported if they’re caught with dime bags of pot? —Mick Dumke • This essay about being a gay man who lived through the AIDS plague and the decision to have children? —Aimee Levitt

When the journalism industry now talks about deceptive practices it’s talking about fake news that spreads online and the vast credulous public that laps it up. Advertorials—that is, advertising done up to look like it might have come from the editorial department—are a last-century vexation made more palatable by journalism’s crescendoing need to sell any kind of advertising at all. These profiles are brief and anonymously written, and most are squeezed in two per page....

Iowa singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen started performing only about four years ago, but she hardly sounds like a beginner. The 25-year-old has a soul-deep voice with a ragged, sensual edge that’s poised between bluesy world-weariness and folky innocence. The first tune Moen wrote, “Songbird,” is an achingly wistful love song to song, and it’s fully realized perfection. “I wish I could swoop you into my wings / But I’m just a songbird outside your window,” she sings as she strums on an acoustic guitar, capturing the hope of an aspiring performer with a rare, sweet clarity....

Chicago singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Emily Jane Powers has been crafting intimate, literate pop since the early 2000s—Gossip Wolf was especially taken with her 2014 book and download, Part of Me, which felt as much like a collection of poignant short-story-style character studies as it did a series of songs. For the past three years, she’s been writing, arranging, and rearranging its follow-up, Restless (recorded with Erik Hall of In Tall Bulldings behind the boards), and it expands Powers’s musical palette considerably....

A decade ago, Joffrey Ballet made a major investment in its future with the Academy of Dance, an official school and training program that feeds the company with new talent while providing open dance classes to the larger Chicago community. “Cathy Marston’s not afraid to tackle literature,” says Wheater. “She’s a woman who enjoys the narrative, and her production of Jane Eyre spoke to me. She’s taken a great novel and crafted a really beautiful work....

Bob Weir and Phil Lesh at the Chicago Theatre

On July 5, 2013, people living in many north-side lakefront apartments and condos had their gorgeous Friday afternoon disrupted by pounding bass that made their floors quake and their windows rattle. Throughout their neighborhood, thousands of people, most young and many in beachwear, thronged the sidewalks and streets. The offending party was the Wavefront Music Festival, an electronic-­music blowout on Montrose Beach, and the annoyances persisted till late Sunday. The fest had debuted the previous year without causing much trouble, but for 2013 it grew from two days to three and got much bigger and louder—it used such powerful subwoofers that people in Rogers Park claimed to be able to hear them....

Crystal Pite’s evolution as a choreographer has been driven by a proverb: “Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.” Theater audiences want to feel represented by the performers, and Pite seeks to create that connection through dance. The three works presented in Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Winter Series are a series of experiments exploring this idea through narrative. But those narratives aren’t set in stone. A new company of dancers means a new approach to each of these works, which debuted between 2008 and 2012....

Several hundred people gathered in the sweltering gymnasium of Truman College Tuesday to share personal stories of shootings, beatings, and robberies by Chicago police officers, and call for the U.S. Department of Justice to “do something” about police abuse. It was the third of four community forums organized by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division designed to solicit public participation in the agency’s investigation into CPD. DOJ attorneys Nicole Porter and Emily Gunston listened patiently and empathetically for two and a half hours as a fleet of department staffers recorded every testimony....

Welcome to Tokyo! Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • Or see Jon Stewart’s take on Rahm Emanuel’s reelection? —Mick Dumke • About Allison Jones, casting director and nerd spotter extraordinaire? —Aimee Levitt