More than 100 people gathered at a southeast-side community center Thursday evening to hear city and federal officials talk about manganese pollution recently discovered near an industrial storage facility owned by the S.H. Bell Company. The city’s Department of Public Health presented data from soil sampling conduced at 27 addresses; some samples revealed concentrations of the neurotoxic heavy metal that exceeds thresholds for emergency removal. Representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the CDC were also present to outline next steps in analyzing the soil at homes near S....

Kossi* hadn’t planned to leave his home in West Africa that day. His wife was pregnant with their second son, and he owned a successful shop that sold the colorful swaths of secondhand clothes from Europe and China that were so popular among his country’s youth. But when an anti-government demonstration broke out nearby, and soldiers came into his shop and started arresting his customers, he knew he had to find safety....

DJ Scary Lady Sarah has been hosting her Nocturna dance party for ages—it’s been the place to scream and be seen for local fans of goth, industrial, and darkwave since Gossip Wolf was a wee pup. These days it’s held roughly every other month at Metro, and the party on Saturday, June 9, is also Nocturna’s 30th anniversary. Holy hairspray! It sounds like leather pants won’t be the only thing wrinkled in that crowd....

Dan Goldberg Mindy Segal’s Brownie Krinkles There have been (and are about to be) a lot of good new cookbooks released by local authors lately. I’m going to try to excerpt recipes from each of them as they come out. First up is Cookie Love, by pastry superchef and Hot Chocolate proprietor Mindy Segal (with Kate Leahy, a food writer based in Oakland, California). This is simply a lovely book, chock-full of cookie porn, with some 60 recipes broken down into categories like drop cookies, shortbread, sandwich cookies, bars, spritz and thumbprints, etc....

Before Annie Russell became a news editor at WBEZ by day and stand-up comedian by night, she was a college student who wanted to make a real statement with a one-act play. Russell describes the work as a cross between the film Garden State and an episode of Law & Order: SVU, a revelatory piece about date rape. Years later, she found the play buried on her hard drive. It wasn’t quite as profound as she remembered....

Local singer-songwriter Constantine Hastalis has one of the finest record collections of anyone I know. What’s most admirable about it is its focus: virtually every LP is psychedelic rock, pop, folk, or experimental music from the late 1960s and early ’70s. Many of the releases are obscure, and more recognizable records tend to be imports or rare editions of famous albums. At one point, Hastalis was posting pictures of highlights from his library to Instagram, but he’s since discontinued the practice....

Yes,” wrote Ben Brantley, “it really is that good.” Tracking the price of a seat became a pastime in itself. Noting that the average face value for a ticket to the Broadway Hamilton is $189, another Times story reported: “For most of May [2016], the median price of a ticket on the secondary market was around $850. Between the Tonys and the July 9 performances, it pushed toward $1,600. Before Mr....

Jazz and Heritage Pavilion Young Jazz Lions Stage 11:30 AM | Lenart Regional Gifted and Harold Washington Elementary School Jazz Combo 12:15 PM | Jones College Prep Jazz Combo 1 PM | Whitney Young Magnet High School Jazz Combo 2 PM | Curie Metropolitan High School Jazz Ensemble 2:55 PM | Pritzker High School Jazz Ensemble 3:50 PM | Kenwood High School Jazz Ensemble Von Freeman Pavilion Noon | Steve Schneck Quartet...

i Whenever attendees said “if she becomes mayor,” the 125 supporters packed into the room corrected them, saying, “when she becomes mayor.” Brown brushed off the allegations, saying, “I respect law enforcement, and anytime someone comes and has a complaint, it is their duty to look into it whether it’s true or false, as these are false.”

“You and I both know that if you leave here and talk shit about this play, people will just assume you’re racist,” says K in Fragmented, a new play by Karissa Murrell Myers (who also plays K) and directed by Spencer Ryan Diedrick (with assistance from Daniella Wheelock) that explores the condition of being a “Half Filipino, Half European American” actress from Boise, Idaho, who now lives and works in Chicago....

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. In the fall of 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died suddenly after taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. During the initial investigation of the crime, a man named James Lewis wrote a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturers of Tylenol, and claimed responsibility for the murders....

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been overwhelmed with the creativity of Chicagoans spreading news, arts, music, and wellness. Staying sane and healthy during these precarious times has become a virtually spearheaded community effort. Checking in, staying hydrated, standing up, stretching, and staying informed are the basics. The folks in the Bridgeport-based hub that encompasses Co-Prosperity Sphere, Lumpen, and Marz Community Brewing are still doing what they always do (which is a lot) and supporting artists through their new periodical, The Quarantine Times....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, March 23, 2016. Map: The 40 skyscrapers currently under construction There’s a skyscraper boom in Chicago, with an impressive 40 high-rise buildings under construction right now, mostly in the Loop and downtown. Buildings range from the new Ability Institute at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago to the London House Hotel to new Jeanne Gang-designed dorms at the University of Chicago. Curbed Chicago has a map....

It could have been Lord of the Flies. Filament Theatre was giving over complete control of its space to a young audience for Forts! Build Your Own Adventure, an hour-long experiment in professionally designed creative play. Arming kids with boxes piled high to the ceiling, pillows, sheets, clothespins and flashlights—what could go wrong? Absolutely nothing. Hundreds of performances, and perhaps thousands of forts later, Filament has proven the value of trusting its young people with agency and influence in the world of its performances....

Iranian writer-director Shahram Mokri—whose second feature, Fish & Cat (2013), opens this year’s Festival of Films From Iran at Gene Siskel Film Center—has cited American slasher movies and the drawings of M.C. Escher as his primary influences for the film, which won a special prize for “innovative content” at the Venice film festival. The movie feels exactly like a fusion of those things: the setup recalls The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the execution is almost impossibly tricky....

If brutality and stupidity are to your taste, you had to love last weekend’s Cincinnati-Pittsburgh NFL game, won by Pittsburgh 18-16 thanks to a recovered fumble, an intentional shot to the head of the helpless receiver after an incomplete pass, and a personal foul that put the Steelers in range of the field goal that won the game as time ran out. Earlier, Cincinnati fans threw debris at Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback, as he was carted off the field....

Gwendolyn Zabicki began thinking up the exhibition “Fête Galante” while in Paris in 2016 after seeing Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera at the Louvre. The paintings in that part of the museum are “joyful and beautiful and the first group of paintings in the museum that felt really modern to me,” says Zabicki. After visiting the museum, she began to read up on the artist Watteau and the fête galante. In Pilgrimage to Cythera, figures dressed in lavish clothing are celebrating love, as many cupids fly around the sky, and others are seen flirting with one another in the grass....

Q: I’ve been married to my husband for two years. Five months into our relationship (before we got married), he confessed that he was an adult baby. I was so grossed out, I was literally ill. (Why would this great guy want to be like this?) I told him he would have to choose: diapers or me. He chose me. I believed him and married him. Shortly before the birth of our child, I found out that he’d been looking at diaper porn online....

The first-ever Chicago Black Restaurant Week, featuring African-American-owned restaurants in Chicago and the suburbs, is happening now through February 13. Unlike the fixed-price menus of Chicago Restaurant Week—which just wrapped up last Thursday, three days before CBRW began—this one offers discounted menu items at participating spots. The goal, according to the event’s website, is to introduce people to restaurants owned by African-Americans. Founder Lauran Smith, a social media specialist, told the hosts of Windy City Live last week that she’s hoping to create more recognition for black-owned eateries....

Is America catching up to Craig Baldwin? Back in 1991, the San Francisco filmmaker took the underground cinema by storm with his collage narrative Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, which repurposed footage from industrial films, educational films, cartoons, and low-budget sci-fi movies to present an alternate history of the 20th century in which humanity is secretly controlled by space aliens operating from a subterranean base at the south pole. A quarter century later, right-wing conspiracy theories circle the republic like hungry sharks: the Sandy Hook shootings were faked, Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, Hilary Clinton and other prominent Democrats ran a human trafficking operation from a Washington pizza parlor....