Stevie Wonder’s personal archives are reputedly filled with decades of homemade demos and jam sessions that have never been released. If I had to guess what they sound like, I’d say some of them probably have a lot in common with the new album from Georgia Anne Muldrow. The Los Angeles singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist is a true original, operating across genre boundaries in soul, rap, jazz, R&B, and elsewhere, and Vweto III recalls Wonder’s early-70s experiments with Moogs and other analog synths....

Kara Thorstenson had a dream of filling her Lincoln Square home with original art, though she thought she could never afford it on her school librarian’s salary. But the 33-year-old found a workaround, acquiring works from friends and repurposing found art. The charming decor has turned what was once a no-frills apartment into a sought-after Airbnb rental. When Thorstenson temporarily relocated to Hyde Park last summer for a six-week teaching gig, she needed to cover two rents; Airbnb seemed the obvious solution....

Chicago is home to lots of technically savvy rock weirdos obsessed with unconventional song structures, odd time signatures, and controlled chaos. I’ve wondered often why London four-piece Black Midi has gotten so much international hype for their (perfectly fine) debut album, given that I can walk into Subterranean’s downstairs venue on a Tuesday and see three local bands with just as much or more face-melting proficiency. I hope at least some of the folks getting turned on to askew rock via Black Midi end up finding these Chicago acts—and Imelda Marcos would be a great place to start....

Workaholic Chicago rocker and audio engineer Greg Obis has suffered through a challenging five years. Both of his parents died (his mother in 2015, his father in 2018), and his ferocious but underrated punk band Yeesh broke up in 2017. That same year, Obis spent time on the road playing bass in indie-rock outfit Clearance; on long van rides, he’d listen to contemporary postpunk bands like Uranium Club and Omni, who tussle with rawboned guitars and relentlessly driving....

Francine Maombi, 30, settled in Chicago a little more than a decade ago. She and her family spent years fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, at various times sheltering in Rwanda or Burundi. When she arrived here she put down roots in Rogers Park, joining the Mennonite Living Water Community Church. Last year she found herself in need of part-time work that would allow her to continue caring for her two small children at home....

Al Podgorski / Sun-Times Media Challenger Amy Crawford says the 46th Ward needs more police. During his campaigns for alderman in 2007 and 2011, James Cappleman vowed to crack down on crime, saying gang activity and public drinking were discouraging new businesses from coming into the 46th Ward. His solution: more police, which he promised to fund by targeting wasteful spending. Since then, Cappleman has claimed to clamp down on crime while also attacking affordable housing that he considers problematic....

Vegemite, ubiquitous in Australia, its country of origin, is barely known elsewhere. Brent Balika (Margeaux Brasserie) was aware of the existence of the savory spread, which is made from leftover brewers’ yeast extract and various flavorings, but had never tried it before Christopher Thompson of Coda di Volpe challenged him to cook with it. “It’s straight umami, superintense,” he says. “Like bouillon: super intense savory.” Compared to the more classic duck a l’orange, Balika says, duck a la Vegemite has a deeper umami flavor that “accentuates the richness and iron quality” of the meat....

Stories of C.K. behaving in this way have been floating around for years. A 2012 Gawker post, filed under the tag “blind item” and headlined “Which Beloved Comedian Likes to Force Female Comics to Watch Him Jerk Off?,” describes a rumor about a female comedy duo’s encounter with a “our nation’s most hilarious stand-up comic and critically cherished sitcom auteur.” The details of the incident in the Gawker item are remarkably similar to the event Goodman and Wolov recount in the Times story: As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C....

Chuck Hodes/FOX Terrance Howard is Lucious Lyon, a King Lear for today. Empire looks and sounds a lot like King Lear—if Timbaland had lived during Elizabethan times. Premiering Wednesday on Fox, this new primetime show is the latest in Shakespeare-inspired dramas, but a ferocious performance by its lead actress will have you mentally revisiting The Lion in Winter. The acting ranges from average (Byers’s Andre is more pencil-pusher than schemer) to great, with Howard and Henson doing most of the heavy lifting....

Anonymous case manager for a home for people with developmental disabilities, on quarantine because of the Vaughn High School aide who tested positive for the novel coronavirus I’m on a mandatory 14-day quarantine. I recently got back from a trip, and I have a preexisting condition that makes me susceptible to illness. It’s easy for me to work from home for 14 days, but our direct staff who have more hands-on roles—picking residents up from employment, cooking dinner, administering medications—don’t really have that luxury....

Peter Holderness/Sun-Times Media Danny Solis’s ward office still can’t account for missing money. With the aldermanic elections just one month away, the city has yet to turn over e-mails that could potentially explain why $140,000 has been unaccounted for in the 25th Ward. Almost a month later, the budget department has yet to release the e-mails and still refuses to comment on the situation.

These days there’s no shortage of people making art in response to Trump’s xenophobic America and his violent impact on immigrants, but it is rarely the undocumented immigrants themselves whose work is on museum walls. For example, the 2013 exhibition “State of Exception” at the University of Michigan Institute of Humanities Gallery was inspired by anthropologist Jason De Leóns’s “Undocumented Migration Project,” a study of the violent effects of crossing the border....

Laurent Gillieron/Getty Images No sleep ’til 2016 Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters will be in Brooklyn? —Drew Hunt

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, October 30, 2017. Pat Quinn, Renato Mariotti join Democratic race for attorney general Former Illinois governor Pat Quinn and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti are joining the crowded field in the Democratic primary for attorney general. Quinn has not run for office since losing the 2014 gubernatorial race to Governor Bruce Rauner. Mariotti has built up name recognition and a large social media following as a cable news legal commentator and frequent critic of President Donald Trump’s policies....

Chicago hip-hop label Closed Sessions is gearing up for another banner year. Late last month House Arrest, the distribution wing of important Mississippi indie label Fat Possum, announced it had struck a deal with Closed Sessions; earlier this week, Pitchfork Music Festival announced that this year’s gathering will feature one of the label’s marquee artists, Kweku Collins. The Evanston MC makes a guest appearance on Cocoons, an EP by Closed Sessions’ latest signee, Ajani Jones; the label announced it signed the Chicago rapper last week, on the day it released Cocoons....

When I walk into Supa Bwe’s two-story Humboldt Park apartment, his big-screen TV is displaying a pause screen from the postapocalyptic shooter Fortnite—already hugely popular, it got another bump last month when Drake streamed it on Twitch with local gamer Ninja. The 28-year-old Chicago rapper (his stage name is pronounced “Supa Boy”) likes to spend as much time at home as possible, and when he’s not working on music in his basement studio he often burns hours gaming....

Thirty-six years ago, when I moved to Chicago, the old lefties used to tell me the political and corporate chieftains were like a secret cartel that had crafted a rich-get-richer scheme of development that would shape the city for years to come. I’ll give old man Daley and his pals this: They were reacting to demographic challenges far greater than those Rahm or Rauner must confront. In the early 1970s, the middle class was picking up and fleeing to the suburbs as the city’s industrial base was crumbling....

Calling itself “The Most Instagrammable Alley in Chicago,” The 12 brings art into the alley of the Tri-Taylor neighborhood. Named for its zip code, The 12 is a housing development built by Home& where each unit has an artist-painted garage door. The developers reached out to Sara Dulkin, owner of Chicago Truborn gallery, to curate the project and bring on the artists. The project, located at the 2500 block of West Polk Street, is on former Chicago Public Schools land....

Guitarist-vocalist Julia Steiner and guitarist David Sagan met as first-year students at the University of Notre Dame in 2010, and they’ve since become ingrained in Chicago underground rock. Under the name Ratboys, they made themselves a home in the emo scene in the mid-2010s, playing country-flecked indie songs and drawing in a couple prolific collaborators to fill out their live sets: drummer Marcus Nuccio of Pet Symmetry and Mountains for Clouds and bassist Sean Neumann, who makes delightful indie pop as Jupiter Styles (he’s also a Reader contributor)....