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With their adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Joseph Steakley and Ben Lobpries have fashioned a fable about Trump-era nationalism. It’s not subtle. At one point, a rabidly ignorant crowd condemns the titular wooden boy with percussive cries of “String him up!” His crime? Pinocchio (created by the Chicago Puppet Studio and voiced and manipulated by Sean Garratt) doesn’t come from town, he comes from the forest. And as the tiki-torch-wielding villagers loudly exclaim, nothing good comes from the forest....

Nearly eight years ago, Jordan Morris, now 32, and his friend Turner Wathen, 35, began planning a business to bring the best, purest rums they could find to the U.S. “We’re looking for rums that are unadulterated,” Wathen says. “No sugar, no caramels. We like the purity of rum.” They identified a 12-year-old rum from Trinidad that they loved, bought some, and had it shipped to a warehouse in Louisville where—due to a mistake—it got mixed with whiskey....

Independent Venue Week is a national celebration of live music to benefit the country’s independent music venues, many of which have been shuttered since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic—and many of which will close permanently if help doesn’t arrive soon. In honor of the occasion—and of all Chicago’s independent music venues—we’ve dug around in the Reader archives to present these stories about some of the city’s most beloved live music spots, past and present....

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. But a puzzle can get to be like a fever, and it will run its course. Later, Weschler introduces a D-type pattern, then strings of digits representing the last 400 years and which pattern each year follows. The piece resembles a 400-level college mathematics textbook, and ends on a startling note....

They’re not smiling now. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About human chimeras? —Aimee Levitt • These Craigslist “Casual Encounters” ads made into animated art? (NSFW!) —Sue Kwong

When I suggest to Shane Merrill that the hardcore festival he founded might have some similarities with This Is Hardcore—the enormous three-day spectacular in Philadelphia booked by “Joe Hardcore” McKay—he gives me a wry laugh. The head honcho of Empire Productions, who started the Rumble in 2010, came up in the potent late-90s Chicago hardcore scene, and he’s founded several bands over the years, including the Killer (in 2001) and most recently Young & Dead (in 2013)....

UPDATE Wednesday, March 18: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Lauren Demerath rages, leers, screams, flirts, and, best of all, sings her way through an unforgettable turn in the title role of Jacqueline Stone’s unique new musical adaptation of the 1891 Henrik Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler: A Play With Live Music. A newly-married woman returns from a honeymoon abroad already bored with her milquetoast academic of a husband (Huy Nguyen) and plots to wreak havoc in the lives of acquaintances and old loves just to feel alive....

ARTIST: Daniel MacAdam SHOW: Arriver, Masonic Wave, and Stomatopod at the Burlington on Sat 2/24 MORE INFO: crosshairchicago.com

On a recent Wednesday afternoon in “Freedom Square,” pedestrians take refuge from the scorching heat in a hospitality tent stocked with campaign petitions, snacks, and a cooler of bottled water. A few kids dabble in watercolor painting, while adults empty trash and slice meat and vegetables for grilling. Curious community members approach to ask what has compelled these activists to brave the summer elements as long as they have. Colón and her brother, Damon Williams, drew inspiration for Freedom Square and their collective from the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, December 8, 2017. Have a great weekend! The battle of the billionaires escalates as J.B. Pritzker fights back against Rauner Democratic gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker slammed Governor Bruce Rauner’s suggestion that he’s a bad investor and/or sheltering money to avoid taxes. “It’s laughable that Bruce Rauner is complaining about my taxes,” Pritzker said Wednesday. “I released way more information than Bruce Rauner has, and it’s important to recognize that unlike Bruce Rauner, who, yeah, he paid taxes, but you know how he made his money?...

The Yard, a professional company of teenage actors, brings extraordinary urgency to its mounting of this powerful theater piece about the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Created by the United States Theatre Project and written by P.J. Paparelli and Stephen Karam, Columbinus is drawn largely from documentary sources-including diaries, e-mails, Internet posts, and homemade videos left behind by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine seniors who on April 20, 1999, went on a shooting spree at the school, killing 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves....

Having finally gotten around to reading the 59-page federal indictment of Alderman Ed Burke, I feel compelled to say a word or two in his defense. No easy task, I assure you. It’s a question, folks, I’ve been posing for years. Let me explain . . . A New York developer, 601W Companies, wanted an $18 million TIF handout to help subsidize its redevelopment of the massive Old Main Post Office in the South Loop....

Four years ago I heard Cincinnati-bred drummer Jeremy Cunningham for the first time at the Chicago Jazz Festival, playing behind young alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, who was just beginning to make a big splash locally. I was impressed by his concision, his time, and his restraint; he was doing more than merely swinging, but he never got in the way. He conveyed his personality subtly and with purpose. Cunningham moved here in 2009, and I’ve since seen him play in many other contexts, most notably in groups with saxophonist Nick Mazzarella and guitarist Tim Stine; he brings the same qualities to every setting....

Sue Kwong Look around the city and you’ll see all the familiar signs of impending spring: Peeps, Cadbury eggs, and boxes of matzo in the grocery store; children playing outside and grown men in shorts; a green river and rivers of green beer and Irish-people-for-a-day puking up and down Clark Street. Suddenly our city is a cheerful place again and we don’t need books to remind ourselves how much we love it....

I don’t know as much about the history of stoner metal and its various offshoots as some of my Reader compatriots, and when it comes to Japanese bands playing this style of spirited sludge, well, I’m basically stumbling blindly through the woods. But during one of my routine late-night Bandcamp trawling expeditions, I found Japanese stoner band Greenmachine. In June three international labels—Robustfellow in Ukraine, Long Legs Long Arms in Japan, and Riff Merchant in the U....

QI’m a 35-year-old divorced man. I’ve been on plenty of dates since my marriage ended, but I invariably get asked this question on or before date number two: “Why did you get divorced?” This is where everything goes to shit. I’m honest: “We got divorced because I cheated on my wife. A lot.” This usually catches my date off guard because I “don’t seem like that kind of guy.” But then I can hardly get past it, because this information is “too much to handle....

Fronted by Chicago music-scene staple Che Arthur (former member of Atombombpocketknife, sometimes Bob Mould backup singer, and sound guy extraordinaire), Pink Avalanche have been cranking out wiry, moody postpunk since 2013. Formed by Arthur and a longtime partner in crime, drummer Adam Reach, as a way to further their musical and personal connection, the band fleshed out their lineup with second guitarist Kortland Chase and bassist Pete Croke, and set about making two records of angular midwestern punk rock that’s as catchy as it is aggressive....

From the inaugural issue of the Illustrated London News in 1842 to the first chapter of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning serial Maus in 1980, comics have had a long affiliation with documentary and reporting. So why isn’t the illustrated medium associated with nonfiction as reflexively as news articles and photographs? In Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute argues for recognizing comics as a substantial documentarian form that “endeavors to express history....

In some ways, 2016 was a rough year for those of us who care about sustainable transportation in Chicago. Six people were fatally struck while biking in the city this year—an average number according to the Chicago Department of Transportation. However, several of these were high-profile cases that shook the cycling community, including the nation’s first bike-share fatality, deaths on popular bike routes like Milwaukee Avenue, and a hit-and-run case that’s still unsolved....

This story was originally published in The Appeal. The first case of COVID-19 among prisoners was confirmed on March 23. A week later, 134 detainees were sick. On March 27, Dart held a press conference touting “single-celling” for almost all prisoners and saying reports of lack of access to soap were “lies.” Meanwhile, the head of the jail’s medical division (which is under the purview of Cook County’s Health and Hospitals System and not the sheriff’s office), Dr....