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Our country has always privileged the powerful—a group that, historically and presently, has consisted almost exclusively of straight white men. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve only intensified their avaricious push to feed the rest of us into the grinder in order to prop up a broken, inhumane economic system. It can feel cartoonishly surreal to watch the government of the wealthiest country in the world use bullying and extortion to force schools to reopen when that’s likely to cause catastrophic spikes in COVID deaths, while hospitality workers who can’t afford to stay home risk their own health and that of everyone close to them in order to serve the affluent, say, a pastry that looks like a coronavirus particle....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, October 3, 2017. Robin Kelly to Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Most guns used in Chicago shootings come from out of state U.S. representative Robin Kelly told White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that most guns used in homicides and shootings in Chicago come from outside Illinois, especially Indiana and Wisconsin. “More than ½ of #CHI crime guns come from outside IL, mostly from @VP’s IN & @SpeakerRyan’s WI....

In late January, I got my hands on an advance of Forever Drifting, the first full-length LP by local postpunk duo Foul Tip. These guys have been around since 2008, and a record as dense and well-rounded as this—it’s a massive but minimal slab of heavy, introspective melodies—makes it feel like all the work they’ve done over those years has paid off. Foul Tip celebrate the release of Forever Drifting (out via Captcha Records) with a free Monday show at the Empty Bottle on March 28, with openers Paper Mice, Lil Tits, and the Christmas Bride....

Chicago hip-hop is closing out its biggest decade on the international stage with some remarkable releases and dramatic moves on the charts. Yet the mainstream press has rarely reflected the reality on the ground here, instead focusing on obviously popular figures such as Chance the Rapper and Kanye West (both of whom dropped albums this year that I’ve mostly forgotten). And though the media finally caught up with Juice Wrld as soon as his second album, Death Race for Love, debuted atop the Billboard 200, I saw far more coverage of his unexpected death earlier this month (and of the still-emerging details surrounding his run-in with the feds in the last moments of his life) than of his music....

If there’s a workable drama within the rambling, under-rehearsed confines of playwright/director Eli Newell’s Cold Town/Hotline, it hasn’t yet emerged. This is one of those shows where the plot wouldn’t exist if any single character behaved in any way remotely resembling human reality. Newell would have us believe that a group of adults volunteering at a counseling hotline would be so frightened by a prepubescent 11-year-old’s ridiculously awful “karate” moves that they’d allow themselves to be held hostage by said child....

Parker Bright “Chicagoans” is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “One of the things we used to do a lot was build obstacle courses in our backyards and time each other through them. You remember American Gladiators? We were like, ‘OK, cool, we’re gonna be on that show, so let’s make sure that we’re really strong.’ That was a very real goal for me....

Ten pairs of lovers, ten pairs of strangers. This musical is a La Ronde adaptation, meaning it performs the same cyclical game as Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play about ten interlocking sets of romantic partners: the whore tosses a freebie to the soldier, who trifles with the nurse, who seduces the college boy, who leads the businessman’s young wife astray, on down the line until the whore returns and the circle is complete....

“HOMO.” That’s what the flyers would say, in four-inch-tall letters—dozens of them, stapled to lampposts, telephone poles, and bulletin boards in and around the Wicker Park neighborhood. Beneath that, they would add “CORE,” accompanied by a list of bands, a venue, and a date. It was the early 90s, and young queer punks Joanna Brown and Mark Freitas used those flyers to announce the kinds of shows they’d always dreamed of attending: rowdy all-ages rock nights where it was OK to be gay....

Last week a cacophony produced by the use of various hammers, saws, and drills echoed through the forthcoming Revival Food Hall on South Clark, where construction workers were finishing up preparations for the enormous upscale food court. But final touches were being made much more quietly in the southeast corner of the space: Curbside Splendor, the longtime independent press specializing in what it calls the “extraordinary voices” of the midwest, was getting ready to open its first storefront operation....

In a recurring feature, the Reader conducts 15-minute interviews with candidates running for city, county, state, and federal offices that represent Illinois. This week: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Daniel Biss. Did you not pay attention much to politics before that? It was just a disagreement that emerged quickly after we had previously had an understanding. And it changed our dynamic in a way that made it so that we couldn’t go on....

At its most benign, the political divide gouged by the Second Amendment separates city dwellers—to whom handguns are the choice of urban predators—from rural sportsmen who take long-arms into the woods. I’d like to think these two camps could learn to agree to disagree—each conceding the legitimacy of the other’s interests and the legitimacy of local laws that accommodate them. And the NRA is right. The Second Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 8, 2017. Chance the Rapper slams Emanuel plan to build $95 million police training academy Chance the Rapper appeared at the City Council meeting Wednesday to slam Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to build a new $95 million police training academy in West Garfield Park, according to the Tribune. Emanuel left before the Grammy Award-winning rapper spoke during the 30-minute public comment allotment....

Al Podgorski /Sun-Times Media Jesus Garcia answers a question at a debate in front of the Sun-Times editorial board on January 30. A front-page Sun-Times story yesterday linked Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s cosponsorship of a measure that benefited a law firm to his son’s free legal representation by that firm. Garcia told me yesterday he thinks the story raises a “completely false controversy” and is “totally misleading.” (For the record, the Reader and the Sun-Times are owned by the same company....

Confession time—I’m utterly obsessed with the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump scandal. Daniels is a former porn star who claims to have had an affair with Trump back in 2006, when they had gathered in Lake Tahoe for a celebrity golf tournament. Now, about that local angle. I’ve got mixed feelings about the Avenatti-Emanuel connection. On the one hand, I can’t be too sure about a dude who brags about working with Rahm....

“ . . . pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . . .” —Polonius, Hamlet, act II, scene 2 Especially pop genres. His latest, The Light Fantastic—getting its world premiere now in a witty production directed by Gus Menary for Jackalope Theatre—takes him into horror, satanic division. Menary and his large staff of designers pick up nicely on that energy. More often than not this staging comes across as the most sophisticated piece of backyard theater you’re ever likely to see, complete with scary-cool effects and faux-Hollywood titles achieved on a budget....

Nothing says “power” quite like a trained flock of ravens. That’s probably why the Chicago Humanities Festival used the birds to deliver invitations to this year’s “power”-themed programming. That and when author George R.R. Martin is on the lineup, never pass up an opportunity to bring Game of Thrones to life. While we’re likely thinking about power more than ever in the year before a major election, the fest’s lineup shows that there’s more to the theme beyond politics and traditional power structures....

Every Monday night, the Promontory in Hyde Park transforms part of its upstairs venue to host the Corner—a young performance series that, like its namesake, arises from an intersection. Curators Sam Brown and Sasha Tycko use the space inventively, curtaining off the main stage and instead using a small platform in the corner, angled toward the square bar in the middle of the room. Since taking over the series in April 2016, they’ve nurtured a creative community whose identity has shifted and expanded constantly....

With this weekend’s acquittal of Donald Trump by the U.S. Senate, the time has come for all fair-minded Americans to consider what to do about the Republican Party. It’s hard to argue with Republicans because they have no fixed principles—they’ll say whatever they have to say whenever they have to say it, even if it contradicts what they said the day before. They say they’re dedicated to law and order, and Blue Lives Matter....

Few spoken-word artists working the posthip-hop landscape can match the intensity, precision, and metaphoric power of Philadelphia’s Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa); I’ve seen her twice this year, and both times she had total control of the audience by the end of the set. She’s involved with several collaborative projects, and one of the most exciting, Irreversible Entanglements, recently dropped its self-titled debut album, a joint release of Chicago’s International Anthem and New Jersey’s Don Giovanni....

It’s kind of amazing that the Guy in Your MFA twitter feed did not exist before last fall. I mean, we live in a world where thousands of young men, many sporting beards and thick-rimmed glasses and who aspire to be the next David Foster Wallace, spend years of their lives hunched over their laptops beside full ashtrays and empty bottles of cheap whiskey just so they can hold court in seminar rooms and make pronouncements like this:...