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More than a year has passed since west-side hip-hop group Sicko Mobb dropped their debut mixtape, the Dragon Ball Z-themed Super Saiyan Vol. 1, which compiled some of the duo’s most frenetic bop favorites. This wolf has been jonesing for another full-length of Sicko Mobb’s effervescent, slightly off-kilter party rap, and we’re all in luck: a follow-up titled Super Saiyan Vol. 2 comes out Wed 4/1. Gossip Wolf doesn’t have the track list yet, but with any luck the whole mixtape will be as good as the recently released “Kool-Aid,” whose buoyant rhythms feel sweet and relaxed rather than frenetic....

Emo has been around long enough to have shed its skin a few times—the melodic, cathartic strain of posthardcore first blossomed in 1985, and it’s continued to evolve since its mainstream breakthrough in the 2000s. Genre-blending Kansas rock band the Anniversary got saddled with the term in the late 90s and early 2000s, at which time guitarist and vocalist Josh Berwanger was a little insulted by it. But the stigma he was responding to has largely dissolved....

The University of Chicago is the place to be for long films over the next two weeks, with Lav Diaz’s 3-hour 46-minute (short for him) Filipino film The Woman Who Left (2016) showing today (February 9) at Logan Center for the Arts and Wang Bing’s 14-hour Chinese documentary Crude Oil (2008) showing over two days (February 16-17) at Gray Center for the Arts and Inquiry. Inspired by these showings, we’ve selected five more bottom-numbing masterpieces to spotlight....

For the Books Issue out now, I wrote about two cookbooks inextricably tied to the community events that inspired them, the Hideout’s Soup & Bread series, and weddings—specifically rust-belt weddings with magnificent potluck cookie spreads. These books are just as much about the cultures that keep them alive as the recipes therein. Maybe by now you’ve already finished Leor’s book. So if you’re in need of more sweet, sweet longform, on August 6 the Reader is dropping the second volume in its Best of collection, this one by a certain food writer who loves you and wants you to know that not everything is about food....

O’Connell’s performance under Les Waters’s direction embodies both the doubt and the resilience in Dana as she fiddles with her glasses, twists a water bottle in her hands, and occasionally refers to her own written version of events, apologizing for the fuzziness of the time line she’s recounting. It’s not uncommon for victims of trauma to disconnect physically and feel as if their story is happening to someone else. Centering Dana’s actual voice while using another woman’s physical presence is a way for Hnath to both honor his mother’s experience in her own words (crucial when women’s accounts of violence and abuse are routinely discounted) and embody that disconnect....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. jcjgphotography/Shutterstock Don’t flush! • That the most entitled generation isn’t millennials? —Sue Kwong • That there is an online competition, Women On 20s, to choose a woman to eventually replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill? —Zara Yost

Dinosaur Jr.’s second act is a feel-good gift that keeps on giving. These unwavering indie-rock lifers seem to have access to a bottomless well of arena-ready solos and riffs, brain-sticking melodies, and hurricane-force noise. In the late 1980s, the powerhouse trio—guitarist and singer J Mascis, bassist and singer Lou Barlow, and drummer Murph—became a revolutionary force in the American rock ’n’ roll underground. Then in 1989, Dinosaur Jr. went through an acrimonious breakup with Barlow, who shifted focus to his indie-rock project Sebadoh, and in 1997, after a couple more lineup changes, the band dissolved....

A few times each year Chicagoans can make the most of living in a city with two major-league baseball teams by catching both clubs in one day—what longtime Reader production director Dave Jones called a “Doubleday,” in honor of baseball’s supposed inventor, Abner Doubleday. This season’s remaining chances fall on Friday and Saturday, August 23 and 24, so if nothing else you’ll avoid having to pay $10 for a cup of hot chocolate at Wrigley....

This year has already seen the release of three superior films for children—The Breadwinner, Paddington 2, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower. These movies teem with visual and narrative imagination, alerting young viewers to the medium’s rich potential. They also refuse to condescend to their viewers: the films are free of the sort of infantile humor and emotional underscoring one finds in less-inspired children’s fare; moreover, they achieve a complexity of detail that requires a certain amount of visual literacy....

As any CryptoParty attendee will attest, you can only ensure a reasonably private communication by using “strong, end-to-end encryption,” “strong” here meaning nearly impossible to break, even with supercomputers, and “end-to-end” referring to only the intended parties being able to interpret the communications. Because the users store the keys on their devices, no one in the middle can unlock the messages. Almost all the following tools are free to download and use....

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong And it only costs $1,200. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About Sony’s new $1,200 Walkman? —Leor Galil • About the transgender teen, child of a Chicago-area theater artist, who got many thousands of hits for her pix about birthday pancakes and coming out? —Tony Adler

Big Gay Ice Cream The iconic New York ice cream manufacturer transports its treats in the Gold Coast at Nico Osteria for Pride weekend, raising money for Howard Brown Health with a dessert menu featuring boozy collaborative creations such as Out and Proud Pops, freeze pops served submerged in a shot of tequila. Sat 6/23, 9 AM-11 PM, Sun 6/24, 9 AM-10:30 PM, Nico Osteria, 1015 N. Rush, 312-994-7100, nicoosteria.com....

Every September Navy Pier is flooded with gallerygoers from Chicago locals to people from abroad walking through the maze of booths at the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art (Expo Chicago). More than 100 booths showing and selling contemporary visual work from international galleries are situated inside Festival Hall at Navy Pier. This year’s Expo conveniently coincides with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, where creatives have no excuse but to wander through gallery spaces and attend lectures by prominent artists....

If my boyfriend ran away with a mysterious identical copy of me, whom I may have created by accident because some thrift store in Norway sold me a typewriter with a hex on it that could do such things, I would have several options. I might very well pull a María (Steph Vondell). Specifically,I might hound the bastard and his demon lover across North America, finally giving up only when I realized that the meaning of life—or at least the prospect of way better sex than I had grown accustomed to with that feckless, gullible idiot of an ex—resided in a garret above a squalid jarana shop in the form of that cute Guatemalan luthier I banged on my way out of Mexico....

Lutheran pastor Katie Hines-Shah Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Katie Hines-Shah, Lutheran pastor. “Also, a lot of people assume that I don’t have child care. I’ll go visit a parishioner at the hospital and they’ll be like, ‘Where’s your daughter?’ Well, she’s at day care, because I’m doing my job. I don’t go hauling my two-year-old around to funerals and hospitals....

Q: I’m a 37-year-old gay man who just got out of an abusive relationship. We were together five years, moved to Portland together, got married three years ago, yada, yada, yada. He suffered a traumatic injury earlier this year, which led to PTSD, which led to a nervous breakdown, which led to our savings being depleted, which led him to leave me in October. He moved back to the other side of the country, and I’m broke and on my own in a strange city....

With all due respect to Republicans and “good-government” civic citizens, I’m not joining your posse, riding out to string up House speaker Michael Madigan, the state’s most powerful Democrat. The General Assembly—which Madigan controls—did pass legislation favorable to Commonwealth Edison, including overriding then-Governor Quinn’s veto to pass the Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act in 2011. Yes, Madigan should step down. But then I thought he should step down—or be forced out—after it became clear that he’d ignored staffer Alaina Hampton’s request that he stop another Madigan operative from harassing her....

Last summer, Chicago DJ and producer Jerome Derradji returned to his native France for the first time in a decade. He needed to clear his head after a legal battle with a New York distribution company nearly sank Still Music, the dance label he’d founded in 2004. After spending a few weeks abroad, he felt better personally, but his business was in the same sad state he’d left it in. It was a lousy time for him to get a phone call from an unfamiliar record dealer offering him a very expensive once-in-a-lifetime opportunity....

Uniform Last year I reported on new-industrial duo Uniform’s first trip to Chicago, and tomorrow night they return, opening for Cult of Youth at the Empty Bottle. The Brooklyn-based band, made up of Ben Greenberg (formerly of the Men and Pygmy Shrews) and Michael Berdan (of Drunkdriver), combines simple, stripped-down, rapid-fire drum machines with wall-of-feedback guitar sounds and desperate, damaged vocals. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Of Sound Mind and Body,” the band’s most unsettling song yet—over the course of its ten minutes, it goes from brutal noise rock into disjointed feedback, the electronic beat remaining unfazed as Berdan loses his mind over everything....