Like so much else at Lyric Opera during the last few years, the Chicago Voices project started with the company’s creative consultant, Renée Fleming. Chicago Voices is a project of Lyric’s five-year-old outreach and educational arm, Lyric Unlimited. Like all of Lyric Unlimited’s work—which includes Millennium Park concerts, school-based programs, and, this spring, a production of Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at the Harris Theater—it’s in part a search for opera’s future audience....

On Nathan for You, now in its third season, Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder poses as an expert and helps small business owners revolutionize their fledgling concerns by coaching them to do things that are really, really ridiculous—like serving poop-flavored frozen yogurt, selling vouchers for booze to underage kids, or renaming a coffee shop Dumb Starbucks. Well, Dumb Starbucks wound up not being such a dumb idea. During the filming of the show’s second season, the media caught wind of the Dumb Starbucks location Fielder opened in LA’s affluent Los Feliz neighborhood, the story quickly went viral, and soon everyone found out that the show was behind the stunt....

In the two years since the secret Not in Our House Facebook group was formed, a number of things have changed. Chief among them is that Profiles Theatre no longer exists. Profiles was the group’s initial inspiration to organize and support people who have been harassed and abused at non-Equity theaters; it closed last June following an investigation by the Reader into more than 20 years of verbal abuse and physical attacks on actors and crew members....

There’s something extremely unnerving about picking up the phone and hearing the voice at the other end say, in a Jersey accent, “This is Patti Smith.” Smith is, after all, one of the coolest people in the entire world. William S. Burroughs described her as a shaman; this does not strike me as inaccurate. I always loved the idea of this day, and I often celebrated in my own way, so it was a nice opportunity to remember a lot of people....

Read about picks 40 through 31 and 30 through 21. 18) John Luther Adams, The Wind in High Places (Cold Blue) Another remarkable evocation of natural beauty from composer John Luther Adams, The Wind in High Places takes inspiration from the principles of the Aeolian harp (in a piece performed by New York’s fantastic JACK Quartet), the song of the canyon wren, and the way atmospheric conditions can create the suggestion of a multitude of suns or moons in the arctic and the Sonoran Desert....

Battle of the Sexes The 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was a carnival—the equal rights movement as prime-time game show, broadcast on ABC to an audience of 90 million. This makes it fine material for the offbeat comic filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), and publicity materials show how carefully they’ve replicated the famous match, with Emma Stone a ringer for King and Steve Carell a perfect choice to play Riggs the pig....

The American Mercy Tour Written and performed by Michael Milligan, this is a harrowing two-parter on how and why our country has failed to protect its “huddled masses” from sickness and destitution. “All these people,” says Joe, the bankrupt and humiliated auto mechanic of part one, waving a hand at invisible bank heads and bureaucrats. “They’re just trying to make some money off my wife’s being sick.” Part two shifts to an attorney’s office, where William, an overworked doctor, contemplates a standing offer from Big Pharma to buy his small family-owned practice....

In the 2000s, the word “emo” had trouble finding a single, standard definition. Part of that is due to the genre’s mainstream crossover in the aughts, when the word “emo” was bandied around and dragged through the mud. As the tide of nostalgia slowly shifts from the 90s to the 2000s Buzzfeed has been littering the web with headlines that only further muddy the definition of emo. When Buzzfeed first posted the news that nu-metal band Evanescence will reunite, the site did so with the headline “Attention Emo Kids: Evanescence Is Reuniting So You Can Feel Things Again” (the headline has since been changed)....

A month ago, when I reported that the University of Illinois had apparently hired and then fired professor Steven Salaita because of his anti-Israel tweets, the UI administration wasn’t talking. Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise issued a statement explaining why she’d effectively killed Salaita’s appointment, refusing to forward it to the board of trustees for what was to have been perfunctory approval. And the board of trustees issued its own statement supporting her....

Since forming more than a decade ago, this energetic, highly theatrical combo from Ukraine have focused on translating the traditional polyphonic vocal tradition of their homeland for a global audience. Impressively, DakhaBrakha have done so without sacrificing their native essence—not even when trafficking in dub and electronic effects or borrowing rhythms from around the world. The four members contribute cello, jaw harp, accordion, and percussion, but the focal point remains the keening Balkan-style vocal harmonies of Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska....

Just because something’s unimaginable today doesn’t mean we won’t be living with it tomorrow. The Tribune’s editorial page pleaded this week for City Hall to economize by placing more jobs “under control of private businesses, which would reduce the weight of traditional pension obligations.” “There’s no outsourcing police work,” said the Tribune, but the city should consider everyone else on its payroll. Why not the police? We’ve privatized public education with all those charter schools—once upon a time who could have imagined that?...

Last month I visited Bogotá, Colombia, a destination that’s been on my bucket list for a long time. In recent years the formerly crime-ridden and civil war-torn capital has made a remarkable turnaround: As recently detailed by Chicago magazine’s Whet Moser, Bogota has succeeded in lowering its homicide rate by more than 75 percent since 1993. During my stay in the city nicknamed the South American Athens, I was impressed by its many excellent museums, centuries-old Spanish Colonial architecture, and impressive Andean setting, as well as the hospitality of its residents....

September 5 will mark 100 years since Chicago police officers and federal agents raided and pillaged the offices of the Industrial Workers of the World on West Madison Street. The CPD seized everything from political pamphlets to personal love letters as possible evidence of the Wobblies’ attempts to sabotage American participation in World War I. In leftist circles, the fishing expedition for “evidence” of treasonous activities was seen as a pretext for dismantling an organization that was successfully unionizing workers around the country and threatening government and business interests....

Shellshag Local garage outfit the Orwells celebrate the release of their major-label debut Disgraceland tonight at Schubas—it’s a free show, but you had to win tickets to get in. If you wanted to go but wound up without a way in there are plenty of other excellent shows to see this evening and throughout the weekend. “British producer Joshua Leary, also known by the cryptic stage name Evian Christ, first started attracting attention in online electronic-music circles for a series of tracks (collected on the 2012 anthology Kings and Them) that reimagined chopped-and-screwed Houston hip-hop as lo-fi ambient techno,” writes Miles Raymer....

There’s a reason why Donald Trump is barely mentioned in Bill Ayers’s new book, Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto, which calls for a social movement that opposes the neoliberal agenda of the rich and powerful that run our political system. When he was writing it last year, he generally assumed that Hillary Clinton would become the next president of the United States. The storm calmed for the Weather Underground as the draft and the Vietnam War ended....

Bishop Bullwinkle’s profanity-laced takedowns of roguish churchmen and their hypocritical flocks on “Hell 2 Da Naw Naw” and “Some Preachers [Ain’t Shit]” have made him a cult, meme-ready YouTube celebrity quite apart from the praise and condemnation he’s received from modern-day southern-soul aficionados. And his shows go even further: they’re basically an unexpurgated barrage of toasts, dozens-style insult routines, and sexual throwdowns. Seemingly designed to both amuse and offend as wide a spectrum of listeners as possible, Bullwinkle’s act represents a long-standing “underground” strain of black folk humor, similar to what Rudy Ray Moore did with Dolemite—though Bullwinkle’s “Bishop” gimmick adds a new layer of transgressiveness....

Andrea Bauer Bric-a-Brac Bric-a-Brac Records, the Avondale record and collectibles shop that opened last June, will be hosting a fund-raiser event on Sunday, March 2, to fund a PA system for its in-store shows. Ever since the shop’s opening day it’s been hosting constant, exciting shows and events—all the while borrowing a PA from neighboring DIY space Animal Kingdom. The shop is booking a busy spring and summer schedule, so now’s the time for Bric-a-Brac to upgrade its own system....

For this invaluable political documentary, a team of video correspondents organized by director Jehane Noujaim (Control Room, Startup.com) collected street-level footage of the Egyptian Revolution from January 2011, when President Hosni Mubarak was driven from office, through summer 2013, when the Egyptian military, responding to widespread public anger, deposed his democratically elected successor, Mohamed Morsi. By focusing on a handful of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Noujaim manages to humanize the tensions in Egypt between secular liberals who want a free society and members of the Muslim Brotherhood who want an Islamic government....

Certain forms of free improvisation, far removed from the technique’s roots in jazz, take “free” to its logical extremes. Brooklyn-based electroacoustic collective Causings create restrained, microscopically detailed, almost entirely abstract sound art that’s defined more by its process than by a fixed lineup—they attempt to eliminate any parameter that might crystallize into habit, so that every performance begins with a blank slate. Derek Baron and Adam Gundersheimer, both originally from the Chicago area, founded Causings as a duo in late 2013, and fellow former Chicagolander Sandy Gordon joined in October 2014....

I’m sitting in a restaurant across the table from Ron Ernst, an indefatigable community activist from the northwest side. On the table before us are computer printouts showing dozens of parcels of property in the Jefferson Park tax increment financing district. Which, of course, is why Mayors Daley and Emanuel have loved TIFs almost as much as I love the Bulls. The city regularly takes underachieving parcels of land out of TIF districts so they don’t bring down the overall haul of taxes....