Keep the faith, Chicago theater lovers. If your trust in the integrity of Steppenwolf and Tracy Letts was in any way shaken by the tortured, execrable sitcom CBS rendered from their Chicago-based stage comedy Superior Donuts (despite their ultimate lack of involvement in the final product, save residuals), Letts wants you to rest assured that the old gang is still as scrappy and pugnacious as ever! “I couldn’t restrain myself ....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm at this morning’s City Council special meeting Like a Roman emperor who had just conquered the world, Mayor Rahm strode before the City Council this morning for his annual budget address—all he needed was a toga. On the front page of the Sun-Times was a big, color picture of discarded “Karen Lewis for Mayor” buttons. The headline read: “What now? Lewis leaves a would-be movement without a standard-bearer....

Earlier this week downstate emo icons American Football announced they’d reunite to perform a couple shows, the first of which will be in September at the tenth Pygmalion Festival down in Champaign; tickets go on sale tomorrow at 11 AM. I bet the group will end up on the Riot Fest bill, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to see them play in their hometown. The three-piece started in 1997, a little more than a decade after the birth of emo during the 1985 Revolution Summer in Washington, D....

An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, thrust former United States Vice President Al Gore back into the media spotlight. In the movie he made a succinct, persuasive case for the exponentially growing threats to our planet caused by greenhouse gas effects from carbon emissions. A decade later, Gore returns to the big screen in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, who shadowed Gore closely across several continents to record how man-made climate change—or global warming, as it used to be called—has drastically worsened....

Sometimes television has an elegant way of coming full circle. In 1994 we slid headfirst on a gurney through the doors of Chicago’s fictional County General Hospital, where we’d spend more than a decade soaking up all the drama (and George Clooney) ER could supply. Presumably the popularity of workplace dramas—particularly those where Chicagoans’ lives hang in the balance—spawned Dick Wolf’s Chicago Fire (2012) and Chicago P.D. (2014), and now the Wolfman’s preparing to launch Chicago Med, a decidedly ER-esque jaunt back into a hospital starring Oliver Platt, S....

Smylie Brothers Dunkelweiss, Porter, Cali Common, Pale Ale, and IPA On June 24, former chef and commodities broker Mike Smylie and his four younger brothers opened Smylie Brothers Brewing Co. at 1615 Oak Avenue in Evanston. (Why is it so hard not to type “Slymie”? Come on, brain.) Their brewpub occupies a building that was formerly an Illinois Department of Employment Security office, a grocery called the Oak Street Market, and a gas station and body shop....

Another season of Bachelor in Paradise draws to a close on Monday night, and with it ends the grueling obligation to spend three hours a week watching sweaty singles dry hump and cry (not necessarily in that order). Last season I described the Bachelor/Bachelorette spin-off as “an all-star league populated by some of the franchise’s most afflicted [as in mentally/emotionally unstable] former contestants.” That wasn’t quite as true this season....

Q: About a year ago, I was pretending to read my boyfriend’s mind and jokingly said, “You want to put it in my ear.” Since then, I have seen references to ear sex (aural sex?) everywhere! There’s even a holiday (Take It in the Ear Day, on December 8), and I was reading a book just now in which the author mentions how much she hates getting come in her ear....

Foreign Exchange, otherwise known as the duo of rapper-singer Phonte and producer Nicolay, plays the Promontory on Thursday night. Debuting with the strictly hip-hop Connected in 2004, the group have since transformed into one of the most cutting-edge R&B groups of the past decade, churning out albums that forego the glitchy electronics of most left field R&B acts in favor of cleaner, more nuanced music and quirky, diagonal singing. Aside from the work they release as Foreign Exchange, both Phonte (formerly a member of hip-hop group Little Brother) and Nicolay also issue solo projects, and all their work is released on their own FE Music label....

American Theater Company suffered a major loss in May, when artistic director PJ Paparelli died at age 40 after a car accident in Scotland, just weeks after the opening of The Project(s), his acclaimed documentary-theater piece about public housing in Chicago. ATC is dedicating its 2015—’16 season to the writer-director’s legacy, but don’t expect a lot of solemn reverence. Interim artistic director Bonnie Metzgar has said the company intends to carry on with the sort of bold, socially engaged work Paparelli championed....

This is the fifth installment in our occasional series on poverty and segregation in Chicago’s schools. Castro’s happy about the choice she made. Some prejudices she bore against African-Americans have been dispelled by having them as classmates, she says. Her boyfriend, also a Wells junior, is African-American. She likes her teachers. “A lot of them stay after school to help their students. They make sure you understand a topic before they move on....

When Felix Biederman and a couple friends launched the political comedy podcast Chapo Trap House in March 2016, they imagined it would connect with a sliver of a niche audience. How many people would tune in to a socialist-friendly show that skewers lukewarm Clintonian liberalism and parodies inside-the-Beltway pundits? Perhaps a handful of like-minded Twitter denizens, Biederman thought. What do you think is behind the resurgence of socialism in Chicago and elsewhere?...

Attorney Clint Krislov argues that Chicago’s parking meter privatization deal is unconstitutional. Five years after it was put into place, Chicago’s parking meter privatization deal is widely seen as one of the great taxpayer rip-offs in the city’s history. The open question is whether it’s legal. Lawyers for the city and for CPM countered that the city still has the power to do whatever it wants with the meters, and they cited the true-up payments as proof....

Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans During WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties” is the second exhibition hosted by Alphawood Gallery, which occupies a former MB Financial Bank on the corner of Fullerton and Halsted in Lincoln Park. The first, “Art AIDS America Chicago,” was a spectacular and affecting collection of works about AIDS. “Then They Came for Me” isn’t quite as vast or impressive as “Art AIDS America,” but the former is equally urgent and moving—a necessary visit for anyone in Chicago during the next few months....

Last month Gossip Wolf brought news of an Indiegogo fund-raiser for nonprofit Pure Joy, which aims to open an all-ages, feminist, LGBT-safe punk venue this fall—and it’s not the only new community arts group looking for a brick-and-mortar home in town. Alumni of defunct DIY venues Mortville and the Beauty Shop have teamed up with arts nonprofit Access/Praxis to launch a multidisciplinary space to foster collaborations among Chicago’s diverse creative communities—and because it’ll be subscription based, rather than using the typical DIY arrangement where people live in a venue to cover the rent, it shouldn’t suffer from the burnout that often gives such places frustratingly short life cycles....

After eight hours or so spent unconscious, I can now modestly claim to know a little something about what being dead feels like. When they finally wheeled me into the recovery room I looked every bit as dead as I felt. The only evidence to the contrary wasn’t heartening: the wires and tubes running in and out of my every orifice, all the original orifices and others newly reamed for the occasion....

Chef, the new comedy written, directed by, and starring Jon Favreau, is being marketed as an independent film, and so it is to a certain extent. It was financed by an independent production company (Aldamisa Entertainment), and one of its central themes is finding creative fulfillment on personal terms. Yet the filmmaking couldn’t be more Hollywood minded; the sentimental plot and sitcom-ready one-liners would be right at home in a Billy Crystal vehicle, and Favreau’s concept of creative fulfillment has more to do with financial success than the artistic process....

It’s become an annual tradition for Jason Wyatt Frederick to illustrate the B Side cover for our coverage of the Pitchfork Music Festival, mostly because they’re so fucking good (and other people are starting to notice). Last year, Jason managed to top the previous year’s cover, and he’s improbably taken it up a notch yet again. Now’s your chance to use the cover as a means of going to the festival for free....

Patrick Hull is owner and curator of Vertical Gallery in Ukrainian Village, which exhibits urban, contemporary, and street art. But take a glance at his LinkedIn profile pic, and you might assume otherwise: the former marketing executive sits in an office chair sporting a crisp white shirt and tie, an argyle sweater vest, and a can-do smile. His resumé of past high-powered positions—at Birkenstock USA, Caboodle Cartridge, Woodruff-Sawyer & Co.—is impressive, but what does this conservative-looking dude “with proven ability to grow market share for diverse companies” know about street art?...

Alison Green Slowdive at the 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival In his Soundboard capsule for Slowdive’s sold-out show on Thursday night at the Vic, Kevin Warwick refers to the band’s 1993 album Souvlaki as their masterpiece. He’s right that it’s the band’s best and probably their most heralded album, but don’t overlook the 1995 album Pygmalion. A weightless, lightly drummed album of looping liquid guitars, echoing female vocals, and painkiller-slow tempos, it foreshadows many experimental-indie artists of the last five years, including Julianna Barwick, Grouper, and countless other bands reliant on breathy female vocal loops and sun-kissed guitar licks....