Last fall, there was a moment when it seemed all but impossible that the Chicago Cubs would win the World Series and Donald J. Trump would win the presidency. On October 30, after Cleveland Indians ace Corey Kluber silenced the bats of Joe Maddon’s team to go up 3-1 in the World Series, Nate Silver’s statistics-driven news website FiveThirtyEight published a post declaring “The Cubs Have A Smaller Chance Of Winning Than Trump Does,” citing forecast models that gave the Cubs and Trump a 15 percent and 21 percent chance of victory, respectively....

Mike Houlihan, founder of the Irish American Movie Hooley festival, is so dedicated to Irish-American filmmakers and culture that this year he screened 50 domestic and international submissions before he and Barbara Scharres, director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, settled on the three films they felt were the most consonant with the Hooley’s mission of furthering the traditions of Irish storytelling. The strongest of the festival’s trio of films is Mother’s Day, a moving BBC drama based on a real-life late 20th-century campaign to end “the troubles” in Northern Ireland....

A little more than two months ago I suggested in a blog post that the recent opening of a Lawrence Avenue storefront restaurant called L.D. Pho might signal a demographic swing toward the Vietnamese taking place on the far-west end of Lincoln Square. What I didn’t realize was that for three years prior a Vietnamese restaurant had already existed in the same space, a place I’d passed hundreds of times but dismissed because its name—New Asia—suggested the sort of pan-Asian dilettantism that makes the eyes glaze over....

Q: I’m gay and have been dating a guy for ten months. He’s great overall, and I would say for the most part we both want it to work out. But I am having a problem with his friends and other lifestyle choices. All of his friends are straight, and almost all of them are women. All of my friends have always been gay men, like me, so I find this strange....

There is a rule in journalism that it takes three of a kind to make a trend. In the past two weeks there have been four anti-Semitic incidents in Chicago: the smashing of windows and the scrawling of swastikas on the front of the Chicago Loop Synagogue, the carving of a swastika on a bench inside the Illinois Holocaust Museum, anti-Semitic and racist graffiti painted inside Saint Cornelius School in Jefferson Park, and a bomb threat to a suburban Jewish community center....

Courtney Barnett It’s Presidents Day, which means some of you get to kick back and take the day off. Even if you don’t have the day off, there’s plenty of ways to celebrate—specifically, plenty of great concerts, such as Justin Timberlake at the United Center and Ultra Bide at LiveWire Lounge. “Twenty-five-year-old Melbourne singer Courtney Barnett unfurls the lines to her wordy songs with an apathy that belies their sharpness,” writes Peter Margasak....

Dale Reince Braid On Saturday Chicago-via-Champaign outfit Braid coheadline a show at Double Door with Smoking Popes; the influential second-wave emo band is preparing to release its first full-length in 16 years, No Coast, and Saturday’s set is the only show Braid has booked in the area before the album comes out. No Coast is a high-energy, matured take on emo, and its sleekly produced tunes are ready-made for summer evenings spent staring at the setting sun....

The first moment I knew Tim Fitzgerald would be a great guitarist was at a place in Lincoln Park called the Jazz Bulls. He wasn’t one yet. It was 1990, and he was a teenager at an afternoon jam session for a local jazz teacher’s students, each of them taking tentative little solos. The guitar he played was a solid-body Martin. It was an awkwardly heavy instrument, and I knew well what it could do because it had once been mine....

Vic Mensa has an affinity for punk. You can hear it in the ferocious tone he brings to his songs when his target is a lethal racist cop or anyone else who deserves his righteous rage—and his clothes flat-out scream it. Maybe you remember him wearing a Bad Brains T-shirt at Pitchfork a couple years ago? If not, you can find plenty of other examples in his Instagram feed—right at the top he’s posted a shot of an LA gig where he’s got on a Dead Kennedys shirt....

Suitcase of Love and Shame On Monday at 7 PM Constellation, the northwest-side arts venue, will host a screening of Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013), a documentary feature compiled from 60 hours of reel-to-reel tape that director Jane Gillooly found in a suitcase she purchased on eBay. Those tapes were recorded sometime in the 1960s by a midwestern woman and the man with whom she had an adulterous love affair....

The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is rarely spoken about in American history classes, much less in poetry books. The forced migration of 14 million people—Muslims to Pakistan, Hindus to India—left divisions that families still grieve over today. Writer Fatimah Asghar, 28, spent most of her life not knowing how partition affected her family, until the history was passed down to her when she was in college. Now, in the wake of the Trump administration’s many crackdowns on immigration and border control, and its separation of families, Asghar’s collection of poems reflecting on her family’s history, titled If They Come for Us, reads like a warning....

The National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University Green Fields, codirected by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1937, screens from 35-millimeter on Sunday at 7 PM. On Sunday at 7 PM Doc Films kicks off the season’s most esoteric retrospective, a ten-film series of Yiddish-language films made between 1937 and 1940. Wittily titled “Schmaltzywood,” the series focuses exclusively on U.S. productions, although Yiddish-language films were made in about a half-dozen countries, including Russia, Germany, and Poland....

Farrar Straus and Giroux I don’t know how to begin to describe Paper Lantern, Stuart Dybek‘s new collection of stories. The subtitle describes the collection as “love stories,” which I guess is as good a description as any. But a “love story,” as opposed to a “romance,” cannot be easily summed up, or broken down into neat elements like epiphany or foreshadowing or the three forms of irony like the tidy stories you had to read in ninth-grade English....

Piggybacking on the success of Italian-food wonderland Eataly, celeb chef and restaurateur Richard Sandoval plans to open Latinicity, a 22,000-square-foot monument to our collective love of Latin food, inside Block 37 in the Loop. So far we know that it’ll have a grocery section, a dozen food stands slinging things like ceviche and grilled meats, a wine bar, a tapas restaurant, a coffee bar, and a lounge. James Beard Award-winning chef Jose Garces (Mercat a la Planxa, Rural Society) will oversee the culinary program and operation of the tapas spot....

Alex Wroblewski The “at least he’s not Rauner” candidate In 1986, Lyndon LaRouche candidates no one had heard of won the Democratic nominations for lieutenant governor and secretary of state of Illinois. “I will never run on a ticket with candidates who espouse the hate-filled folly of Lyndon LaRouche,” said Adlai Stevenson III, the Democrats’ nominee for governor, who formally abandoned his party, ran on a third-party ticket, and was clobbered....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every week in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Is a Chicago without police a possibility? In the 2016 article “Abolish the police? Organizers say it’s less crazy than it sounds.” Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova explored the history of abolitionism, spoke with local activists fighting for change, and reported the Chicago Police Department’s response (or lack thereof) to the movement....

October 25-November 9, chicagohumanities.org In a different sort of world we’d grow up swapping cards with pictures and fun facts about our favorite economists, reading comic books about the adventures of physicists and anthropologists, and hanging up centerfolds of Paris Review interview subjects in our lockers. We’d throw parties—with themed cocktails!—to celebrate the announcement of the Nobel Prize laureates and wait in line all night outside bookstores (or at least sitting in front of our computers hitting “refresh”) just so we could get tickets to readings....

Yes, yes, we Chicagoans are blessed to live in such a terrific theater town, where you can see something tremendous even in the most humble storefront black box populated with non-Equity actors. But here’s the thing about those storefronts: most of them just don’t have the budget for comfortable seating. Instead of the well-padded, velvet-covered seats that abound in the fancy downtown palaces, where you can enjoy a quality nap if road-show Phantom proves less than captivating, little theaters provide flimsy folding chairs crammed as close as seats on the el and with only slightly more padding....

Born into extraordinary wealth during the reign of Louis XIV, French writer Jean-François Regnard traveled widely—and for a while, involuntarily, when he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. Ransomed, he continued his travels, spending time with the Sami people of Lapland. Then he took a cushy government job that left him free to write Molière-esque plays for Molière’s old theater, the Comédie-Française. Regnard died under ambiguous circumstances (suicide?...

“I discovered Raw magazine while looking for pornography in the back room of my local Omaha comic shop,” Chris Ware recalls in Outside the Box, a collection of in-depth conversations between influential cartoonists (among them Allison Bechdel, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Daniel Clowes) and Hillary L. Chute, a comics scholar and assistant prof of English at the U. of C., where she organized the wildly popular Comics: Philosophy & Practice Conference in 2012....