Federal authorities have conducted undercover investigations and arrested men in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and Ohio who were allegedly trying to travel to territory held by the Islamic State, and that’s just in the last month. But the feds’ approach to snaring potential terrorists with surveillance and aggressive informants—many of them using tactics bordering on entrapment—began well before ISIS emerged as a top concern last year. Yet the informant kept pushing Hassoun to come up with more ideas for attacks and other criminal activity; at one point, he told Hassoun that he could teach him how to deal heroin—which prompted FBI agents to chastise the informant about engaging in entrapment....

Billy Flynn has quietly been playing an essential role in Chicago blues for some time. A Green Bay resident, he’s frequently made the five-hour drive from Wisconsin to Illinois to play behind the distinguished likes of Jimmy Dawkins (whom Flynn considers his mentor), Billy Boy Arnold, Jody Williams, and Willie Kent as well as with the band Mississippi Heat. Flynn also plays the area regularly under his own name, and tonight marks a special occasion: the celebration of Lonesome Highway, his Delmark debut....

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP A 2008 opinion on the Second Amendment by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has reshaped gun policies in Chicago and beyond. Just a couple years ago it was against the law for a private citizen in Chicago to keep a handgun disassembled in a closet at home. By later this year it will be legal to carry a loaded one on the way to the gun store....

Random House Most of what I know about close, lifelong female friendships—the all-consuming kind, that start in the sandbox, continue through confidences about first periods and first gropings with boys, and survive marriage and children (though of course the friends are maids of honor and aunties to each other’s children)—comes from books. Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, Betsy and Tacy, other characters from way more mediocre novels whose names I can’t remember now, but who also share a deep and abiding, though strictly platonic, love....

In a famous put-down, Pauline Kael once referred to The Sound of Music as “The Sound of Money,” implying that the film’s expensive production values distracted from any of its virtues. I was reminded of her line when I watched a couple of recent releases, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. These are handsome, rousing movies that provide the biggest sense of spectacle that money can buy, and neither lets you forget how much was spent in the service of its spectacle....

On the evening of May 29, 2013, 26-year-old Bobby Cann was bicycling north on Larrabee from his job at Groupon, heading home to catch a Blackhawks game. Meanwhile, 28-year-old Ryne San Hamel was driving southeast on Clybourn. He’d been drinking in Wrigleyville after watching the Cubs defeat the Sox. These bike lanes, which are separated from traffic by wide concrete curbs that provide extra protection for riders, double as a memorial for the fallen cyclist....

Selecting a particular 12 O’Clock Track each week has a tendency to set me on natural associations, with one tune sparking the memory of another. Last week’s song by Tribo Massáhi mentioned the Recife band Nação Zumbi, members of which worked with Seu Jorge on his 2010 album Seu Jorge and Almaz. That long-running group has made lots of great records. Yet nothing matches its first two albums, which were recorded when its highly charismatic frontman Chico Science (nee Francisco de Assis França) was still alive—he died in a car crash in 1997 at the age of 30, just as his group was starting to attract serious international attention....

Last week Slate posted a story whose headline pronounced classical music in America dead. Such obituaries have been written so often—and not just for classical music—that you could be forgiven for assuming that most art forms have more lives than a cat. But classical music, while definitely still alive, has without question lost the cultural weight and audience appeal it once had in this country—it’s now widely seen as stale, fussy, elitist, and boring....

During a trip to New York last summer, I finally made my first visit to the legendary Village Vanguard. The club was hosting a week of performances by a diverse slate of musicians tackling the latest book of compositions by John Zorn, the Bagatelles. I caught a set by pianist Craig Taborn that was every bit as brilliant as I expected, but a friend recommended I also check out another pianist I’d never heard of: Philadelphian Brian Marsella....

Yesterday numerous outlets reported that Dieter Moebius, the Swiss-born musician, died at the age of 71. His body of work spans virtually every conceivable iteration of late-20th-century experimental electronic music: noise and drone with Kluster (with Hans Joachim-Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler), proto-dance music with Cluster (the same group sans Schnitzler), Krautrock with Harmonia (in which Cluster brought on Neu! multi-instrumentalist Michael Rother), ambient music with Brian Eno (as both Harmonia and Eno as well as Cluster & Eno), and a combination of all these kinds of music with his own solo material....

For its first half, Ulrich Seidl’s documentary In the Basement is a brisk, bracing, and often very funny film about the seeds of fascism in contemporary Austrian society. The people Seidl observes in his short, sketchlike sequences are generally obsessed with order and domination, yet he renders their obsession nonthreatening, if not comically pathetic, by presenting them like characters in a comic strip, centering each of them in symmetrical or near-symmetrical compositions with lots of negative space at the top....

Jackie Coogan and Charlie Chaplin in The Kid At the end of next week the historic Patio Theater will close for an indefinite period, as the owners claim they’re unable to afford repairs to the building’s air-conditioning. (Heather Cherone recently posted a full report on the situation at DNAinfo.) But the Portage Park venue will host two more events before then. Next Wednesday at 7:30 PM, the Northwest Chicago Film Society will present the rarely revived Michael Curtiz crime drama The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932)....

Q: My husband is nearly 20 years older than me, which was never an issue early in our relationship. However, for approximately the last eight years, we have not been able to have fulfilling sex because my husband can’t keep an erection for more than a few thrusts. I love my husband and I am committed to our family, but I miss full PIV sex. I’m still fairly young and I enjoy sex, but I feel like I am mourning the death of my sex life....

Eduardo Verdugo/AP Some convicted drug dealers doubted that the apprehension of cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán was real. Word travels fast in prison. A couple of weekends ago Derek Thomas was watching a basketball game on one of the TVs in a common area inside McDowell Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia, glad to be out of his cell. Authorities had been putting the prison on lockdown even more often than usual to try to quell conflicts among inmate factions....

Last weekend I stumbled around Manhattan trying to take in the bonanza of the annual Winter Jazzfest. The event has expanded from two days to six, but its heart remains a two-night marathon spanning Friday and Saturday. This year more than 150 first-rate groups performed downtown at more than a dozen venues. Winter Jazzfest takes place during the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, where curators and programmers talk shop and check out artists who want the organization’s members to book or hire them....

Best known for his work with Gillian Welch, David Rawlings seemed intent on using his second album, 2015’s Nashville Obsolete, to differentiate himself from his partner and her sharp updates of American rural traditions. He ended up sounding lost and turbid, extending simple folk-rock themes into endless drones. With his terrific new Poor David’s Almanack (Acony), he’s regained his footing, distinguishing himself by putting his voice front and center. On a loose adaptation of the old folk tune “Cumberland Gap,” Welch’s biting harmonies remind the listener of their bond, and the song’s stripped-down groove and dark melody inject some of the horror of Neil Young’s “Ohio” into Rawlings’s invocation of the gap’s harrowing physical danger....

It’s been more than five years since local indiepop band Baby Teeth broke up due to bassist Jim Cooper (formerly of Detholz! and Frodus) relocating to Los Angeles. Their last show, which they dubbed “The Last Schmaltz,” took place in July 2012, and with the exception of a one-off show in 2013, they’ve stuck by their self-imposed retirement. Lead singer and keyboardist Abraham Levitan has kept busy in the years since with projects such as Teletype, his duo with Chicago singer-songwriter Devin Davis, which released its full-length debut, Spontaneity (No Means No), in 2016....

Lil Durk first came to national attention as part of the south-side drill scene and an associate of Chief Keef’s Glory Boyz Entertainment crew, but he’s quickly proved that he can hold his own. Over the past year he’s signed to the Coke Boys label run by New York rap kingpin French Montana, appeared on tracks alongside French, Diddy, Rick Ross, and Jadakiss, and been featured in XXL‘s annual Freshman Class issue....

Sun-Times Media Former alderman Isaac Carothers, who served a federal prison term on corruption charges, is asking voters to send him to the Cook County board. Isaac Carothers argues that there are good reasons he should be elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. First and foremost, he says, he’s spent his whole career serving the public. And the federal prison time he served for corruption? He claims that just because he pleaded guilty to taking bribes doesn’t mean he actually did....

Last we heard from beloved local rapper Che “Rhymefest” Smith, he was teaching kids how to make music through the Got Bars program launched by Kanye’s nonprofit, Donda’s House. Smith’s also working on his own material, and he’s launched a PledgeMusic campaign to fund his third album, Violence Is Sexy. Smith’s got less than a month left to raise money for the LP—which he plans to release with a book of lyrics, essays, and artwork—and he’s offering up some primo incentives for contributors, including a private house show for a donation of $2,500 or more....