Jeopardy Productions, Inc. Our hero, Julia Collins Last week was a demoralizing week in television. As for her Jeopardy! run, she’s second only to Ken Jennings in number of consecutive wins; Jennings won an obscene 74 games back in ’04. Her take, $428,100, makes her the third-winningest contestant of all time. And there aren’t any statistics I can quote, but it’s my unscientific opinion that she’s also the number one least smug multigame winner in Jeopardy!...

The tenth annual Riot Fest starts a week from today, and we’re happy to be the first to announce the full hour-by-hour schedule! (The first by a few minutes, anyway.) For its third year in Humboldt Park, the fest graduates from the five stages that dotted the park’s southern end to seven stages spread out in the much bigger northern part—well, eight stages, including the one that’s just for Pussy Riot’s panel on Friday....

Some playwrights have a gift to amuse; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has a darker gift. Anyone with romantic notions of Chinese culture will be unsettled by the jagged, unsentimental portrait of modern urban China presented in the Goodman Theatre’s world premiere of her drama The World of Extreme Happiness. Hell, even if you don’t have romantic notions, you’ll probably be unsettled. (The title of the play is, no surprise, sarcastic.) Jo Mei must do this when one of her characters, the deluded follower of a self-help guru, is transformed from comic relief into someone we genuinely care about, as she’s ground down by the heartless system she thought she would prosper in....

Moving along with our continuing series of local food books: To date Tribune food columnist JeanMarie Brownson’s most notable cookbooks have been coauthored with Rick Bayless, for whom she serves as culinary director of Frontera Foods. Though her name was on 1989’s The Chicago Tribune Cookbook (when she was head of the paper’s test kitchen), until now there’s been no hardcover collection of her own work. Dinner at Home, published by Agate Surrey (which is becoming the publisher of record for local cookbooks), is made up of recipes selected from Brownson’s column, and it has the wide scope you’d expect to come out of a major daily....

Federal appellate judge Richard Posner’s decision to retire should surprise no one who’s read his latest book. Posner, of Chicago’s Seventh Circuit, is pushing 80, which he suggests is when judges should retire, and in The Federal Judiciary: Strengths and Weaknesses, he shows little concern over alienating his superiors. The job of appellate judges involves writing opinions that the Supreme Court, should it review them, will admire and concur with, but Posner sounds beyond caring....

As I wrote in my year-in-review piece on overlooked Chicago hip-hop, no agreed-upon variables exist to help determine which releases are definitively “overlooked.” I’m less willing to characterize artists that way if I notice that, say, publications outside the city are giving them attention—but some musicians are so good that even when they start to get popular, it’s hard not to feel that they deserve still more fans. Maybe “underappreciated,” not “overlooked,” is the better word here....

Midwestern Cuisine Running a cafe that’s located inside a locavore superstore means that Abra Berens has at her fingertips the freshest seasonal fruits and vegetables, lovingly grown and harvested on midwestern farms. From her station in Stock’s open kitchen, the chef, a farmer herself, is able to survey Local Foods’ produce cooler, which in late September overflows with peppers, cauliflower, corn, and squashes. Here she gets a feel for what’s in abundance without having to look at an availability sheet like the other local chefs who source ingredients from the four-month-old grocer and wholesaler....

Justin Townes Earle The country blues man stops by City Winery to play some tunes. His last two albums, the companion pieces Single Mothers and Absent Father, were released less than a year apart, adding to a quality discography that features records released on local label Bloodshot Records. Expect songs old and new tonight. Brooklyn Brewery Mash Tour Chicago folks normally don’t take too kindly to New Yorkers, but I think we can make an exception when tasty beverages are involved....

No one needs another spiel about Why George Saunders Is Important. He’s “the writer for our time,” according to the New York Times Magazine, which laid that honorific at Saunders’s feet in 2013 upon the publication of his story collection Tenth of December. And with the release last week of Lincoln in the Bardo, he became a long-awaited first-time novelist at age 58. But you’re probably aware of this already. What I wanted to find out is: What don’t we know about George Saunders?...

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove One of the supreme pleasures of the new 35-millimeter restoration of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (which screens for two more nights at the Music Box) is that it allows you to celebrate how grainy Stanley Kubrick’s movies are. I can’t think of many other comedies that look like Strangelove, with its sci-fi mise-en-scene and newsreel-style matter-of-factness....

American Hero Bess Wohl came up with a delicious premise for her 2014 comedy: abandoned by their bosses almost as soon as they’re hired, three bewildered would-be “sandwich artists” go rogue, banding together to keep their submarine franchise open. The result might’ve been anything from a blue-collar farce or a corporate satire to a kind of fast-food version of Sartre’s No Exit. But while Wohl has the wit to keep things amusing in the short run, she never gives us a good reason to think the trio are anything but stupid for holding on....

The headline in question reads “Dozens Dead in Chicago-Area Meatwave,” and it’s still such a good dig. Meat Wave guitarist and front man Chris Sutter and drummer Ryan Wizniak are old friends, and Sutter says Wizniak so frequently quoted the 2003 Onion story—which goes into gory detail about the “estimated 40 residents dead of steaks, chops, ribs, bacon, and various other forms of meat exhaustion”—that it became a running joke between them....

Illinois House Bill 4469 is an initiative that, if passed, would affect inmates throughout the state. Drafted this past January with an implementation date of 2020, the bill consists of three major parts. It would turn Cook County Jail into an official polling location, would implement election processes at every jail in Illinois, and would provide “Know Your Rights” guides and voter registration forms to inmates upon release. This year the bill was passed in the Illinois General Assembly, but Governor Bruce Rauner has refused to sign it without an amendatory veto of its third provision....

Last Saturday morning Nina Sandlin gave the initial yank on a cord attached to a white sleeve covering a new street sign at the southeast corner of Wilson and Artesian. Then she said she bet some small volunteers would like to take over, and she stepped aside when three children promptly stepped up. Nina watched with the rest of us as the sleeve fell away, and the corner assumed its new identity as the Honorary Lee Sandlin Way....

Anchee Min will be interviewed by Rachel DeWoskin at tonight’s fundraiser. On Sunday, the New York Times ran the chilling story of Noemi Álvarez Quillay, a 12-year-old girl who attempted, twice, to travel alone and without papers from her home in the southern highlands of Ecuador to join her parents in New York. The first time, she got as far as Nicaragua and then turned back. The second time, she made it all the way to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico where last month she and a coyote, a human smuggler, were apprehended....

Pennsylvania Back in a March In Rotation, the Owl’s talent buyer Aaron Dexter sang the praises of local four-piece Melkbelly, and a couple of weeks ago he announced that he was starting up his own record label, Automatic Recordings, and his first release would be the band’s debut LP. A couple of days ago Melkbelly released a preview track from Pennsylvania, which Dexter will have out next month, and after giving it one listen it’s easy to see why he—and probably anyone else who hears it—loves this band so much....

On their second full-length, Offers (Grand Jury), Chicago sweethearts Ne-Hi take poppy indie rock and elevate it to new levels of grandeur. Formed in 2013 by four college friends at the now-defunct DIY space Animal Kingdom, Ne-Hi released their self-titled debut via Manic Static the next year, building a beautiful, fuzzy racket by smearing sweeping melodies over their grimy basement-punk roots. On Offers Ne-Hi edge even farther away from their garage-y genesis—not to mention the dreary sounds of members’ side projects Dehd and Earring—into sophisticated pop majesty....

Any dance acolyte knows that “virtuoso” is the proper adjective to glue in front of the name Savion Glover. The prodigy of hoofing—distinguished from traditional tap by its heightened interest in improvisational riffs and its lowered interest in incorporating the body, focusing mainly on the feet—has a unique, incessant style. His tremolo is like syncopated lightning. His staccato sounds like a rattlesnake on amphetamines. Once he finds his groove he barely rests a fraction of a beat—and in the interim he seems be using his hands to snakecharm the beat out of the floor and into his shoes....

Let’s say you’ve gone to war in the mountains. You and your men have a chance for a breather. You’ve found a secluded spot, easily defensible, near water and not far from a few cowherds, from whom you’ve liberated one of their fattest animals. Everybody’s hungry and it’s time to make camp. The enemy’s not far, but you don’t know exactly where he is. He doesn’t know where you are either, but you definitely don’t want to attract his attention—so no fires, guys, sorry....

Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, social media editor Brianna Wellen and staff writer Leor Galil discuss the bizarre appeal of the Netflix holiday extravaganza The Princess Switch. LG: Can we actually describe what Vanessa Hudgens did as “playing multiple characters”? I realize she was given two roles, and one role required her to speak with an accent that suggests she’d spent a weekend in the UK, but she didn’t have much to work with, really, for either character....