‘Tis the season for hip-hop and waffles—or at least it is at Jerry’s in Wicker Park. Next week the restaurant, bar, and venue hosts two events with the city’s preeminent breakfast-food-­obsessed rap squad, Waffle Gang! On Saturday, December 19, Waffle Gang leader Shawn Childress (aka rapper, singer, and producer Awdazcate) celebrates his 40th birthday as part of the weekly rap-­karaoke party at Jerry’s (with music by Encyclopedia Brown). It’s Native Tongues night, so come ready to bust out some Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, or A Tribe Called Quest; the fun starts at 9 PM, and there’s no cover....

Making a Murderer, the compulsively watchable Netflix series that ate up a big chunk of the holidays for many of us, has a couple of major Chicago connections. The future of his intellectually challenged nephew—who was 16 years old when he confessed to raping Halbach while she was chained to his uncle’s bed, slitting her throat, and helping torch her body—rests in large part with Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth....

Gossip Wolf isn’t the biggest fan of Emo Nite LA. The widely publicized DJ monthly doesn’t seem to be good for much except using nostalgia for 2000s emo to sell gimmicky shirts (maybe you’ve seen their “Sad as Fuck” tees). The series’s organizers are bringing their laptops to town on Wednesday, April 19, but why spend $10 to watch mass marketers sing along to old Billboard hits when you can go to a homegrown emo night for free?...

Given that artist and bartender Greg Shirilla bartends at Humboldt Park 4 AM spot the Continental, where he serves rowdy revelers into the wee hours, it’s remarkable that he’s still one of Chicago’s friendliest dudes—dealing with humanity at its drunkest tends to make a person surly! Shirilla needs a hand, and Gossip Wolf is happy to pitch in: On June 28, he fell three stories while cleaning windows at another job, breaking his wrist and ankle and cracking two vertebrae....

The Disney folks are brilliant at repackaging. Hence a hit 1991 animated musical feature, with songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, about a bookish young woman who saves an enchanted prince by falling in love with him, has become an array of action figures, a line of clothing and costumes, countless fashion accessories, a 1994 live version for Broadway (with additional songs by Menken and Tim Rice), a “junior” version for high school and middle school productions, a 2017 live-action movie starring Harry Potter alum Emma Watson, and so on....

German reedist Silke Eberhard is hardly cagey about her influences. In recent years, in fact, she’s recorded several personal interpretations of their work—she took a stroll through the Ornette Coleman songbook with pianist Aki Takase, for example, and her all-horn quartet, Potsa Lotsa, plays nothing but tunes composed by Eric Dolphy. Last year Eberhard released two new records on the Leo label that capture different facets of her tart playing on clarinet and alto sax: Turns, with pianist Uwe Oberg, is mostly renditions of beautifully contemplative chamberlike pieces by Jimmy Giuffre (and his associates Carla Bley and Annette Peacock), while Mingus Mingus Mingus, by Eberhad’s trio with trumpeter Nikolaus Neuser and drummer Christian Marien, consists of vivid small-group translations of the bassist’s ebullient contrapuntal arrangements that don’t sacrifice their original energy or wit....

When I was doing a food podcast, I would start worrying I was exhausting my listeners if an interview with one chef pushed past the ten-minute mark. Yet for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to a podcast called In the Weeds in which a chef named Ben Randall talks with his friend Steve Kadwell about places he’s worked—for an hour to two hours in each episode, of which there are 30 so far....

You wouldn’t know it from looking, but Trap Door’s cramped, sepulchral, amenity-free cubbyhole, where the shoestring company has been mounting intractable, inscrutable plays for 22 years, is the site of perhaps the greatest Chicago theater success in the last quarter century. Despite nearly a quarter century presenting demanding, unmarketable works, Trap Door has garnered numerous awards, launched European tours, and significantly grown its audience. Yet it hasn’t gone the usual route charted by successful fringe companies: get a bigger space and program more audience-friendly material to support it....

Michael Gebert Fettucini made with grano arso, burnt flour. “This is something you’d only have seen in Puglia,” chef John Coletta of Quartino, the two-story Italian restaurant in River North, says. “Even in Lazio, you wouldn’t see it.” “In my opinion, its place is pasta. It started that way; why not keep it that way?” Coletta says. “People used to flavor pasta doughs, whether it was lemon or pepper or whatever the flavoring is....

Combatants in the great charter school debate went toe-to-toe a couple of weeks ago in a bout that should have been broadcast live on TV. Not that there’s any doubt about what the board is going to decide, regardless of the feedback it gets. But the creation of the advisory council was overseen by New Schools for Chicago—a nonprofit consortium featuring some of the city’s wealthiest charter school backers. And the facilitator of the council itself was Juan Jose Gonzalez, the Chicago director of Stand for Children, another consortium of wealthy charter school backers....

Lancashire, England, c. 1580: Two men sip wine in a stone-walled room whose dark and dampness are relieved only by a weak wood fire. One man, the elder, is a priest, a believer—in God, in the church, in a “harmony” worth pursuing. The younger man is an artist, or will be. He can’t hear the harmony; his head roils with a multitude of voices and characters clamoring to be heard and understood....

A weak sentence can undermine a strong argument. The other day I read Steve Chapman’s libertarian case for legalized prostitution. Then I read a moral case against it, made by Sarah Marshall in the New Republic. I won’t say one writer was right and the other wrong; they frame the question differently and reach different conclusions, and it is up to you to frame the question for yourself the way you want to....

Texas has just made itself look a little silly. In discussing “immigration” to America, a new geography textbook for use in Texas schools teaches that “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” As the Dallas News observes in this editorial, the state’s textbooks are carefully scrutinized and heatedly debated, with an eye to making southern history as anodyne as possible....

At first, when Stephanie Douglass saw the orange spots covering plants and trees all over the ten-acre organic farm she manages, she thought it might be some sort of fungus or bacterial infection. The spotting on the leaves was indiscriminate, attacking everything from tomatoes to peppers to cucumbers to basil to sunchokes to spinach. Within two weeks the tissue on some of most heavily affected plants necrotized and developed holes, giving their leaves the texture of Swiss cheese....

Amy Krouse Rosenthal: A Beauty Salon” is an interactive exhibit that celebrates the life, work, and spirit of the Chicago writer, who died in March this year at the age of 51 from ovarian cancer. Rosenthal came up with the concept of a beauty salon—where “beauty” is defined broadly and “salon” as a gathering of people to exchange ideas—last year, after her cancer diagnosis but before she knew it would take her life....

On Wednesday night, Chicago’s black tech community gathered at 1871 with one goal in mind: to share critical pointers for succeeding in their sector. “I had to totally redo my business model,” Dickson said. “Never be too attached. I’ve launched Flat Out of Heels three times. We’ve had to continuously reinvent ourselves.” Do extensive research. Figure out what your product, business model and consumers will be. Beta test your product, testing it with a smaller consumer group before going full-scale....

Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, contributor Mason Johnson ponders the darkness that lies at the heart of Christmas With the Kranks. Catching wind of the Kranks’ plan, their neighbors become determined to drag Luther and Nora back into their fanatical festive fold. Dan Aykroyd, sporting his Chicaaaaahhhgo accent, plays Luther and Nora’s block captain, Vic. He takes it upon himself to talk some sense into them....

Cameras started rolling in town this week on Chicago Med a month after the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour—a hazing ritual of sorts for fall TV’s freshman class. As I chatted on a couch with showrunner Andrew Dettmann, little did I know that his time was about to be up on Chicago Med. Just a week after press tour, news broke that the former CSI producer would no longer helm the Med writers’ room, reportedly due to “creative differences....

I’m no Chicago heretic. I won’t deny the pleasures of our summer. When the June sun finally emerges after six months of gray skies, it’s a magic cure for the seasonal blues and a harbinger of the embarrassment of riches of things to do. The next four months are mostly swell—there’s a reason so many of us preach the gospel of Chicago summer to our out-of-town friends. But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing....

To say the state of contemporary circus in America is dim isn’t to insult the discipline—it’s merely to point out that, with the exception of Cirque du Soleil, which is Canadian anyway, there’s yet to be a troupe that’s set the country ablaze. The first Chicago Contemporary Circus Festival intends to end this period of relative obscurity with an dynamite program—including eight world-class performances and five days of professional workshops—that will bring a broader contingent of cirque nouveau troupes to mainstream audiences....