Over the course of her nearly 30-year career, award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa has covered everything from abuses at immigrant detention centers to Latino voters’ impact on the 2016 presidential election. Born in Mexico City, she came to the U.S. as a toddler in 1962 and was raised in Hyde Park. Today, as the longtime host and executive producer of NPR’s Latino USA, Hinojosa delves into every aspect of Latino news and culture....

In the summer of 2013, Mayor Emanuel’s handpicked lineup of school board appointees featured the best and the brightest of corporate Chicago, including two lawyers, one banker, a venture capitalist, and the retired president of Northwestern University. So we have to ask ourselves: Why couldn’t our public school watchdogs see what was staring them in the face? The answer, my friends, is that it’s hard to see when you have your eyes closed....

The luminescent Swedes in Cult of Luna hold down a distinctive European corner of the postmetal landscape. Like their countrymen Opeth, they make their own way, and they’ve generally done a good job of surprising listeners on a regular basis, whether by going stripped-down when ornateness was expected or, in the case of last year’s Mariner (Indie Recordings), taking on a collaborator: postpunk vocalist Julie Christmas, front woman of Made Out of Babies and coconspirator with Mouth of the Architect and Spylacopa (with members of Candiria, Isis, and Dillinger Escape Plan)....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, April 19, 2017. Jury awards $350,000 to family of teen boy fatally shot by Chicago police officer A jury awarded $350,000 in damages to the family of Christian Green, who was shot to death by Chicago police officer Robert Gonzalez in July 2013. The jurors found that Gonzalez did not reasonably believe that the 17-year-old Green’s actions “placed himself or others in imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm....

The mood among marijuana legalization advocates at the Illinois State Capitol was jubilant Wednesday after legislation was filed to legalize weed for recreational use. “Obviously, the state of Illinois needs money,” Linn says, “and people are looking at the success of [recreational marijuana sales] in Washington and Colorado.” Legalizing recreational marijuana would be a “huge positive” for the state, de Souza says. He says he hopes the state takes the same approach with recreational marijuana that it did with medical pot by setting up a strict regulatory framework for the cultivation, testing, and sale of the drug....

Booker T. Jones, most famous for fronting iconic R&B/soul band Booker T. & the MGs, is a much more diverse musician than people give him credit for. A child prodigy who picked up an assortment of woodwinds and keys growing up, he became one of the most accomplished musicians in the Stax Records stable in the 60s, as likely to score a soundtrack as he was to introduce elements of jazz and classical music into Memphis soul....

On Wednesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a new initiative he says would help advance academic achievement in Chicago Public Schools: a requirement for all high school students to present an acceptance letter to a college, military, or trades program in order to graduate. Nowhere in the new initiate is there a plan to tackle this disparity, or to increase funding for crumbling schools—many of which are in such decrepit shape that principals complain about rat infestations while teachers are forced to buy basic supplies such as text books, pencils, and toilet paper....

On its surface, Tom Stoppard’s magisterial play is a jargon-heavy requiem for the Eastern bloc, oscillating scene by scene between the high-table gossip of a Cambridge Marxist academic named Max (H.B. Ward) and the tumultuous ordeal under communism of his hippie transfer student Jan (Julian Hester). Close to three decades in the saga of Czechoslovakia’s tug-of-war between the Kremlin and commercial capitalist hegemony play out at the grittiest level of detail: in Prague, Jan and his friends debate the viability of President Gustáv Husák’s normalization policies, while Max and others, in a dozen extremely dense English rows, weigh in on subjects ranging from physicalism versus innatism to Sappho’s papyri in the Ashmolean....

Fearing the final stages of dying from AIDS, a recording artist (Erik Pearson) gathers his closest musical colleagues to record an album inspired by his experience living with a terminal illness. Unbeknownst to everyone except his audio engineer (Benjamin Baylon), he intends for the performance to serve as his own artistic epitaph, a final love note to his friends and romantic partner, recorded the night before he plans to take his own life....

In the event that you’ve forgotten tenth-grade English, “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” is a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play by a certain William Shakespeare. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? It’s also the name of a new wine bar wedged into an increasingly restaurant-gunged Randolph Street. It’s a name so annoying I had to step away from the keyboard and command my dog to type it....

baseballhotcorner.com Wrigley Field: A great place to suffer for the past 100 years. I visited Wrigley Field for the first time on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1982. I was five and accompanied by my dad. He was a Detroit Tigers fan and I had no previous interest in baseball, but it was understood we would root for the Cubs because we were north-siders (well, northwest suburbanites), even though I secretly thought their opponents, the Pirates, had a better team name....

Aladdin Not that it matters, but this live touring version of the Broadway musical based on a 1992 Disney animation is shrill, bombastic, and almost hysterically chipper. Everything the cast and designers bring to the tale of Aladdin—a petty thief who becomes a mensch and then a sultan—is top-notch, from Jonathan Weir and Reggie de Leon’s comic villains to Anthony Murphy’s outsize Genie to the glinting, golden Cave of Wonders created by set designer Bob Crowley....

Maya Deren’s The Witch’s Cradle screens as part of an avant-garde shorts program this Thursday at Co-Prosperity Sphere. “If there’s a documentary about political activism from the 1970s that was shot on 16-millimeter, then chances are I’m going to show it,” said programmer Michael W. Phillips at a South Side Projections screening last year. Phillips has yet to screen every film that fits this description, but that’s not to say he isn’t trying....

The latest documentary from Kartemquin Educational Films, In the Game profiles the girls’ soccer team at a large public high school on Chicago’s southwest side. To call it a sports movie, though, would be selling it short. Director Maria Finitzo uses the school’s soccer program to address larger issues about public education and social inequality in Chicago. As a school administrator informs us, more than 80 percent of the student body at Kelly High School (where the movie was shot) live around the poverty line....

“Water? Coffee? Gushers? Fruit by the Foot?” offered director Connor Wiles as his volunteer crew carried equipment past classrooms filled with board games and crates of toys. Over two days in mid-November, Wiles and his partner in the production company New Trash, Nat Alder, turned part of the Kidz Express Boys & Girls Club in Austin into a music-video set for Chicago hip-hop duo Mother Nature. This was to be New Trash’s 30th video in less than three years, and they’ve developed a vibrant, playful style both despite and because of their typically minuscule budgets—the Mother Nature shoot would cost about $500....

Celebrities gotta eat, so help feed them on The Taste If your idea of fun is listening to food writers tell stories embarrassing themselves, there’s a banner two days in a row coming up. Chicagoist editor Chuck Sudo will be among the lineup at That’s All She Wrote on Sunday, July 20, at the Savoy. And the very next night at Homestead, there will be a bevy of food people, including Fountainhead chef Cleetus Friedman, Molly Each, David Zivan, editor of CS magazine, Time Out Chicago and Sun-Times Splash contributor Samantha Lande, Kelly Aiglon of Red Tricycle, and ....

No longer do tourists make mere visits to Minneapolis to commune with Prince. Ever since the city’s iconic son overdosed in April 2016 at the age of 57, such trips have become veritable pilgrimages. The tourism bureaus of Minneapolis and Minnesota now prominently host itineraries on their respective websites, featuring points of interest such as First Avenue, the nightclub where Purple Rain was filmed; Prince’s childhood home on the city’s north side; and the downtown studio where he recorded his first demo....

It’s 50 years from now. Boston is an archipelago, Los Angeles is a bay, and New York is under the sea. But in Chicago, you don’t piss and moan about dibs on your street, rats in your backyard, or Cubs fans urinating on your porch. Those things are still aggravating, but you keep your trap shut because nobody calls us the Second City anymore. Compared to the rest of our continent’s erstwhile major metropolitan regions, we’re doing great, still high and dry above sea level....

Q: I am a straight, married, 38-year-old woman. My husband and I have two children. I have been with my husband for 12 years, married for six. Three years after we were married, we found out that he was HIV positive. We had both had multiple tests throughout our relationship because of physicals and the process we went through to get pregnant. Both of us were negative then, but only I am now....

Q: I’m a straight married man. My wife and I have a four-year-old and a three-month-old. We’ve just started having intercourse again. For Valentine’s Day, we spent the night in a B&B while grandma watched the kids. We had edibles, drank sparkling wine, and then fucked. It was amazing. After we came and while we were still stoned and drunk, my wife mentioned she was open to inviting others into our sex life....