John Steinbeck intended East of Eden to be the book of his life. He planned to set down the story of his own personal origins for his two sons, and he meant that both literally and cosmically. Originally he called the book My Valley, and he intended it to unfold in alternating chapters that cut between his mother’s family, the Hamiltons, who arrived in California’s Salinas Valley from Ireland in the late 1800s, and their fictional neighbors, the Trasks, who embodied what he called “the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil....

When Girlpool plays live, all Cleo has is Harmony and all Harmony has is Cleo. The Philadelphia-based duo (by way of LA) consists of just two players: Cleo Tucker on guitar and Harmony Tividad on bass. Both sing in harmony, and neither one sees any need for a drummer. No matter the size of the venue they play, Girlpool inevitably brings feel of intimacy to the space as they rattle through their growing catalog of folk-pop songs....

A composed plate featuring two rows of four perfectly aligned nachos shows up on the menu of Gemini, the second act for a long-running Lincoln Park neighborhood restaurant. Each of those well-behaved chips is piled with successively diminishing gobs of garnish, beginning with juicy duck confit, followed by a tiny, perfect square of melted chihuahua cheese, then a wee spread of avocado pico de gallo, a dribble of lime-infused crema, and a thin sliver of bright red chile....

Ryan Smith Over the past few weeks, in preparation for last weekend’s My Little Pony Fair, I watched a lot of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It is, I discovered, a really good show. During that period, I also read a few extensive reports on rape at college campuses and the psychology of rapists, interviewed two rape victims/survivors, and saw on the news that a young white man had attended a prayer meeting in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and then shot and killed nine people he’d been praying with, including the pastor....

Paul Boucher The future for the White Sox: Avisail Garcia and Jose Abreu, after Garcia homered in August against the Orioles Chicago baseball fans who wish they could say that at least their team’s better than the chumps on the other side of town will have to wait till next year. The Sox have one of the best hitters in the game in Jose Abreu, who should be a unanimous pick for Rookie of the Year....

Just minutes into A Tribe Called Quest’s headlining Pitchfork set Saturday night, when Phife Dawg‘s vocals streamed out of the speakers during what would’ve been his first big turn, the jumbotron right of the stage showed a crane shot of an empty space and unattended mike stand in front of Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s DJ setup. Phife Dawg, born Malik Taylor, died on March 22, 2016, a few months after he and rapper-producer Q-Tip got the group back together to play The Tonight Show in November 2015—a performance that convinced them they were meant to make music again....

I once wrote a profile on Bruce Norris for Chicago magazine. This was about eight years ago—after he’d pissed people off with evil-minded satires like The Pain and the Itch, but before they anointed him with a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for Clybourne Park. The profile (which, I have to say, is very good) examines Norris’s perverse charm. He’s quoted at one point saying that Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Martha Lavey “has referred to me as a ‘perseverator’: I enjoy things that are hectoring and terrierlike [and] refuse to drop the topic....

Human Feel Oh man, New Order is in town this week—I saw them at last year’s Lollapalooza, and it was legitimately mind-blowing. Too bad for us, that show is sold out. But, there’s still tons of other great stuff to see this week as we close in on Independence Day. “Since forming My Brightest Diamond in the mid-aughts, Shara Worden has gotten increasingly ambitious, putting her classical training to excellent use in fleet, sophisticated arrangements that wriggle, strut, and float around her crystalline voice....

Twenty-eight-year-old grad student Rachel Hardeman tiptoes into Professor Zelda Kahn’s Cambridge office (Harvard? MIT?) with such diffidence that you half expect her to change her mind and tiptoe back out, no one the wiser. She doesn’t do that. And yet she doesn’t go so far as to make her presence known, either. She simply stands there—timidly, it seems—waiting for the professor to look up from her papers and register her presence....

Most good documentaries are powered by conflict, and you couldn’t ask for a struggle more elemental or relevant to our time than the one chronicled in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City. Director Matt Tyrnauer revisits the ongoing contest in the 1950s and ’60s between Jane Jacobs, the populist author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Robert Moses, the imperious master builder of New York City, who championed massive tower blocks and expressways in his plans to modernize Manhattan....

An all-star cast—Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney, Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch—pile aboard Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a resentful family reuniting in small-town Oklahoma. Streep chews the scenery as the vicious, pilled-up matriarch, and Roberts (whose early career as a pretty woman has given way to a great sourness) gives as good as she gets playing the angry eldest daughter. The cloistered farmhouse setting, the surfeit of familiar faces, and the furious emotional pitch all contribute to the stifling sense of claustrophobia that’s so key to Letts’s writing (and which William Friedkin exploited so well in his adaptation of Bug)....

Q: I’ve always wanted to tie girls up, but I can never convince a woman to let me. Lately, I’ve been exploring “bondage singles” sites online, but I’m totally new to this. How do I know which ones I can trust? There are hundreds of profiles, but it’s hard for me to believe I can really just answer an ad, meet a girl in a hotel room, and tie her up....

Emily Stewart, executive chef at Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits, says that umeboshi “tastes like a Warhead that’s been tossed in vinegar, but with the texture of a pickled smushy fruit.” Made from the ume fruit, which is often referred to as a Japanese plum but is actually more like an apricot, umeboshi are packed in salt and left to ferment in their own liquid. “[Ume] are naturally salty and sour, and then [the Japanese] really lean into that flavor profile,” Stewart says....

Last week, a Northwestern University student rocked the campus by filing a federal lawsuit against the university for failing to take adequate action on her two-year-old complaint of sexual harassment against an NU professor. Here’s the version of events according to the lawsuit, filed February 10 by the student’s attorney, Kevin O’Connor: The lawsuit states that her memory was fading “in and out” and that she recalls being in an elevator and going back to his apartment, with him groping her while she begged him to stop; then she recalls waking up at 4 AM....

Chicago rapper Femi Adigun, better known as Femdot, has recently emerged as one of the city’s best storytellers. He’s certainly earned such a title with June’s Delacreme 2 (Closed Sessions), and according to some of the material on this full-length, he fought hard to get here. Femdot still sounds like he’s fighting on “Alright,” as he barrels through a dreamlike instrumental with the same force of will that’s seen him through the very challenges he raps about—be it violence at the hands of the police or struggling to show his worth as an artist....

Nathan for You Nathan Fielder saves struggling businesses by taking the longest possible route for the shortest possible gain. In one instance, he enticed customers to fill up at a particular gas station by lowering prices. But the deal required a rebate—in order to cash it in, people had to hike up a mountain and answer a series of riddles. Fielder follows the old maxim: it’s about the journey, not the destination....

In a pivotal scene in the new version of A Star Is Born, unknown singer-songwriter Ally (Lady Gaga) and a buddy arrive at their food-service kitchen job dressed in unflattering clothes, talking excitedly about anything but work. Their boss trudges by and says snarkily, “You’re late!” Ally is furious. “I’m late?” she says. “I’m late?!” She quits on the spot, stomps out of the restaurant, and does what her new boyfriend, rock star Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper, who also directs), has been urging her to do—get on a plane, fly out to his latest gig, sing to a packed stadium, and leave her life of drudgery behind forever....

The slow cooker is a crucial piece of kitchen equipment for folks keeping kosher, particularly on the Sabbath when they aren’t supposed to work or tend the fire. The simple solution for putting together a hot and ready midday meal is to assemble it in the slow cooker Friday night, and the next day, there it is. That process is at the heart of Laura Frankel’s Jewish Slow Cooker Recipes, an updated paperback edition of a book the former Shallots Bistro chef and current chef at Wolfgang Puck’s Kosher Catering at the Spertus Institute published in 2009....

Read numbers 40 through 31, 30 through 21, and 20 through 11. Pandelis Karayorgis, Circuitous (Driff)Great Boston pianist Pandelis Karayorgis made this quintet record in Chicago with a killer local band, though bassist Nate McBride has since moved back the leader’s hometown. The group also includes Frank Rosaly on drums and an excellent yin-yang pair of saxophonists, Dave Rempis and Keefe Jackson. Karayorgis has discussed the fact that he used the classic Tony Williams album Spring as a model for the instrumentation here, but the sound is all his own, with punchy, angular tunes, a wide dynamic range (from soft rustling to juddering blasts), and ingenious arrangements that color in the oblique melodies and provide plenty of suspense....

A day after dropping her challenge to Illinois comptroller and fellow mayoral candidate Susana Mendoza’s petition signatures, Cook County board president and county Democratic Party chair Toni Preckwinkle pivoted to fund-raising. In an e-mail sent at 9:33 this morning, Preckwinkle asks supporters to give her money after decrying the injustice of the incarceration of Tennessee woman Cyntoia Brown. The ActBlue landing page to which the link leads proposes donations ranging from $5 to $500, with a write-in box where, one assumes, the requested $3 donations can be entered....