You’re not supposed to eat old eggs. Or drink milk that’s been sitting around for—oh, say, a year or two. So two-year-old eggnog sounds like a pretty bad idea. But there’s a loophole, it turns out. Alcohol is the key (as is so often the case): it kills any bacteria that may be lurking in the perishables, making the eggnog safer to consume than it would have been when fresh....

Like many Chicagoans, Latoya Winters was stunned by the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Shamiya Adams at a sleepover in July. Shamiya and several friends were in the bedroom of a home in West Garfield Park. They were circled around a pretend campfire, about to microwave s’mores, when a bullet fired at some boys outside came through a window. It struck Shamiya in the head; she died the next morning. We’re in an office at Marillac House, the 100-year-old social service agency near Jackson and California, where Winters works with children in summer- and after-school programs....

Q: Is it legal for a man to procure the services of a dominatrix? In the kind of session I have in mind, there’s no nudity or sexual activity or contact involved. There’s not even any whipping or flogging or caning or hardcore BDSM stuff. I just want to see what it would be like to be bound and gagged. That’s it. So is it against the law to pay a woman to tie me up?...

Last year Ilwoo Lee, guitarist and principal songwriter for Seoul postrock group Jambinai, told Noisey that “many Korean people don’t listen to traditional Korean music and they don’t respect Korean traditional culture.” Having studied music at the country’s National University of Arts, he’d been exposed to historically important forms in which few people his age had any interest. In 2009, Lee, who’s also a champion of the bamboo flute known as a piri, formed Jambinai with two like-minded students: Bomi Kim performs with a two-stringed fiddle-like instrument called a haegeum, while Eunyong Sim prefers the geomungo, which is part of the zither family and is typically played while it’s resting flat on the ground....

One notable factoid about La Havana Madrid, the subject of an affecting new play by Teatro Vista‘s Sandra Delgado, is its former location: a prominent hot spot for Chicago’s Latino community in the 1960s, the nightclub once resided on the corner of Belmont and Sheffield in Lakeview. From there, we’re introduced to severalcharacters of Latino and Caribbean descent, each with vivid tales of persecution, adversity, and, at some stage, redemption. There’s a Cuban teen, for example, separated from her parents and sent to Chicago at the height of the Cuban Revolution....

What do words like objectivity and impartiality even mean any longer? Wallace is transgender, and asserted, “Obviously, I can’t be neutral or centrist in a debate over my own humanity. The idea that I don’t have a right to exist is not an opinion, it is a falsehood.” “The people consuming news are savvy. They know that news is curated and complex; that the editorial choice of what to report and how to report it is always a subjective one; that facts are real, but so are priorities and perspective....

“Whisper” isn’t a word that usually springs to mind when one thinks of percussion, but with his diverse program “Whisper(s)” Eighth Blackbird percussionist Matthew Duvall actively explores quiet sounds and textures. He’s still willing to pound away on a piece like the ultraprecise and melodic “Binge Delirium” by Yu-Hui Chang, or Matthew Burtner’s “Broken Drum,” which gives a car’s discarded brake drum a workout while high-pitched electronics enhance the rapid thrum of a stick beating the inside, the player’s other hand damping the sounds....

With 21 candidates vying to be the next mayor of Chicago, hearings on challenges to their nominating petition signatures and other paperwork began this week at the Chicago Board of Elections. The agency will issue its decisions on the challenges by Christmas. Many of the candidates will likely not be able to prove that they have the 12,500 valid signatures from registered Chicago voters necessary for making the ballot. “As a young girl in eighth grade I used to get teased and called a raccoon because I had dark rings around my eyes,” she went on to say....

QI’m the bisexual everyone loves to hate, because I want to be in a poly relationship with both a man and a woman. I am a woman who is into commitment, loyalty, love, trust, and honesty. I am not looking to cheat on anyone. But I discovered after one failed marriage to a man and one long-term relationship with a woman that I want to be in a romantic, sexually committed relationship with a man and a woman at the same time....

Before the Sun-Times told its staff late last month that it would begin publishing content from the Daily Herald, it was already publishing content from USA Today and picking up stories from the Reader. And it was decades ago that the paper began publishing content provided by the AP and other wires. Even at their biggest, strongest, and richest, the dailies never went it alone. “Once they sold them off,” Lampinen explains, “it made sense to reach out and say, ‘Hey, we’re not going after each other’s throats any more....

Mike Sula There’s a rack of ribs under that candy coating. I may be forgetting a few, but over the past 14 months or so I’ve written about at least ten new barbecue restaurants within the city limits. In the cases of all but two or three I can neatly sum up their problems by invoking America’s most lovable nihilist, Rustin Cohle: “Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing....

Cesar Merino Made to Break In the liner notes for Provoke (Clean Feed), last year’s debut album by his quartet Made to Break, reedist Ken Vandermark writes that the band emerged from two impulses or threads he’d been exploring over the years with other projects. He first cites FME and Frame Quartet as ensembles that explored modular forms—compositions with multiple moving parts that can be reordered on the fly by participants; then he cites Spaceways Inc....

As part of an ongoing retrospective of films starring Nicolas Cage, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films screens John Woo’s Face/Off on Thu 1/30 at 9 PM. I can think of few films that better exemplify the whacked-out enthusiasm of a Cage performance (except for maybe Bringing Out the Dead, which is also included on the program). To that point, I can think of few directors better equipped to harness said whacked-out enthusiasm than John Woo, action director par excellence, who’s known for his fascinatingly over-the-top work....

The first exhibit you’re likely to encounter at the new American Writers Museum is a temporary installation. Longer on gadgetry than on literature, AWM is all about the breezy quote and the glitzy busywork toys that are now the currency of the exhibit industry: push a button, spin a wheel, drag an icon, and the gadgets spit out a thimbleful of data. It’s American Lit 101 (and more), the nutshell version....

Chicago DJ Tim Zawada, cofounder of nightlife collective Boogie Munsters, goes to great lengths in his search for amazing tracks: as he told the site SF Station in 2012, he’s discovered new wave records in a rural Indiana barn and lucked into a collection of funk seven-inches while doing post-Katrina repairs on a house in Gulfport, Mississippi. Around five years ago, Zawada began to notice a constellation of small labels releasing new takes on boogie, a futuristic funk sound whose synths evoke a battery of computer hardware and whose bass is so dense you could bounce a quarter off it....

After the U.S. air strikes against Syria in April, some questioned whether Donald Trump has abandoned his campaign platform of “America First.” The phrase has elicited comparisons with language used by the American First Committee, the powerful isolationist group founded in 1940 to oppose any material support for Britain in its war against Nazi Germany. But it wasn’t the first political movement to use the slogan. Thompson served three terms as Chicago’s mayor, from 1915 to 1923 and then again from 1927 to 1931....

Singer, producer, and chef Via Rosa moved to Chicago in 2010 to help take care of her grandmother and work with local production collective ThemPeople. As she told culture site Chicago Creatives last year, outside of family obligations, she spent the vast majority of her time during her first five years in the city working out of their space: “Literally the night that I landed, I went to their studio.” Through ThemPeople she met singer Jean Deaux, formerly of the local collective the Village, and soon Deaux introduced Rosa to the musician who’d become one of her most important creative partners: producer Na’el Shehade....

After just three months Diana Dávila resigned Wednesday as executive chef at Cantina 1910, one of the city’s most exciting new restaurants. In an interview, Dávila, a subject in the Reader‘s recent People Issue, cited “irreconcilable differences” with the Andersonville restaurant’s ownership. Cantina 1910’s chef de cuisine Aaron Covert and executive sous chef Alison Denton also quit. Dávila says she’s looking for a new gig—Mexican, of course. Despite near unanimous praise from the city’s professional critics and a nod in the Wall Street Journal, Cantina 1910 was the subject of a Yelp smear campaign by people who couldn’t understand the restaurant’s progressive approach....

Karl Wirsum is an art star. The low-key member of the Hairy Who—the 1960s art group nestled inside the Chicago Imagists movement—would probably balk at this characterization, and the art market may not have rewarded him as such, but he is one of our homegrown treasures. Wirsum spoke over the phone recently about his encounters with Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago, Maxwell Street memories, and what inspires his art today. The blues seems to be important to you....

Since 2010, Aperiodic has enriched Chicago’s new-music scene by performing new and rarely heard work by composers who augment their prescribed sounds with indeterminate events and collaborative processes. The ensemble, which is led by Nomi Epstein, which has premiered and revived rarely performed work by Pauline Oliveros, Michael Pisaro, Christian Wolff and Eva-Marie Houben. Now for its 36th performance the group turns inward, playing a program curated by its bass clarinetist, Jeff Kimmel....