To my mind, nothing embarrasses a newspaper more than a lack of vigilance over statistics—what I’ve taken in recent blog posts to calling “numerical illiteracy.” One egregious offender is the New York Times. To bolster his case, Emanuel passed along statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he said “show rapid increases in S.T.D.’s among older people.” Between 2007 and 2011, he reported, “chlamydia infections among Americans 65 and over increased by 31 percent, and syphilis by 52 percent....

Born Yesterday Garson Kanin’s 1946 comedy crackles with sharp-witted dialogue, smartly drawn characters, and almost painfully fresh relevance in Remy Bumppo Theatre Company’s timely revival. It concerns a crooked New Jersey scrap metal dealer, Harry Brock, who arrives in the nation’s capital aiming to bribe a senator to pass legislation that will undo government regulations and benefit Harry’s business. Hoping to make his uneducated but street-smart mistress, ex-showgirl Billie Dawn, a bit more “presentable” to the D....

Julia Thiel The Forbidden Root booth at Beer Under Glass Despite (or maybe because of) the dozens upon dozens of Chicago Craft Beer Week events happening this year, I haven’t been to many of them. But I’ve tried to make it count when I did. I made it to the official kick-off event, Beer Under Glass—which was held entirely on the grounds of the Garfield Park Conservatory this year rather than inside, leading some people to refer to it as “Beer Next to Glass....

Because it’s doppelbock season, last week I stopped by Binny’s in River North on the way home from work to pick up a bottle of Weihenstephaner Korbinian. (I was already working through three six-packs of Metropolitan Generator, which seemed like enough at the time.) Just a few feet away, I spied something calling itself Dragon Lady Doppelbock—it cost less, it was stronger, and it had an awesomely tacky label. So I bought both....

As near as Gossip Wolf can tell, the only thing predictable about Angel Marcloid’s hectic and eclectic electronic-music project Fire-Toolz is that its output will always be just as disorienting as it is fun. Last week Hausu Mountain dropped her new album, Skinless X-1, which combines Spock’s Beard-style prog rock, IDM ambience, nifty pop hooks, and blurry black-metal shredding—often on the same track! On Thursday, August 30, Marcloid celebrates with a release show that’s part of the Hideout’s monthly Resonance Series; also on the bill are Tiger Village and Lord Mute, the duo of Chicago producers Mukqs and J....

Thanks in large part to Jordan Klepper, from 2005 to 2007 Chicago comedy connoisseurs had their Saturday-night plans locked down. They’d go to a party or check out an art show, then hurry over to the iO Theater, then located in Wrigleyville, just in time for the midnight performance of The Late Night Late Show. The weekly talk show featured local improv luminaries in character, guests such as Hoop Dreams director Steve James, and a lot of unabashed absurdity in the service of meticulously crafted conceits, such as an evening in which the show was hijacked by Russians....

For most heshers, releasing a 12-inch solo EP and scorching splits with satanic Ohio squad Midnight and legendary Sabbat front man Gezol in one year would count as productive. But Chris Black has already done all that, and his 2018 is just getting started. He has one of metal’s most diverse discographies—the Reader has covered his groups High Spirits, Superchrist, and Dawnbringer for years and only scratched the surface. On Friday, October 5, he’ll outdo himself by dropping three full-lengths—which he describes as “distinct and separate in terms of the music, lyrics, and atmosphere”—under the name Professor Black....

Norwegian quartet Cortex play jazz music rooted in aesthetics that were crafted generations ago. You can hear the stop-start structures of Ornette Coleman’s classic recordings for Atlantic in trumpeter Thomas Johansson’s compositions, and there are hints of Albert Ayler’s hyperemotional tone in Kristoffer Berre Alberts’s saxophone asides. But they’ve honed an approach to this material that’s all their own. Ola Høyer’s elastic double-bass lines and Gard Nilssen’s about-to-boil drumming sustain a swinging velocity that is both nimble and energetic, and the group’s approach expresses an ebullience that justifies the name of their most recent album, Avant-Garde Party Music (Clean Feed)....

Since September 2013, Chris Anderson, a former floor manager at the Green Mill, has been organizing a monthly series that invites local jazz musicians to assemble new groups in order to play a classic and/or overlooked album in its entirety. During its run, his Jazz Record Art Collective project has expanded its range: though the bulk of the albums celebrated have been hard bop at their core, other installments have explored free jazz or more fusion-oriented work....

What are you afraid of? The dark? Dogs? Not making rent? White supremacists? Your own potential? Sickness and death? The chef, Rey Villalobos, was summoned from Art Smith’s Blue Door Kitchen, the Gold Coast mothership, where he’s chef de cuisine. But here he’s offering three squares a day instead of two, with weekday breakfast including juice, coffee, fruit plates, oatmeal, pancakes, and something called a “brown line wrap.” There’s hummus, kale chips, and kale-and-artichoke dip that will surely appease whatever loving God you believe is supervising your existence....

Many of the memorable experiences created by Lookingglass over the years have been triumphs of imaginative and physical scale—more often than not, the augmented kind—like Amanda Dehnert’s Eastland or Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. This enchanting world-premiere Christmas pantomime is a decidedly different sort, one that resembles a music box: fastidious and deceptively compact and, despite its weight and elegance, ultimately a machine masterfully crafted for play and wonder. Four powdered wig-clad chamber musicians provide string, piano, and woodwind accompaniment to Hans Christian Andersen’s fable about a one-legged tin soldier (Alex Stein) hopelessly in love with a toy ballerina (Kasey Foster)....

AP Photos U.S. officials haven’t convinced Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to create a multiethnic state—but maybe they should show him Ivanhoe. The ending of the 1937 Jean Renoir movie Grand Illusion gently comments on the absurdity of war. The fleeing French prisoners cross the border into Switzerland and the pursuing Germans lower their guns out of respect for the rules of combat: it’s improper to shoot your enemies in a neutral country....

Fred Frith is a giant of the avant-garde. Among experimental guitarists, perhaps only Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser, and Sonny Sharrock can be considered his peers. He has an impeccable resumé in progressive rock, having started Henry Cow while still a teenager in 1968 and cofounded spin-off band Art Bears in ’78—both also featured drummer Chris Cutler, god­father of the late-70s Rock in Opposition movement. Other groups in which he’s played include Massacre (alongside bassist Bill Laswell), Skeleton Crew (with cellist Tom Cora and harpist Zeena Parkins), Naked City (led by saxophonist John Zorn), and the relatively new Cosa Brava (with Parkins, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, percussionist Matthias Bossi, and sound artist the Norman Conquest)....

The world has yet to realize the full potential of Vine, but plenty of musicians are having fun trying to get there. When it comes to using the app’s short looped videos to blast original songs around the globe, an aspiring teenage MC in Maryland who calls himself Semi is leading the charge—he went viral last year with a clip tagged “another 6 sec rap.” Chicago has its share of music-scene Vine stars, but no one looks to be having as much fun with it as Jim Magas....

The ongoing normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba augurs an uptick in the presence of artists from the island making their way to the U.S., and it’s an encouraging sign that the brilliant Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes is playing in town for the second time since last summer, a date that arrived after a long period when he only performed here once in nearly 16 years. Although the pianist has lived in Spain since 2010, the members of his current group, the Afro-Cuban Messengers, still live in Cuba....

If there’s an afterlife and F. Scott Fitzgerald is in it, he must be furious he left the land of the living so soon. Since he died in December, 1940, when he was just 44, he’s had some of the best years of his publishing career. New collections of stories and essays! A new piece in the New Yorker! Most of a novel, heralded as brilliant! Not to mention the movie adaptations and the millions of copies of The Great Gatsby sold to high school and college students!...

Now this is a random blast from the past. Eddie Holman is famed for “Hey There Lonely Girl,” a sweet, vulnerable Philly soul ballad that rocked AM radios during the winter of ’69. It wasn’t his only hit, but it overshadowed the others—visit his website and the opening bars are the first thing you hear. On the track Holman is clearly on the outside looking in as he consoles a lady who just got dumped while not so subtly offering up himself as a replacement....

In a spring Pitchfork feature about Liz Harris, who records and performs as Grouper, contributor Ben Ratliff wrote that when she submitted the new album Grid of Points to Kranky, the Chicago-based label “at first worried that listeners would feel short-changed.” The record, which came out in April, ends at 22 minutes, but Harris makes such thorough use of that short span that asking for anything more feels gluttonous. Her gentle keys, barely perceptible and frequently overdubbed singing, and use of space and field recordings have the capacity to make time appear frozen, with her spectral voice suspended in the air....

As you know if you’ve read this week’s Gossip Wolf, tonight the Empty Bottle hosts Cuddlestock, a four-way release party thrown by local garage label Tall Pat Records, which is run by the very tall Pat Sullivan. Tonight’s third-annual edition of Cuddlestock will include performances by Flesh Panthers, Clearance, the Rubs, and Glyders, whose self-titled seven-inch is the freshest Tall Pat release—its A side, “Every Boy & Girl” is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Chicago seems like it’s luxuriating in a golden age of pasta. From Monteverde’s Sarah Grueneberg to Daisies’ Joe Frillman to Cameron Grant at Osteria Langhe, the number of chefs operating at the peak of eccellenza is astonishing. And yet is it really that impressive when you consider that the Chinese were eating noodles long before anyone else—and that, in terms of the vast universe of Asian noodle dishes, Chicago is years behind cities like Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Toronto?...