At Taste of Thai Town you can eat khao kha mu in what was once a holding cell. You can slurp tom kha gai in booking. And you can spoon up green curry and rice in a basement that once might’ve been reserved for cattle prodding and water boarding. Arun Sampanthavivat’s long-awaited second restaurant is a strange but karmically satisfying repurposing of the old Albany Park police station. Some two years in the making, it was billed as sort of a community center for Thai culture and an Eataly for Thai cuisine....

The publicly available catalog of Chicago R&B singer-songwriter Aaliyah Allah stretches back five years, to a song she recorded on GarageBand with just a USB mike; as she told Circus magazine in February, she didn’t know how to mix music in those early days, but that tune, the dreamy, slow-motion “Infatuated,” remains one of her favorites out of all the material she’s created. “It is probably the most raw, organic song I’ll ever be able to make,” she said....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 9/3: Prolific Chicago indie rocker Jason Balla expands his catalog with his new solo project, Accessory. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, free. Mon 9/3: The Chicago Fringe Festival pares back to one week—what does it mean? Ultimately it means less shows, but several of this year’s still look promising. Times vary, Jefferson Park locations vary; see website, chicagofringe....

The most intense moment in playwright Young Jean Lee’s deliberately uncomfortable 2008 play, now being revived by Red Tape Theatre, happens in silence. Midway through the show, four out of the five members of director Wardell Julius Clark’s all-black cast step forward in a line. They point their gaze at the gallery—first one white face, then another, and yet another—as the house lights at the Ready’s 65-seat black box gradually come on....

Jimmy Fishbein Twista “I’m known for a certain tempo of music,” says Chicago hip-hop veteran Twista. The tempo is remarkably fast—after all, the man otherwise known as Terrell Mitchell landed in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1992, the same year he released his debut album, Runnin’ Off at da Mouth. More than two decades later and Mitchell is still at it—today he releases his ninth album, The Dark Horse....

Almost two years ago a minor food media scandal erupted when a website called Snackpicks.com, owned by Kellogg’s, published a pair of recipes purportedly written by Grant Achatz. If “Chef Grant Achatz’s Ham and Curry Toppers” and “Chef Grant Actatz’ [sic] Sweet Potato Toppers”—snacks built on Keebler crackers—seemed beneath the talents of the creator of Black Truffle Explosion and Pheasant, Shallot, Cider, Burning Oak Leaves, matters were made even more ignoble when the site misspelled the chef’s name....

Richard A. Chapman / Sun-Times Media Republican Bruce Rauner addresses the congregation at New Beginnings Church of Chicago, whose pastor, Corey Brooks, has endorsed him. The latest twist in the increasingly strange, ugly race for governor came over the weekend, when south-side minister Corey Brooks said he received death threats, and his church was burglarized, after he appeared in TV commercials for Republican Bruce Rauner. Republicans don’t need to be reminded that they haven’t won an Illinois governor’s race in 16 years....

The design-friendly cover of Real Estate’s forthcoming Atlas While promoted and praised by everyone from Pitchfork to the New York Times, New Jersey band Real Estate have always appeared to me to be on the receiving end of quite a lot of negative criticism. Maybe because I’m friends with a number of people who are omnivorous listeners, I’ve seen many mentions on social media about the band being part of an increasing output of beige, unmemorable indie rock....

Following a long stretch of British TV work, proletarian director Ken Loach returned to the big screen with this 1979 children’s adventure, adapted from a novel by Leon Garfield and set in 1750 Yorkshire. For a social realist like Loach, the story seems unusually macabre and fantastical: young Bartholomew, apprenticed to a draper, is tending to one of the hanged corpses his boss surreptitiously recovers and sells to the local medical college when suddenly the huge man revives, explaining that he survived the noose by shoving a bent spoon into his windpipe....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • That Twitter has shut down 30 sites that store politicians’ deleted Tweets? —J.R. Jones • About the hunger strike launched by protesters of plans to turn Dyett High School into an art and design academy run by Little Black Pearl Arts? —Kate Schmidt • About China’s economic woes? —Drew Hunt • About liberalism’s long history of divorcing racial disparities from economic inequality?...

It has been about a decade since I’d given any thought to the Seattle quartet Kinski. I wrote about their 2005 album Alpine Static (Sub Pop) and then lost track of what they were doing. But this summer they released 7 (or 8), an insular reference to how many albums are part of their official discography, on Kill Rock Stars, and it made me feel as if time had frozen. Although the latest record dispatches most of the space-rock elements that characterized their work for Sub Pop back then, the band’s still serving up tight, propulsive, guitar-driven stuff that suggests the music could’ve been made at any point during the last two decades....

Bronx rapper Artist Dubose, better known as A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, became one of the biggest acts to emerge from NYC last year in part because he was willing to shrug off the city’s imposing hip-hop canon. The hits off his debut 2016 mixtape, Artist, and his October EP, TBA (Highbridge/Atlantic), feel hardwired for the present-day Top 40, which owing to radio almost demands that crossover acts sing as much as they rap....

Since their first releases in the early 80s, southern California four-piece Redd Kross have been a cut above their punk peers. Started in 1980 by teenage brothers Jeff and Steven McDonald and rounded out over their first decade by a rotating cast of guitarists and drummers—including Black Flag members Ron Reyes and Dez Cadena and Circle Jerks founder Greg Hetson—the band added a sophisticated melodic sense to their feisty punk. By the early 90s, the brothers had grown into legitimate long-haired heartthrobs and were operating in a jangly, alt-rock realm, cranking out some minor hits while supporting acts like the Lemonheads and the Presidents of the United States of America before disbanding in 1997....

Two of 2018’s biggest rap singles came out last year. “Mo Bamba,” a burbling, combustible anthem that Harlem rapper Sheck Wes made for his childhood friend, Orlando Magic center Mohamed Bamba, originally dropped in June 2017; earlier this month, the song reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100. “Lucid Dreams,” a corrosive heartbreak song that Chicagoland rapper Juice Wrld built on a tender guitar melody swiped from Sting’s “Shape of My Heart,” also debuted online in June 2017; in October it peaked at number two on the Hot 100....

When the National Public Housing Museum finally opens next year in a three-story brick building at 1322 W. Taylor—the last remnant of Chicago’s oldest federal housing project, the Jane Addams Homes—it will be the first cultural institution in the country devoted to chronicling and analyzing America’s attempts to house its people. Over the last 20 years, the idea for the museum has evolved into an ambitious plan that includes historic reconstructions of public housing apartments, a policy research center, and an entrepreneurial hub, along with programming that bridges social justice struggles past and present....

As budget speeches go, Mayor Emanuel’s recent address to the City Council was more or less true—with one glaring exception. The council was packed with people who had a hand or two in those debacles, starting with Alderman Ed Burke, who as finance chair steered every single bad deal, including the dreaded parking meter sale, through committee. No, he wasn’t in the City Council during the Daley years. And now that it’s pretty clear the courts won’t let him dictate pension cuts to the unions, we get the new Mayor Rahm, stepping forward to solemnly say it’s time we do the right thing and pay our bills....

The media have had a lot to say about the dismantling of the Obama legacy by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress. Either they can and will, or they’ll discover they can’t entirely but they can chainsaw it to bloody bits. Their first order of business seems to be to make the federal government they’re inheriting unrecognizable. In whatever way this grand plan proceeds, it’s already failed. Everything Trump has done so far as president-elect has only enhanced Obama’s legacy....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “Fashion is empowering,” John Williams says. “It allows me to embrace who I am, and I believe it has the ability to do this for others.” It was with that spirit that the accounting student and Ghanaian immigrant founded the fair-trade apparel company Gyetum—which means “to embrace” in the Ghanaian language Akan—to encourage black and African people to accept “who we really are,” says Williams, pictured with his girlfriend Lesan Mattis....

Andrew Bird has a well-deserved reputation for fastidious craftsmanship and quirky songwriting—every sound and syllable in his art-pop ditties feels carefully chosen and freighted with significance. The Evanston native was a young violin prodigy, schooled in the Suzuki method, and once he turned his attention to original songs in the late 90s, his sponge­like brain made almost every style and approach accessible to him. He soon sharpened his focus, and since the mid-aughts he’s enjoyed great success....

Atlanta rap trio Migos have experienced a lifetime of music industry ups and downs in less than half a decade. Rappers Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff first made it through the buzz of their breakthrough 2013 sensation, “Versace,” surviving a Drake remix that felt less like a cosign than a jump on something hot. They held their ground in Atlanta’s fickle, rapidly evolving hip-hop scene—still the apple of the country’s eye—long enough to drop 2015’s Yung Rich Nation through Atlantic, 300, and heavy hometown indie Quality Control....