Maria Larkin is trying to nail this bunny hop. Not the easy kind, where you pull your whole bike off the ground in one swift jump. Larkin, an elite racer who came up through Chicago’s bike scene, mastered that one long ago. On a recent Wednesday night in Humboldt Park, Larkin was aiming for the harder kind, the kind that allows you to jump over even bigger hurdles. The bike-obsessed Belgians invented the sport to give them something to do during the harsh winter off-season; cyclocross racers are like mailmen, competing in rain, snow, sleet, and hail....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: That the Weeknd is being sued for use of an illegal sample in his hit “The Hills,” which was produced by Chicago hip-hop linchpin Mano? —Leor Galil About the Irish origins of the dreidel? —Tony Adler About how Donald Trump knowingly works the press like a speed bag? —Ryan Smith Or listen to the first episode of season two of Serial?...

WBEZ’s Jenn White has a knack for telling Chicago’s modern history. In her podcasts Making Oprah and Making Obama, White recounted the captivating stories of local personalities gone global, and her current coverage of the Laquan McDonald case follows in that vein. White’s new serialized podcast, 16 Shots, follows the case from the beginning, detailing the night in October 2014 when Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke killed the 17-year-old- McDonald, and the subsequent fallout in Chicago and throughout the country....

This week Ben Sachs reviews Captive, a “faith-based” drama about an Atlanta meth head (Kate Mara) who finds the strength to kick her habit after she’s taken hostage by an escaped convict (David Oyelowo). And we’ve got new reviews of: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, a documentary about the black-power radicals; A Brilliant Young Mind, a British drama about young math prodigies, starring Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan; Goodnight Mommy, an Austrian horror movie about malevolent twins who decide that their mother is an impostor; The Intern, with Anne Hathaway as a millennial overachiever and Robert De Niro as the retiree who becomes her office intern; On Broadway, with Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block as a carpenter who decides he wants to become a star; Sicario, a brutal thriller about the drug cartels, starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro; Stonewall, a drama set during the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village that catalyzed the gay-rights movement; and Wildlike, an indie drama about a 14-year-old runaway who’s befriended by a solitary hiker (Bruce Greenwood)....

Don’t you think Graham Elliot should’ve been cast in The Hunger Games as a TV chef in the Capitol? These days the bow-tied one may be more known for playing good cop on MasterChef than he is for his food. When was the last time he was associated with a dish that pervaded the gustatory zeitgeist like the foielipop? But the dictates of celebrity cheffery demand a cookbook, and now there’s Cooking Like a Master Chef, a slick 100-recipe volume interspersed with plenty of food porn and shots of the slimmed-down, postbariatric Elliot frolicking with his family like a regular joe....

My accomplice and I huddled at our table outside the restaurant, shivering as waitstaff struggled to light the outdoor heaters. It was the first night of sidewalk season at Ella Elli, but we were the only guests fool enough to take advantage of it. Suddenly the doors swung open and a well-fed, ruddy-cheeked, blue-blazer-over-white-golf-shirt alpha-bro strutted onto the sidewalk bellowing over and along with the tastefully leveled sound system: “Doot dooo-ooo dooo dooo....

About halfway through a plate of jambalaya at Pearl’s Southern Comfort, it occurred to me that I’d never given much thought to the distinction between Cajun and creole cuisines. In fact, I’ve probably used the terms interchangeably, which makes me a terrible southerner. (Well, that and defecting to Chicago.) The Becks were already serving Louisiana-style dishes at Toons, which is known for having better fare than the average fried-food feed trough—there are po’ boys on the menu along with nachos and mozzarella sticks....

Brand-new Phoenix Rising Productions flaps its wings with the world premiere of company writer-lyricist Aaron Woodstein’s episodic musical cum parable about one of history’s most terrible enfant terribles. After Agrippa has her husband, Claudius, killed, clearing the way for her son Nero to ascend to emperor of Rome, a series of assassinations follows, related sometimes in song, other times through vigorous action sequences, and culminating in the Great Fire of Rome....

Can design by Phineas X. Jones On Saturday, October 4, at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, a panel of 222 judges from ten countries bestowed 268 medals on a record-breaking field of roughly 5,700 entries from more than 1,300 breweries. (That’s a lot of breweries, but it’s not even half the current U.S. total—and thousands more are in the planning stages.) Chicago institution Half Acre took home its first GABF hardware, winning silver with its Heyoka IPA—and Heyoka’s category, “American-Style India Pale Ale,” was by far the most hotly contested at the fest, with 279 entries....

500 E. 61st, 773-904-9800, sunshinegospel.org/what-we-do/sunshine-enterprises A three-block stretch of 61st Street, from King Drive to Champlain Avenue, is like many on the south side: once a thriving commercial corridor, it now consists largely of vacant lots and boarded storefronts. Sunshine Enterprises, a nonprofit with an office on that strip, seeks to help entrepreneurs launch small businesses, partly in the hope that some will eventually move in on 61st and make the strip vibrant again....

CarmelleSafdie It’s the time of year when there are nonstop shows to see, and the beginning of this week is a perfect example of that. The week starts off with garage-rock party-animal King Khan and his band the Shrines playing at Empty Bottle on Monday night. Reggie’s is the place to be on Tuesday, with Black Flag’s once-again retooled lineup playing two shows in the Rock Club (an early all-ages “kids show” and a regular full-blast one later on) and Robby Krieger of the legendary Doors playing in the Music Joint....

Alex Friedland Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes and Samantha Urbani Tal Rosenberg: The big news out of the first day of Lollapalooza was Blood Orange; unfortunately, troubling news about festival security overshadowed otherwise positive feedback about the Dev Hynes-fronted band’s set. According to multiple tweets from Hynes and a Pitchfork report, the frontman and his girlfriend Samantha Urbani were assaulted by security. In a bizarre coincidence, Hynes was wearing a T-shirt with the names of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, and Jordan Davis written on it; Urbani wore a T-shirt that read “STOP POLICE BRUTALITY....

An Uber “brand ambassador” in Chicago spoke on the condition of anonymity about the company’s practice of persuading Lyft drivers to convert to the rival service. “I have no idea how many others in Chicago do this. All my communication with Uber is done remotely through e-mail or webinars. Once I met a driver who said she’d already encountered two brand ambassadors, so there could be a strikingly large amount of people....

Jason Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder today, but in an overwhelming number of cases in America, if a cop shoots someone because he’s angry he’s considered a murderer, while if he shoots someone because he’s scared, he’s innocent. He attributes a lot of the problem to a generalized sense of fear—particularly white people’s racial fear of nonwhites. “We obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights,” Hayes writes. Fear of crime waves, of terrorist attacks, gets converted into and becomes the justification for the war on the drugs, the war on terror, mass incarceration, and on a more elemental level the police killings of young black men....

Rich Hein / Sun-Times Media The former campus of Michael Reese Hospital, shown in 2009, the year the city bought the property. The bill—up to $91 million—is now coming due. Yesterday was a banner day in the city’s effort to waste more property tax dollars on dreadful tax increment financing deals. Instead, I learned about the payment in an article by Micah Maidenberg, a real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business....

Vanessa Paradis and John Turturro in Fading Gigolo One thing I’ve noticed about the response to John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, which ends its run at the Landmark Century tomorrow, is that people who don’t like it really don’t like it. The anti-Gigolo crowd seem downright appalled by the film’s sentimental view of prostitution, and I’ve heard at least one viewer decry as chauvinistic fantasy the premise of rich and beautiful women paying Turturro’s middle-aged shlemazel for sex....

Discussions of inspiration in hip-hop (or really in any genre) tend to focus on specific influential albums or artists, but Chicago rapper-producer Ausar Bradley found creative fuel in an algorithm. In a recent video interview with local hip-hop blog Illanoize, he talked about what happened when he uploaded his first single to Soundcloud in fall 2015. “Excuses,” with its lightly chattering percussion and mellow soul keys, accumulated thousands of plays almost immediately, which confused Bradley—as much as he’d hoped to attract listeners, he knew he was an unknown, and he couldn’t figure out where all those people were coming from....

For the past 18 years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been in heavy rotation at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Counting the current mainstage production, there have been six Midsummers since 2000, a record that none of Shakespeare’s other 36 (that we know of) plays comes close to approaching. The lights come up to reveal an Athenian court dominated by a massive marble (or marble-looking) wall that evokes Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Like the fallen monument of the poem, the great wall of Athens topples to insignificance as the regimented world of the court morphs into an enchanted forest....

Instrumental guitar rock does not need to brood. It does not need to swoosh, swirl, ache, or throb. It’s not always Explosions in the Sky. Much like San Francisco’s the Fucking Champs—who helped popularize an instrumental style of blazing riff-rock within underground circles—Georgia four-piece Double Ferrari lean way (way) more metallic than mopey, with a triumphant style beholden to Iron Maiden. On their 2017 self-titled debut for the Ernest Jenning label, rhythms gallop like steeds cutting through the low-hanging fog of a Tolkien-esque battlefield while slicing guitar licks combine forces rather than duel, igniting each track in the same way the Power Sword transforms Prince Adam into He-Man....

The pattern is familiar. Strike gold with a film slated to be the first in a series, proceed with said series to a satisfying conclusion, then attach more films—prequels, sequels, and reboots—until viewer fatigue sets in and a backlash ensues. Though J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series begat eight film adaptations, a theme park, and a fixed pop culture legacy, she seems to have taken the wrong lessons from her forebears. As the Hobbit trilogy, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and Solo: A Star Wars Story have shown, just because one can append more films to a bankable franchise doesn’t mean one should....