A bright green fireball fell from the sky into Lake Michigan early Monday morning. Such events were not unknown in ancient mythologies when the gods were displeased, but scientists at the Field Museum and the American Meteor Society have assured us that it was just a meteorite breaking into pieces as it entered the earth’s atmosphere. The technical term for it, though, is a “sporadic fireball,” which is still pretty awesome....

As you’ve no doubt heard, Donald Trump wants to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. Ironically, Trump is cutting the arts because it’s great theater. It’s such an easy target: low-hanging fruit that’s also high visibility. The artists know how to put up a fuss that’ll get noticed, and he’ll look like a hero to that supposed rust-and-Bible-belt antiart constituency. A statement will have been made about what America does and doesn’t value....

The team behind last year’s Ferris Fest, which celebrated the 30th anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, will return June 22-25 with an even bigger follow-up event. The Shermer Club: A John Hughes Fest will honor writer-director’s John Hughes’s 1980s teen movies with exclusive film screenings, a luxury bus tour to filming locations in and around Chicago, and expansive re-creations of classic scenes from those films—culminating in a full reenactment of the wedding scene from Sixteen Candles....

Lana Del Rey’s place in the pop firmament has been ambiguous from the start. At the beginning people argued about her relevancy and authenticity, whether she was a legitimate artist working within the aesthetic culture of hipsterdom, or a corporate shill mining it for major labels to market in a watered-down way to a mainstream audience. After her disappointing coming out on SNL a lot of the anti-Lana contingent gleefully labeled her a flop....

The idea that there’s no such thing as moral goodness, the sort that can be distinguished from Spock-like cost-benefit analyses or Darwinian instincts, isn’t exactly novel. Noted contemporary philosopher Joey Tribbiani made that argument to Phoebe Buffay on Friends, which led her on a memorable series of botched attempts at selfless deeds. “I went down to the park and I let a bee sting me,” she announced to him in defiance....

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Her Sister’s Secret (1946), which screens tomorrow at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is that the movie contains no villains. The story is about an unwedded mother who’s unable to find the father of her child, yet the filmmakers refuse to demonize either the woman or the man who impregnated her. They present the situation as the result of unfortunate accidents—no one is at fault....

George Cukor often seems like the great Hollywood auteur hiding in plain sight, obscured on the one hand by international icons such as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock and, on the other hand, by cult heroes such as Raoul Walsh and Allan Dwan. A filmmaker of greater refinement than many of his contemporaries, he made elegant, sophisticated films with an unmistakable visual style. This week the streaming channel FilmStruck moves Cukor front and center as its featured director, offering up a generous selection of his films; we’ve bypassed the three most iconic (The Women, The Philadelphia Story, and A Star Is Born) in favor of five others that demonstrate his artistry and range....

Reading Go Set a Watchman feels wrong. Not because of the subject matter, but because of the experience. It’s a broken, inconsistent, only halfway-to-good effort that feels like the early draft it is. It reads like a book you should never have been allowed to read at all. Watchman‘s reveals are more plot holes than plot twists. This novel might have been saved with some thoughtful revisions, but nothing of the sort ever happened (Lee herself hasn’t read Watchman since her lawyer discovered the manuscript in an archive last fall), so the changes between this book and Mockingbird stand out as dark inconsistencies and aren’t treated with the significance they should be....

John Hodgman is 44 years old, or in his own words an “elderly man.” Best known as a Daily Show correspondent and for his three books of invented history, the father of two recently spoke over the phone about how middle age and self-awareness are affecting his comedic approach as his new stand-up tour, “Vacationland,” comes to Thalia Hall on Thursday. What do you think about Chicago? As a former cigarette smoker, smoking cigarettes looks and feels cool....

Next week, the Chicago Park District board is expected to vote thumbs up or down on a deal to die for: a lease that would give the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts a prime hunk of lakefront land for 99 years with two renewable options. That’s 297 years at a total cost of just $30. Since they wanted to hear from as many people as possible, it was probably just an oversight that Park District officials scheduled the first meeting, held at Columbia College, for 2 PM on a Tuesday, when a lot of folks had to be at work....

Whomever Illinois elects as governor in November 2018 may be in a position to make or break proposed legislation to legalize possession of limited amounts of pot and sow the seeds for a recreational marijuana industry in the state. But money is just one of several potential benefits of legal pot. As the Reader reported in April, Chicago cops arrested thousands of people last year for possession of small amounts of weed, and nearly 80 percent of those apprehended were black....

When it comes to booking women, Pitchfork has just broken its own record. This year it’s one of only three major summer festivals to assemble a lineup where at least half the acts include women—a feat not one accomplished in 2017. The women at Pitchfork include several under age 25, among them Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Nilüfer Yanya, and Ravyn Lenae. But don’t dismiss them because they’re young, or assume that their presence is a side effect of some sort of gender-based quota system....

Chicago hip-hop fans used to speak strictly in terms of rappers, beat makers, and DJs, but over the past few years we’ve also started celebrating saxophonists, guitarists, band leaders, backing vocalists, and poets. As a listener, I get a lot of joy surveying this sprawling world and finding musicians who enhance my understanding of what Chicago hip-hop—and, by extension, Chicago music—is and where it can go. And this fall I’m particularly looking forward to new releases from rapper Roy Kinsey and singer-songwriter Tasha Viets-VanLear, who performs under her first name....

In July, Sen Morimoto quit his job as a barback at Big Star with no plans to look for other work—the 24-year-old singer, rapper, producer, and multi-instrumentalist had decided to try supporting himself as a musician. Since moving to Chicago in 2014, he’d been content to hold down restaurant jobs and take opportunities to work on his music—an adventurous blend of hip-hop, jazz, prog rock, and pop—wherever he could find them....

Five women storm the stage. Over the loudspeaker Philadelphia-bred rapper Khia sings of her neck and her back and two specific parts of her nether regions while the ladies hump the air and pound the walls—one even does a handstand. They’re Super Human, and before they even get to the improv they’re amazing. Every show is different, and every sketch within it is informed by either the theme or an audience suggestion—and sometimes by both....

Access to Chicago’s lakefront Museum Campus has been dreadful forever. Isolated by the no-man’s-land of Lake Shore Drive, the campus’s three great museums—the Adler, the Field, and the Shedd—sit apart from the city, remote as castles across a dangerous moat. It’s an inconvenience we’ve tolerated, like the weather. It hasn’t been the city’s most pressing problem. This caught the attention of Friends of the Parks, which has opposed putting the Lucas Museum on the campus....

Michael Gebert Don Curry and the Southern Pitch food truck Don Curry hands me a business card from MacCormac College, a business college in the Loop where he teaches courses in entrepreneurship. Frankly, though, his commitment to the idea of entrepreneurship, especially for African-Americans in Chicago, was already pretty apparent—as unmissable as the 25-foot-long food truck he’s standing in front of, decorated with images of Negro League players like Satchel Paige and Rube Foster and old newspaper stories about long-ago games....

After a drought of more than a year, today Andersonville has a record store once again. Sure, you can buy music at Transistor, as well as at several of the resale shops in the area, but Rattleback Records (located at 5405 N. Clark) is the first dedicated record store in the neighborhood since Borderline Music closed its storefront and went online-only in July 2017. Contrary to popular belief (OK, contrary to my belief), the store’s name has nothing to do with rattlesnakes....

Courtesy the artist Mikel Patrick Avery Mikel Patrick Avery is one of Chicago’s more talented and curious jazz percussionists, a musician who frequently departs from his mainstream foundations to participate in all kinds of unusual projects—whether playing the homemade instruments built by repurposing carpenter and sculptor John Preus or contributing to the single-chord drones of Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society. One of his most interesting and entertaining projects emerged earlier this year—something he calls “Music for ½ Size Piano....

With Detroit, her latest feature, director Kathryn Bigelow has done something unusual: she’s made a film that fits all the criteria for what a “Kathryn Bigelow movie” should be, yet one that doesn’t much feel like a “Kathryn Bigelow movie.” Like several of Bigelow’s other feature-length efforts, Detroit is a critique of both institutional corruption and law enforcement as well as an examination of masculinity. But tonally and structurally the work feels like the product of a different director—until the credits rolled and the onscreen text read “Directed by Kathryn Bigelow,” I wondered whether I was seeing something helmed by someone else entirely....