Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, May 26, 2017. Have a great holiday weekend! Union Station will be transformed with $1 billion renovations Riverside Investment & Development will lead a $1 billion renovation and redevelopment of Union Station and the area surrounding it, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Amtrak CEO Wick Moorman announced Thursday. “We’ve had a great partnership [with Amtrak], because if you’re going to have a 21st-century economy, it needs to run on a 21st-century infrastructure,” Emanuel said during the announcement event....

After I wrote about Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of education, a few weeks ago, I started getting e-mails from the Friends of Betsy DeVos. That’s why presidential spokesman Sean Spicer had to call a press briefing to make it clear that (in spite of those pesky photographs) Trump attracted the biggest inaugural crowd ever. And that everyone at the CIA is “ecstatic” that he’s now their leader....

Each book in the long-running 33 1/3 series is supposed to be about a single record, but Emily Lordi’s 2016 entry, Donny Hathaway Live, does a little more: she calls it a “praise song” for the soul icon’s 1972 live album, but it’s also about his relationship with live performance in general. But Lordi doesn’t care to perpetuate the posthumous image of Hathaway as a sort of soul-music Van Gogh. In Donny Hathaway Live she stresses the intimate political and social connections he tried to create with his audiences, challenging the idea of Hathaway as a sort of tortured, idiosyncratic loner....

I’ve been a bit surprised by the recent output of Jaap Blonk, perhaps the most striking and original sound poet working during the last few decades. He established himself with a mind-boggling catalog of extreme vocal techniques, whether mastering Ursonate, the classic Dadaist text by Kurt Schwitters; or developing a massive vocabulary of whinnies, howls, sibilant explosions; or virtually creating a library of invented sounds and languages. But on the new August Ananke and the 2013 album Lifespans (both released on his Kontrans imprint) his voice is nowhere to be heard—the former is an electronic collection of “eight meditations on just intonation” (you can hear the opening track, “Ataraxia,” below) and the latter, while based on some speech fragment transformed and processed through Blonk’s own computer software, arrives as a relentless blast of harsh noise that could please Merzbow fans....

For the last several weeks, Mayor Emanuel, Governor Quinn, and various civic and corporate big shots have been pounding each other on the back for bringing Chicago a $70 million shipment of federal pork—otherwise known as a Defense Department grant. OK, look—I’m happy that the mayor and the governor and the other civic honchos are happy. And I like the fact that the feds are sending money back to Chicago—we certainly pay enough in federal taxes....

If you’ve got a low tolerance for whimsy, this Australian psych-prog band are probably not for you (the name really should have tipped you off to begin with). But if you like your trippy art-rock with lots of impish smiles implied, welcome to the weird world of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. The group formed in 2010, and their most recent full-length album, September’s Flying Microtonal Banana, is already their ninth....

From Ebony magazine’s “cracked” Cosby Show cover to Eddie Murphy’s Bill Cosby crack at the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor awards—it’s about time. Judging from Black Twitter and beyond, many African-Americans are livid and hurt by the November issue, which shows the beloved 80s family smiling under cracked glass: I hear some of the hack contributor writers for #EbonyMag are upset with me for continuing to point out their disrespect for Black society — Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) October 16, 2015 #EbonyMag has gone the way of BET both OWNED & OPERATED by White folk & will do & say anything 2 uphold WHITE SUPREMACY #cosbyshow...

In the never-ending fight against the man—whoever the man might be—it’s rare to get a victory. So I’m happy to tell you about Bob Quellos’s great achievement: he got the Chicago Police Department to admit it had been spying on him. Investigators received permission from the police brass to engage in a range of spying techniques, including tapping phones, sifting through garbage, and infiltrating protest groups with undercover cops posing as activists....

Adolescents Tonight at Red Line Tap, there’s a show going on that’s headlined by the Rikk Agnew Band—a crew of aging punks backing up the former Adolescents and Christian Death guitar player. I’ve watched videos of the Rikk Agnew Band and it’s kind of a bummer, essentially live-band karaoke featuring an awkward and once-prominent punk star. Instead of going to see a show like this, I find it’s a better bet to revisit the classics, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is just that: the Agnew-penned “Kids of the Black Hole” off of the Adolescents’ 1981 self-titled debut, one of the finest west-coast punk songs of all time....

When Terrance Scott stood before federal judge Joan Lefkow in June, he was hoping to receive some sympathy for the spot he’d been in—and a lighter prison sentence as a result. “People are scared straight for a number of reasons,” Sassan said. By the time he was in his early 20s, Scott had been arrested 20 times, mostly for drug-related offenses. On one occasion he was picked up after being caught calling out “Blows!...

“The MQ-9 Reaper,” says the United States Air Force’s online spec sheet, “is an armed, multi-mission, medium-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft that is employed primarily as an intelligence-collection asset and secondarily against dynamic execution targets.” In short, it’s a military drone—a plane with the ability not only to spy on enemy targets from a great and lofty distance but also to obliterate them at the touch of a button, with the Hellfire missiles it carries under its wings....

Q I’m a straight 24-year-old female, and I just recently lost my virginity. I’ve had sex only three times (not with a monogamous partner) and have found each time to be incredibly painful—even when the guy’s just using his fingers. I’ve always been extremely sensitive. In the past, I’ve had guys run their hands over my jeans, and even that hurts. I brought this up when I went to my first ob-gyn appointment, and my doctor assured me that everything was normal down there....

The career of Alabama’s Secret Sisters seemed on the upswing when they dropped their second album Put Your Needle Down (Republic) three years ago, the sweet close-harmony singing of Laura and Lydia Rogers set to catch fire. Instead, their label dropped them, they got tangled up in a lawsuit with a former manager, and they had to file for bankruptcy—Laura was forced to earn her keep more from cleaning homes than from taking the stage....

In May a seven-member boy band from Seoul called BTS (aka Bulletproof Boy Scouts) won the Top Social Artist prize at the Billboard Music Awards, defeating Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Shawn Mendes, and Selena Gomez. It was a milestone moment in K-pop’s crossover into the Western marketplace, as was the chart performance of BTS’s second album, Wings, which in fall 2016 debuted at number 26 on the Billboard 200—higher than any previous K-pop release....

In Cincinnati, a city with a police force of roughly 1,000 officers, reform was born of a class-action suit filed in 2001, after years of abusive policing practices in black neighborhoods. To settle the lawsuit, Cincinnati entered into an agreement not only with the federal government but also with community organizations and the police union, thus formally bringing all the stakeholders for police reform into negotiations with one another. Frequent meetings to evaluate progress and a department commitment to “problem-oriented” community policing were mandated by the “collaborative agreement....

One of Frederick Wiseman’s many talents as a filmmaker is his ability to achieve poetic abstraction by scrutinizing concrete activity. The passages in Meat (1976) detailing the corralling and slaughter of steers inspire one to meditate on human beings’ relationship to animals. The opening 25 minutes of Canal Zone (1977), which show the intricate workings of the Panama Canal, lead viewers to think about the maintenance of society as a whole....

Around this time each year, the air begins to cool, the leaves begin to abandon their branches, and our TVs fill up with a bunch of sitcoms that are going to be canceled very, very soon (and, OK, a few that won’t). What makes one network sitcom more viable than another? Hell, if I knew that I’d be getting money foot rubs from Les Moonves, or at least from the person he pays to give money foot rubs to people....

Chicago experimental-rock collective Anatomy of Habit have been conjuring up crushing gloom and doom throughout their ten years of existence, and they’ve recently moved into their next phase. Fronted by sole constant member Mark Solotroff, Anatomy of Habit’s shapeshifting lineup has seen a who’s who of heavy and weird music pass through its ranks, including John McEntire of Tortoise, Will Lindsay of Indian, Noah Leger of Facs, Greg Ratajczak of Plague Bringer, and Dylan Posa of Cheer-Accident....

Warning: This post contains spoilers. But back to Ego. As played by Russell, the god seems comfortable with his immortality, his strident mannerisms and loquacious line readings suggesting confidence and jovial bemusement. (His performance is easily the most entertaining supporting turn in a Marvel movie since Michael Douglas walked away with Ant-Man.) Russell makes good by Gunn’s comic dialogue, bringing a relaxed assurance to the material; he’s also good at hiding Ego’s melancholy, his aura of confidence belying how it must feel to be alone in the universe....

On the brand-new You Only Live 2wice (Empire/ESGN) rapper Freddie Gibbs, who made his name as a resident of nearby Gary before settling in LA, takes his biggest departure yet from his gangsta-rap roots—though he’s far from going soft. Packaged with this year’s best LP cover—featuring a halo-fitted Gibbs in Jesus garb levitating above a posse of cops, strippers, and “disciples” documenting the scene on their iPhones—are eight excellent tracks of psychedelic and soulful hip-hop, with beats that flow more than snap....