Charles Rex Arbogast / AP Photos Democrat Pat Quinn and Republican Bruce Rauner have raised almost $100 million in their bitter race for governor. Here is today’s $100 million question: which candidate for governor is going to get your vote? Rauner, the challenger, has never run for elected office but says he’s qualified for the state’s top job because he made hundreds of millions of dollars as a private equity investor—including huge sums managing state pensions....

When Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, is asked what motivated her to get into her line of work, she always tells the same story. Several years ago she worked for a summer art program for youth, and she overheard a pregnant 14-year-old offering $10 to anyone willing to kick her in the stomach. The teen already had one child and couldn’t afford an abortion. “She lives at home, and she’s saying she doesn’t have access to birth control,” Hernandez says....

Top Dawg Entertainment rapper Ab-Soul is from California, like the rest of the members of Black Hippy (Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, and Jay Rock). But Ab-Soul’s collaborated with enough Chicagoans over the past couple years that I’d like to think he considers this city a second home—he’s dropped tracks with Twista, Common, Lupe Fiasco, and Cool Kids’ Chuck Inglish and Sir Michael Rocks; plus he’s on one the best tracks on Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap and my favorite tune on Vic Mensa’s Innanetape....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 10, 2017. Emanuel delays briefing City Council on his plan for a CPS bailout Mayor Rahm Emanuel is working on a bailout plan for Chicago Public Schools that “could rely on using a mix of borrowing, tax-increment financing surpluses and job cuts for support staff” so the district doesn’t have to end its school year early, according to the Sun-Times. But he delayed a fuller discussion of his proposals for the second time when he canceled the Tuesday briefing he’d scheduled with the City Council....

When you take members of unhinged noise-rockers Den, crusty grinders Moral Void, and doomy hardcore outfit Angry Gods and put them together in a band practice room, you can be sure of a couple of things about any music they’ll produce: it’s gonna be intense, and it’s gonna be fuckin’ loud. And that’s exactly what’s happened in Bruges, a local four-piece consisting of bassist Matt Russell, vocalist Pat Nordyke, drummer Nate Kappes, and guitarist Dylan Piskula....

Having spent the last few days examining what led to last Friday’s calamitous carbon monoxide leak that sickened about 70 students and seven adults at Prussing Elementary School, Alderman John Arena has some simple advice for parents throughout the city: I still can’t get over this oversight. I mean, over the years I’ve seen all kinds of boneheaded moves by CPS officials, mostly having to do with personnel, curriculum, and finances....

micke keysendal Dieb13 I won’t make any argument that the Austrian turntable artist Dieb13 is a jazz musician—even though he plays in the great Swedish Azz with reedist Mats Gustafsson, tuba player Per-Åke Holmlander, and vibist Kjell Nordeson—but he’s one of the most arresting and original improvisers I’ve heard in the last decade, easily transcending the limitations one would have with just a pair of turntables and a crate of records....

Former BLACKBIRD and current Embeya chef Mike Sheerin is out to prove that pretty much anything can go inside a dumpling. At his fast-casual counter-service dumpling-and-bao-haus Packed, set to open this month in Hyde Park at 1321 E. 57th, Sheerin draws from an arsenal of more than 50 different recipes. Dumplings and bao will rotate seasonally and include varieties like cheeseburger, posole, tamale, Peking duck, and gyro, along with a set of reimagined soup dumplings such as French onion, charred asparagus, and butternut squash and caramelized scallop....

JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images Canada’s Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue When I was a kid in Canada I spotted a mention in the local paper of a high school basketball game with a twist: one of the coaches couldn’t make it, so both teams had to be coached by the same guy. The memory of reading this has stuck with me as anecdotal evidence of the casual way the Canadians approached every sport but hockey....

Over the past couple decades, few Latin American pop singers have matched the elegant sophistication of Mexico City native Natalia Lafourcade, who’s found inventive ways to balance chart-­topping melodies with a meaningful engagement with the prerock past. Five years ago, on her gorgeous album Mujer Divina, Lafourcade took advantage of her popularity to salute the work of Agustín Lara, the great Mexican composer of romantic songs and boleros, duetting with a diverse array of guest vocalists (including Gilberto Gil, Devendra Banhart, and Miguel Bosé) in her first explicit exploration of the pop traditions of her homeland....

Michael Gebert Kevin McMullen at the Brixton I had reason to stop by the Brixton and talk to Chef Kevin McMullen for something coming up in these pages/pixels—which you’ll see in due course—but while I was there I chatted with him for a few minutes about the Andersonville bar-restaurant, which so far has succeeded in lifting what appeared to be a curse on its location. The irony about bringing in McMullen to help transform the space back into the neighborhood bar it was before Premise is that one of the guys he crossed paths with at Longman & Eagle was Brian Runge—not to mention that McMullen’s background at El Ideas and working with Brandon Baltzley wasn’t the likeliest prep for making the food people expect to find in a bar....

Barbara Ransby, a history professor at UIC, author of Making All Black Lives Matter, and one of the keynote speakers for the March to the Polls this Saturday, October 13th, hosted a book talk and discussion panel Tuesday at the SEIU Healthcare headquarters on Halsted. The panel also included Jaquie Algee, a board member and organizer of Women’s March Chicago, and Chicago poet and playwright Kristiana Colón, cofounder of #LetUsBreatheCollective and creator of #BlackSexMatters....

There aren’t many ingredients you would associate with exactly one restaurant—helium with Alinea, I guess, and if I were to mention the Mexican herb-slash-weed papalo, Porophyllum ruderale, you might say “Isn’t that the thing they put on the sandwiches at Cemitas Puebla in the summer?” Yes it is, when they can get it at all (more on that in a minute). It’s a flat leaf, about three inches wide (at least that’s how big it is at present in one of my Earthboxes), with a medicinal-herbal flavor that invites not-that-close comparison to basil or cilantro, plus a bit of the mouth-coating effect of coriander, or of taking a big swig of after-shave....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Low, Double Negative This venerable Minnesota slowcore trio, anchored by Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, has been inching from rock instrumentation toward electronic textures for a couple albums now. The new Double Negative abandons that gradualism for a breathtaking leap. Almost every sound—sometimes even Sparhawk and Parker’s lovely vocal harmonies—is processed, distorted, or degraded....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. The sticker that Reckless Records put on a copy of Iconoclast’s Groundlessness of Belief seven-­inch If hardcore label Ebullition released it, chances are I own it or want to. So when I found an inexpensive used copy of this 1994 Ebullition seven-inch by Jersey emo band Iconoclast at Reckless recently, I knew I had to buy it....

Chris Wronski The City Council took up an ordinance Wednesday that few aldermen know much about, except that it’s likely to raise the cost of living in Chicago for apartment and condo dwellers. Those who know more aren’t talking. The council passed it anyway. A few years ago Mayor Richard M. Daley realized that the city was broke and he had to do more than sell off bridges and parking meters....

Detour Noir City, the Music Box’s annual series of rare and nearly impossible-to-find film noir, is in full sway. (If you haven’t yet, make sure to read J.R. Jones’s rundown from this week’s paper.) This year the program features a selection of foreign titles, a welcome deviation from tradition that further supports the idea that noir wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. Among the most distinct film genres, noir isn’t defined in the same manner as the western or the melodrama—there’s something less tangible, more amorphous about noir—which explains why it’s sort of an umbrella category that unites various subgenres and seemingly divergent films....

Maybe it occurred with the election of Barack Obama. Or the murder of Trayvon Martin, or the implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the election of you-know-who. But at some point in recent American memory, the often talked-about, ever-elusive “national conversation about race” stopped being a think-piece phrase and turned into an actual daily reality. As a nation, engaging in the conversation is unquestionably (a) critical to combatting deeply rooted systemic social injustice and (b) really, really unpleasant....

Over the past five years, Adrian Younge has become an in-demand producer within veteran hip-hop circles; he’s knocked out tracks with the likes of Ghostface Killah (2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die) and Souls of Mischief (2014’s There Is Only Now), and he’s knocked out tracks with Common, Jay-Z, and Kendrick Lamar. His most important collaborator, though, has been Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, and this year the pair released a self-titled album as the Midnight Hour (via Younge’s label, Linear Labs)....

Governor Bruce Rauner believes he can hold secret meetings on public property. Brian Jackson/For the Sun-Times Governor Bruce Rauner says you don’t have the right to know what state business he’s conducting behind closed doors. “The Governor’s Office was under no obligation to provide the requested appointment calendars to Mr. Dumke because these documents are not ‘public records’ under FOIA,” she wrote in a July 16 letter to the Public Access Bureau, a division of the attorney general’s office that rules on FOIA disputes....