When I read that the Chicago Park District was pulling down century-old trees in Jackson Park despite a federal lawsuit filed to prevent Obama Center-related construction in the area, a visit there leaped to the top of my must-do list. The 543-acre grounds, part of our inheritance from the World’s Fair of 1893, were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, of Central Park fame, and include the Museum of Science and Industry, the 59th Street Harbor, and—the two greatest attractions for me—the Wooded Island and the Japanese-style Garden of the Phoenix (formerly known as Osaka Garden)....

As the duty of journalism is to service the people’s so-called right to know, a good way to embarrass a newspaper is to point out something it didn’t get around to telling them. Let’s say a daily paper writes a lot of stories about a hot local debate but doesn’t make it clear the coverage is being paid for by rich men deeply involved in the debate and all on the same side....

There are plenty of MCs who can put together a solid case for why they believe they’re the next big thing and why the masses should flock to them—hell, there are some who can fill an entire mixtape about their preordained rise to fame—but there aren’t many who can inspire the kind of fierce devotion in their fans local rapper-producer Tremaine “Tree” Johnson does. I remember conversations about Tree the way you’re supposed to remember song lyrics, and that’s partially because I’m so enamored with his unique, strange, and soulful sound, which he calls soul trap....

Since belatedly discovering Here Is Barbara Lynn, the sole Atlantic album by the titular Texas soul singer, half-a-dozen years ago, I’ve often wondered why she never became a major star (Light in the Attic Records is reissuing that album next month). She was not only a remarkable vocalist with a plush, throaty, and powerful instrument, but one hell of a songwriter and a terrific guitarist (the latter two skills were generally suppressed in female artists during the early 60s, when she first emerged)....

Virginia guitarist Daniel Bachman regularly demonstrates curiosity and practice outside of the hazy contours of the American Primitive style of acoustic guitar made famous by John Fahey. While those excursions have been limited and discreet—and he’s generally veered back to his comfort zone—they’ve neverthless indicated his admirably restless creative streak. He dives in completely on his dazzling new double album The Morning Star (Three Lobed), masterfully complementing his stellar guitar work with an array of sounds including mesmerizing drones and environmental presences that together foster a turbulent kind of meditation....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Janice Wilson, 35, police officer and youth baseball coach. The police academy? I thought it was going to be tougher than what it was. It was actually fun. After the academy, I went to work in the Fourth District. The station is on 103rd and Luella. That’s where I started my training in the field....

Toward the end of Bob Eisen’s duet with Kristina Isabelle, an untitled work he’s reprised twice with different dancers since last year’s premiere in Russia, I was touched by an impulse—at once amusing and alarming—to obsessively list English words with connotations of movement, then spend the rest of the dance ticking off terms, Bingo style, as their analogues surfaced. With pleasure, I imagined striking out every last adjective, noun, and verb in a long, vertiginous streak....

Festival season ain’t over till Red Bull says it is. The energy drink’s music operation has so far thrown six festivals in New York and one in Los Angeles, and in November it’ll host a similar event in the midwest for the first time. (Last year’s 30 Days in Chicago—one big show every night, with Red Bull’s muscle and money allowing for relatively inexpensive tickets—was a different beast.) Saturday, November 3 GOOD Music showcase:NasPusha T Teyana TaylorValee Desiigner 070 Shake Venue: Wintrust Arena...

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: That Pilsen’s 53-year-old Nuevo Leon was destroyed in a fire? —Mike Sula That the Seattle CEO who raised the minimum salary for his company’s employees to $70,000 a year has something to hide? —Tal Rosenberg About sex, sex education, and birth control in China these days? —Kate Schmidt About this secret Hollywood meeting addressing gender bias?...

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • That Anish Kapoor is pissed off at Mayor Emanuel for defending the Chinese knockoff of his Cloud Gate, aka the Bean? —Deanna Isaacs • About the flag-raising at the U.S. Embassy in Havana this morning? —John Dunlevy • About the softer side of Compton? —Drew Hunt • That the time of the Maurice Lenell pinwheel cookie is coming to an end?...

When the talent booked to headline a Coca-Cola-sponsored Mexican cabaret concert blows it off last minute, it’s up to the beleaguered host, his three semi-talented children, and a fifth guy who just sort of hangs out at the cabana to rescue the night’s entertainment. But the show must go on, and we witness several examples of the bad lengths to which Señor Pepe Hernandez (Johnny Garcia) will go to salvage his big blowout and its munificent corporate funding....

Composers of classical music have been inspired by birdsong for centuries—from Daquin to Beethoven through a bevy of contemporary figures such as Jonathan Harvey and Per Nørgård—but none has devoted as much energy and imagination to the process of translating trills and warbles into notated music as Olivier Messiaen. In the 1950s he created his epic Catalogue D’oiseaux, a book of seven works devoted to the sounds of a wide variety of avian creatures....

In the fall of 2010 one of Emily Graslie’s classmates suggested that she visit the zoological museum at the University of Montana, where she was a senior majoring in studio art, to which Graslie replied, “What’s a zoological museum?” Today, she works at the Field Museum, where her job, essentially, is to answer that question. Graslie started volunteering full-time as the museum’s curatorial assistant, working in a bakery to help pay the bills, and began taking online classes for a master’s degree in museum studies through Johns Hopkins....

Editor’s note: Sharon Fairley, Rahm Emanuel’s choice to head the Independent Police Review Authority, was married to John Rogers Jr., CEO of Ariel Investments LLC, from 2002 until last year. Ariel manages hundreds of millions of dollars worth of city and state pension funds, and is a major shareholder in a second company, JLL, that has received substantive city construction contracts. Rogers and his colleagues are also major donors to the campaigns of various city, county, and state officials, including the mayor’s....

The best improv is like a best friendship; one player anticipates the other’s next ten moves and trust between the two reaches a tipping point after which anything goes. When I first saw Holly Laurent and Katie Rich collaborate in sketches and improv sets on the Second City main stage, it was like watching two old friends riff. Forget the audience—they almost seemed to care more about making each other laugh....

Make Trouble is like John Waters’s version of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! The latest published work by the filmmaker, aka the “people’s pervert” (a title given by Guernica magazine that Waters has lovingly embraced), is an illustrated version of the commencement speech he gave to the Rhode Island School of Design’s graduating class of 2015. Eric Hanson’s crude line drawings, paired with Waters’s unconventional advice—”design clothes so hideous they can’t be worn ironically”—provide a brief but insightful glimpse into Waters’s mind in an easily digestible package....

A Chicagoan since 2013, and a charismatic, influential figure in punk music for nearly 20 years as the leader of Against Me!, Laura Jane Grace has more recently become a role model and inspiration for many with her frank writings about her struggles with addiction, brushes with the law, and perhaps most importantly, her experiences of gender dysphoria and coming out as a trans woman. Grace began sharing that journey in an in-depth profile in Rolling Stone in May 2012, and in the autobiographical lyrics of Against Me!...

In a black-and-white photo from 1946, a group of African-American protestors protest outside of a Chicago ice rink they’re forbidden from entering, ironically named White City. They hold up signs: some echo their direct demand, like Put an End to Discrimination at White City others call out the hypocrisy of prejudice, like The Draft Boards Did Not Exclude Negroes. Black Americans were still forced to travel across the world to fight for their country but couldn’t go down the block to their local ice rink....

Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson in Saraband Visiting the Pickwick Theatre last month—and poking my head into its five auditoriums of different shapes and sizes—brought back fond memories of going to the Highland Park Theater as a kid. I grew up about 45 minutes west of Highland Park, but my parents made a point of driving there every few months to see a film. They were smitten with the layout of the building, which had opened in 1925 as a vaudeville theater called the Alcyon....

As a teenager, comedian Brittany Meyer (who prefers the gender-neutral plural pronoun) was four foot four and 140 pounds, and their mother put them on an experimental growth hormone in the hopes that they would “stretch out.” While Meyer did grow more than a foot, they still continued putting on weight. A phrase from their mother has stuck with them ever since: “You need to grow up, not out.” The lineups prioritize people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and women or female-identified performers—groups who are most often scrutinized for their looks....