When Kevin Jennings was born, he says there was just a single state in the country where being in a same-sex relationship was legal: Illinois. This was before Stonewall. Before Obergefell. Before...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/lgbtq-rights-lambda-legal/
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The late Christina Ramberg’s paintings, drawings, and quilts are showcased in a gorgeous and long-overdue retrospective at the Art Institute, on view until August 11. Rather than explore Ramber...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/christina-ramberg-art-institute-retrospective/
In the first scene of Mothering the Movement, seven members of Free Street Theater’s youth ensemble riff on what mothers mean to them. On opening night, it was clear that some had their own mot...
It’s amazing that this play about old souls moves along at such a brisk pace. Theatre Above the Law’s new production of Craig Lucas’s romantic comedy/drama Prelude to a Kiss is intentiona...
“Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie, if you believe it.” Jason Alexander doesn’t repeat this famous George Costanza line from Seinfeld in Rob Ulin’s morality comedy, Judgment Day, now...
Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and CIRCA-Pintig’s collaborative piece, Panther in the Sky, written by Lani T. Montreal and directed by Mignon McPherson Stewart, tackles difficult subject matter. ...
When photographer Lawrence Agyei saw the South Shore Drill Team for the first time over a decade ago, he was enamored by the entire group—but knew he wasn’t yet ready to capture their electri...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/lawrence-agyei-pays-homage-with-drill/
On May 10, CalicoLoco’s debut album, I Love Myself, finally makes its way from their downloads folder into the world. Over the past two months, these indie rockers have released three singles i...
Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, in conjunction with a group of majority Black women alders, is calling for the creation of the Mayor’s Task Force on Missing Women. A resolution, filed with the C...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/missing-persons-resolution/
Hamid Dehghani remembers when he took the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). “After the exam, I just walked for miles,” the Iranian director says. “I felt so light, like I lost ...
Few Chicagoans know that a living guitar legend is hidden away in the wilds of Skokie. Charlie Schmidt isn’t a blues firebrand or a metal shredder, but everyone who loves fingerstyle guitar sho...
Chicago is filled with architecture and design, from the iconic skyline to the art installations of the CTA. Victoria Martinez incorporates these elements and influences in her solo exhibition at...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/braiding-histories-victoria-martinez-cultural-center/
In June 2022, the Illinois State Police inked a $362,000 contract with ShotSpotter. The agency planned to pilot the controversial gunshot detection system along eight miles of the Dan Ryan Expres...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/shotspotter-contract-expire/
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A sugar daddy is always looking for his sugar baby, and vice versa. These are the top sites where sugar daddies and babies connect for real sugar relationships. The post Best Sugar Daddy Websit...
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If you are looking for no-strings-attached sexual conversations, you can’t beat calling a phone sex line. In seconds, you can be connected with like-minded strangers who are eager to chat. Wh...
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Finding the right sugar baby can be a challenge. Here are the 17 best sugar dating sites and apps for sugar babies and sugar daddies to meet. The post Best Sugar Baby Websites and Apps to Meet ...
Why get off watching a video when you can watch a cam girl live? Here are the best sex cam sites with free and paid options. The post The 13+ Best Adult Cam Sites of 2024 appeared first on Chi...
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On May 6, the Pulitzer Prize board announced the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners in various categories of journalism and reporting. Reporters Trina Reynolds-Tyler of Invisible Institute and Sarah...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/staff-notes/missing-in-chicago-pulitzer-prize/
As I settled in to watch the third installment of post-2020 B-tier rom-coms starring Anne Hathaway, The Idea of You (following She Came to Me and Locked Down), a nagging sense of familiarity bega...
At the Christian high school I attended—which was affiliated with a local church of the “health and wealth gospel” flavor—plenty of people took literally the Bible verse that reads, “By...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/kathleen-dorothy-blackburn-loose-of-earth/
Soon, late in the evening on the fifth of June, a delivery driver will drop a fresh bundle of our beautiful newspapers at one of 1,100 locations across the city. This will mark our return, after ...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/staff-notes/weekly-newspaper/
By Amina Kayani The post Settler’s Prayer to La Linda Nasca appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/reader-partners/poetry-foundation/settlers-prayer-to-la-linda-nasca/
Flannery O’Connor wrote some of the most honest stories about Americans and their many flaws that anyone has ever put to paper. A woman of the south, crippled by lupus as well as the region’s...
Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut is not about nothing. It purports to chronicle the 1960s cereal wars between Battle Creek, Michigan–based rivals Kellogg’s and Post and the desperate scra...
Astounding, vivid, and lively, this animated film directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach follows a relatively simple story to deep effect. Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) is a little girl w...
Watching the trailer, one would be forgiven for assuming that The Fall Guy is a vehicle for two of the most popular, attractive actors of our time—Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer) and Ryan Gosling (Ba...
Chicago Reader multimedia content producer Shawnee Day engages in conversation with some of the city’s most dynamic individuals across various disciplines and sectors on The Sit Down hosted by ...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/podcasts/the-sit-down/
Foxx prepares for DNC showdown Kim Foxx has a message for people planning to take to the streets when the Democratic National Convention comes to town in August: don’t. The outgoing Cook County...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/make-it-make-sense/kim-foxx-dnc/
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. For the past several years, my moviegoing log has bee...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/the-moviegoer/film-logs-benshi-and-pedro-costa/
Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at f...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/reader-bites/goi-vit-duck-salad-nha-hang-vietnam-restaurant/
On Friday, November 17, members of the Berlin Union and the lawyer for the beloved Lakeview queer club met for what workers didn’t know would be their last bargaining session. Staff, party host...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/berlin-nightclub-union/
The phrase “love letter” is often overused in reviews, but when author Arionne Nettles calls her new book “a love letter to the city that raised me,” it’s entirely fitting. In We Are th...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/arionne-nettles-we-are-the-culture-black-chicago/
Few young stars have had a rise as meteoric and seemingly inevitable as Zendaya. From an Emmy-winning turn as a drug-addicted teen in HBO’s gritty high school drama Euphoria to playing the woma...
Flipside is a cluttered, largely forgotten New Jersey record store that’s drawn the focus of director Christopher Wilcha in this documentary—sort of. Wilcha worked at Flipside as a teenager i...
Steel promised many immigrants the American dream, but it ultimately left them high and dry, stuck cleaning up the messes made by the mills that prospered and faded away. “If there’s soot o...
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s highly anticipated sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow is both a tribute to millennium kid culture and a genre-defying trans coming-of-age thriller. On electio...
MPAACT resident writer Shepsu Aakhu does something remarkable in this gentle, metaphysical play. He creates a world that successfully blends ritual and realism without succumbing to the weaknesse...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/warm-on-the-coolin-board-mpaact/
Could you call Chris Dritsas’s and Zach Hacker’s musical comedy a parody? They probably wouldn’t fight you on it, but I might—the gags, send-ups, and compositions here (music by John Love...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/little-orphan-boy-annoyance-theatre/
A tormented young man is visited by the ghost of his recently slain father, who asks the son to avenge his death at the hands of his own brother—who, to add insult to injury, has taken his job ...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/hamlet-red-theater/
Edging tend a joyful garden of chaos amid the decaying concrete of Chicago. On social media, the five-piece band describe themselves as “landscaper punks” because their three founding members...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/edging-punk-concrete-cumming-good-sex/
Self-indulgent. A blunt word, yet little else feels appropriate for a show that ran three hours and eight minutes—from late start to the end of curtain call—when it is said to be two hours an...
We’re not trying to say that alongside every great woman is a fabulous gay bestie, but Bo Durham has certainly been just that for his mentor, James Beard Award–winning pastry chef Mindy Segal...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/bo-durham-pastry-chef-mindys-bakery/
This week, as demonstrations charging Israel with genocide in Gaza ramped up on college campuses across the country, the staff of the Illinois Holocaust Museum was preparing for the May 1 opening...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/on-culture/illinois-holocaust-museum-voices-of-genocide/
Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15. May 2, 2024 The post Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15 appeared first on Chicago Reader .
Anaiet Soul (she/they)—born Teiana Davis—is a 24-year-old multi-instrumentalist and performer whose main instrument is piano. Primarily jazz-trained, Soul has taken part in Ravinia Jazz Mento...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/chicagoans-of-note/anaiet-soul-pianist-performer-lifelong-student/
Every year, comedy hopefuls swarm into Chicago, hoping to find a place in classes at Second City that might lead to performing at Second City e.t.c. or the mainstage—the legendary launching pad...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-preview/evan-mills-second-city-victor-wong/
In the 1980s the Chicago art world was at the height of its authority. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago was mounting the first solo museum exhibition of work by Jeff Koons, hosting perform...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/chicagos-80s-art-scene-hudson-feature/
A month after the years-in-the-making Bring Chicago Home referendum failed to pass during March’s near-record low primary turnout, the City Council voted to approve a $1.25 billion bond issue t...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/housing-bonds-johnson/
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Adult sex games have gone virtual, and it's time to play. These are the best 20 VR porn games of 2021. Strap on the headset and have fun. The post 20 Best VR Porn Games to Play in 2024 appeare...
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The adage that history repeats itself may seem banal at this point, yet it remains undeniably true, unfolding before our eyes as our nation and the world descend further into turmoil. Another rep...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/chicago-film-archives-1968-democratic-national-convention/
The rose gold interior of the Lyric Opera House is dappled with green light, as if filtered through leaves on a forest floor. Birdsong penetrates the space, sweet and ineffable in a place typical...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/dance/midsummer-nights-dream-joffrey-ballet-alexander-ekman/
The Abbot of Priscos was an accomplished gastronome, often enlisted to organize baroque feasts for the Portuguese royal family. But from his tiny parish in northwestern Portugal, Padre Manuel Joa...
In an embarrassment of riches, two impeccable renditions of August Wilson’s plays share space in the Chicago theater community this spring: How I Learned What I Learned, produced by Congo Squar...
In June 2022, Beat Kitchen hosted the debut ZBR Fest Midwest, a two-day screamo marathon organized by Zegema Beach Records. Festival founder Dave Norman launched the label in 2013, building on th...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/gossip-wolf/zbr-fest-midwest-pleasant-mob-wzrd/
Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few, The Almighty Saxophonist Isaiah Collier is still in his mid-20s, and he’s already made a lasting mark on Chicago’s storied jazz scene. The Almighty is his f...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/chicago-record-report/lala-collier-valebol-sons-ra-locrian-masonic/
Emergency Group swim in the heady tides of prog rock, psych rock, and free jazz. These Brooklyn improvisers harness kaleidoscopic reverb and distortion with a creative generosity befitting one of...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/emergency-group-sleeping-village/
Update Sat 5/4: According to the Empty Bottle, the Cindy Lee show tonight is canceled “due to personal reasons within the touring party.” Refunds will be issued, and the concert will be repla...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/cindy-lee-empty-bottle/
As the story goes, Chicago instrumental doom-metal quartet Bongripper began with the desire to write a track longer than Sleep’s “Dopesmoker,” the single 74-minute song on their iconic 1998...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/bongripper-metro/
When my favorite bartender at the Raven Room told me that the bar and event space is shutting down at the end of April, I nearly burst into tears. For more than a year, I had been visiting the ...
https://chicagoreader.com/city-life/feature-city-life/raven-room-closing-bar-redline/
In his first year as a Guida Family Creative Wing resident at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago-based artist Tongji Philip Qian is rethinking the order of the studio. The artist has just launche...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/tongji-philip-qian-studio-state-viii-project/
This story was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here. Robbie Johnson is raising her family’s fourth genera...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/news/chicago-gun-violence-neighborhoods/
On picture day in third grade, Rickie Pérez wore his dad’s chef’s coat and toque and posed with his favorite book from the Brentano Math and Science Academy library: Lynne Marie Waldee’s C...
Disarray at the CTA The #FireDorval caucus grows larger. Governor J.B. Pritzker is the latest to call for the ouster of CTA president Dorval Carter. Although he declined to use terms like “fire...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/make-it-make-sense/dorval-carter-bears-stadium/
Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with Selva Aparicio about the exhibition “In Memory Of,” on view at the DePaul Art Museum. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readabil...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/selva-aparicio-on-in-memory-of/
To a large extent, classical music and popular music are separate traditions with distinct audiences. No one told folk guitarist Marisa Anderson and indie-rock drummer Jim White, though. Their se...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/jim-white-marisa-anderson-constellation/
Folly Group’s “Paying the Price” is one of the best electronica-infused postpunk songs about shame, and it’s only a B side. The band’s singles—of which they’ve dropped plenty since ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/folly-group-hideout/
Pianist Erwin Helfer is a local hero who has made a global impact. The 88-year-old musician is resolute in his devotion to early blues, jazz, and ragtime piano, and he’s taught his emotional, s...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/erwin-helfer-old-town-school/
Even if Japanese songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Eiko Ishibashi collaborated with Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi only once, I’d be grateful. When I saw Hamaguchi’s celeb...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/eiko-ishibashi-score-gift-logan-center/
When the Reader checked in with local noisemaking polymath Seb Alvarez in 2022, he’d turned his creative focus away from his band Meth. and toward the beats-blasted experimental side project Vi...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/meth-schubas/
Update Monday, April 29: Jozef van Wissem has canceled this appearance (and several other dates on his U.S. tour), but some of the rest of the bill remains intact. Refunds are available. “The L...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/music-review/jozef-van-wissem-empty-bottle/
Giggs’s self-released debut full-length, Walk in da Park, is a landmark album in UK hip-hop history, and almost 16 years after its release, the London rapper is making his first North American ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/giggs-subterranean/
Countless Survivor contestants have turned to the camera during their confessionals to express the difficult and draining nature of the game—the physical and mental exhaustion, the lack of food...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/ben-katzman-empty-bottle/
I saw my first Barrie Cole play the night before the world turned upside down. On September 10, 2001, I trotted over to Curious Theatre Branchʼs home in the now defunct Lunar Cabaret space on ...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/ghost-light/barrie-cole-hamburgers-and-disappointment/
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A sugar daddy is always looking for his sugar baby, and vice versa. These are the top sites where sugar daddies and babies connect for real sugar relationships. The post 9 Best Sugar Momma Webs...
https://chicagoreader.com/reader-partners/sugar-momma-sites/
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver picks up right where the first film left off, continuing writer-director-cinematographer Zack Snyder’s Seven Samurai in space” homage/reimagining/pastic...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/review-rebel-moon-part-two-the-scargiver/
Omen opens on the set of a windswept desert. A horseback rider appears as the score wanes and whistles. This is maybe the only moment of calm in the film, with the remainder involving stunning vi...
Simon Godwin’s production of Macbeth was filmed live at Dock X in London, but even though it was intended for cinema release, a lot of the production choices don’t work especially well on the...
In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the titular vampire’s victims were initially and primarily women. The bites and the blood were metaphors for sexual awakening, and the femmes who fell to ...
In the opening scene of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man at Marriott Theatre, a train car full of traveling salesmen showcase their talent and precision as they fast-talk and sing their way thr...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/music-man-marriott-theatre/
There have been several intriguing plays about siblings dealing with loss onstage this year, including Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World at About Face Theatre and the curre...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/jump-shattered-globe-theatre/
A one-person take on Hamlet starring a famous comedian sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence. (Or the opening premise for a deliberately off-kilter affair, as in the ridiculous and sublime Gar...
Some shows age well, some don’t. You’d think a silly 74-year-old musical comedy like Guys and Dolls, with its cartoonish characters and sitcom plotlines (like, gambler makes a bet he can’t ...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/guys-and-dolls-drury-lane-theatre/
Brooklyn Laundry is a deceptive show: It begins with a meet-cute and briefly lulls you into the sense that it will unspool as something of a rom-com. But playwright John Patrick Shanley isn’t o...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/brooklyn-laundry-northlight-theatre/
It’s tempting to say that Neil Simon’s 1963 romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park hasn’t aged well. But even when it premiered on Broadway with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as newlywe...
Under the best of circumstances, it would be hard to make this 1983 musical soar. The story by playwright Sybille Pearson about three prosperous white, middle-class couples coping with pregnancy ...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/baby-citadel-theatre/
Last summer, Galen Odell-Smedley opened a solo show, “Peach Peach,” at Humboldt Park’s Ignition Project Space. The exhibition hinted at a meticulously arranged artist’s woodshop: What we ...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/sensing-wood-sculpting-ecology-galen-odell-smedley/
Come mingle and listen to an insider’s conversation on fashion and journalism. We have an esteemed group of panelists, from SAIC, the Chicago Fashion Coalition, and our very own editor-in-chief...
https://chicagoreader.com/reader/reader-events/fashion-forward-night/
For years before Chicago singer-guitarist Miranda Winters cofounded beloved noise-rock group Melkbelly in 2013, she was already making music as a solo artist. In 2018 she released a cassette call...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/gossip-wolf/miranda-winters-mandy-lawn-girl-show-pals/
Younger folks don’t often believe me, but in the 1990s, the term “psychedelia” was usually a liability for an artist. It meant stuff like the Grateful Dead, who were extremely unhip at the ...
It has been more than ten years since the last of the Cabrini-Green high-rises—housing complexes that were built in 1942 to be affordable and safe housing for low-income residents—were demoli...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/we-grown-now-minhal-baig-interview/
Traces, residues, and obfuscation are the small but major themes of the playful Jonas Müller-Ahlheim exhibition, “peekaboo,” on view at Ukrainian Village’s Patient Info gallery. At first g...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/jonas-muller-ahlheim-art-games/
Bianca Xunise’s graphic novel debut Punk Rock Karaoke is a love letter to the south side and punks of color everywhere. In 248 rapid-paced pages, Xunise tells a coming-of-age story centered on ...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/bianca-xunise-punk-rock-karaoke/
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the preeminent society portraitist of his day. A master at capturing the sheen and folds of the costumes he dressed his wealthy sitters in, the question of w...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/review-john-singer-sargent-fashion-and-swagger/
Hanky Panky is a delightfully unserious horror movie crammed with comedy. From the minds of Nick Roth and Lindsey Haun, the film follows a man and a talking napkin who are on a mission to save th...