Evan Thomas Weiss doesn’t exactly have a lot of name recognition—the 26-year-old emo troubadour, who plays a mix of singer-songwriter ballads and heavy pop-punk tunes, does most of his recording as Into It. Over It., and that can’t be helping. But this year alone he’s released five split seven-inches with five different collaborators for a project he calls Twelve Towns; he’s written and recorded five songs with a new side project called Stay Ahead of the Weather, where he sings and plays guitar; and he’s written and recorded five more songs, specifically about his life in Chicago, for IIOI/KOJI (No Sleep), a brand-new split album with one of his frequent touring buddies, Pennsylvania-based Hawaiian singer-songwriter Koji....

While I wish Kevin Junior [“Heroin Hell,” January 19] and Jamie Bolo [Letters, February 2] luck–and encourage them and any recovered/recovering addicts or those with drug/alcohol problems to do whatever works for them–Bolo’s letter does toss out some misinformation that is unfortunately disseminated unchecked throughout the mainstream media: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (a) Although millions (and perhaps billions) of dollars are spent yearly attempting to prove alcoholism/addiction/substance abuse a “disease,” as Bolo labels it, that has not yet happened (and, I believe, never will);...

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was an overnight success when it appeared in 1818, and it’s been in print continuously ever since. That’s long enough for loads of wildly divergent interpretations to have sprung up. These days, it seems, Shelley’s story can mean just about anything. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All this hyperbrainy slobbering ignores one key fact about Frankenstein: it’s awful. Every chapter of Shelley’s florid prose springs more laughable implausibilities and strained coincidences....

Most weeks the Reader is a window on Chicago, but once a year we send our contributors in search of stories from a little farther out, in the broader region surrounding our usual stomping grounds. This year food-and-drink columnist Mike Sula pays a visit to Peoria’s June, a highly regarded restaurant in a somewhat surprising locale that the locals will tell you isn’t surprising at all. Katherine Raz finds a thrifter’s mecca about 50 miles east of where everybody else from Chicago goes antiquing, and Jerome Ludwig investigates a new photography book about Ernest Hemingway’s family camp in northern Michigan....

Come across a terrific news story these days and you’re all but certain to find somewhere to publish it—that is, if you stretch publishing to include posting it on a website few people have heard of and fewer read. That’s what Michael Volpe had to do with a story he thought would rock Chicago—a story about convicted city employees continuing to draw salaries. He’d hoped for better. A couple of equally obscure sites lifted his story without asking permission or significantly enhancing its visibility....

Playwright Young Jean Lee navigates some dangerous shoals in Untitled Feminist Show (2012). Performed nude, with virtually no dialogue, the show joins the contentious debate over what defines feminism. Reassuringly, in an interview with a curator from Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, Lee expressed a horror of didactic political art—an issue she’s sidestepped here partly by not using words. As she put it, because the audience can’t “latch onto” what anyone says, they’re left inside their own thoughts and have a more complicated, ambiguous response....

The Major and the Minor For its series on “Foreign Americana,” Doc Films has programmed a number of classic American films made by directors from different countries. Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, Max Ophuls’s Caught, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, which inspired last week top five’s, were the first films to screen. Next up is Billy Wilder’s famous Sunset Boulevard, the native Austrian’s pointed critique of American celebritism and Hollywood’s lack of respect for its own history....

“Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation,” says Joe Coutts, the 13-year-old narrator, in the opening sentence of The Round House (Harper), Louise Erdrich’s latest novel. They were just seedlings, but they’d grown into the cement blocks, and Joe says it’s “difficult to pry them loose.” Violence against Native American women is rampant. In an afterword, Erdrich points to shocking statistics cited by a 2009 Amnesty International report: one in three Native women is raped—they’re more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the U....

It’s not hard to figure out what’s on Manny Flores’s mind these days. Wherever the conversation starts—governmental transparency, the economy, garbage collection, his family life—at some point he steers it toward a sustainable business project called the Green Exchange. His enthusiasm builds until even a straightforward recitation of facts takes on the cadences of a closing argument to the jury: “You’ve got 270,000 square feet of space in an old industrial site....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because I first heard The Big Shot Chronicles, the second album by Scott Miller‘s pop combo Game Theory, late in spring 1986, it’s always seemed like classic summer music to me—it’s packed with sunny, ultracatchy melodies, sweet vocal harmonies, and soft-focus psychedelia. The record was produced by Mitch Easter, who also worked on the earliest R.E.M. records and led the band Let’s Active, and The Big Shot Chronicles fits right in the with jangly guitar pop of that era—it was as though Davis, California, had provided an answer to what was happening in the south in the mid-80s....

Other Violets (Not Two), the superb new album by the Chicago freebop quartet Engines, is a collaboration with the great Danish reedist John Tchicai (who died last October at the age of 76), and whenever I hear something by him I usually think of one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, one that he had an important hand in creating. Witchdoctor’s Son (Steeplechase) is a 1978 album by the brilliant South African bassist Johnny Dyani, and while the entire record is superb, the extended performance on “Magwaza,” the leader’s adaptation of a traditional folk song, can’t help but tower over every other track....

Anatomy of Habit At the beginning of the year, Gossip Wolf reported that monstrous local five-piece Anatomy of Habit had retooled their lineup, and now, five months later, we get to see the refurbished band live, opening for French post-rockers Ulan Bator at Cobra Lounge on Friday night. Anatomy of Habit, a band known for intense, terrifying post-metal dirges and heady experimental rock, have bid farewell to guitarist Greg Ratajczak, metal percussionist Blake Edwards, and drummer Noah Leger (who had replaced original drummer Dylan Posa), and have added even more star power to the lineup....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The prospects appear to be dim. At the end of last year a Lowe’s home improvement store and Potbelly sandwich shop opened on the old steel plant site. Still, while acres of muddy land remain, in March the Daley administration officially refused to support putting a Wal-Mart on the site; sources say the mayor wants peace with unions as he tries to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drew Hunt: The show was ridiculous, there’s really no other way to describe it. And I mean that in a positive way as much as I mean it in a literal way. I’ve yet to see Kanye give anything less than 100 percent at one of his shows (this is the third time I’ve seen him live). The dude just doesn’t stop moving—even when he stands still, he’s standing still very aggressively....

The Reader’s Choice: A Taste of Heaven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This gay- and independently owned coffee shop and bakery has endured its share of criticism from the A-ville stroller set. Remember a few years back, when the posted request that “children of all ages” use their “indoor voices” set off a shitstorm that made the New York Times? But even then no one was criticizing their baked goods, all made fresh in-house, or the giant steaming mugs of latte, always what the doctor ordered for a pick-me-up on a chilly afternoon....

Clark Street Ale House 742 N. Clark 312-642-9253 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under the familiar sign that commands passers-by to stop and drink, Clark Street Ale House permits friendly canine companions to join their owners at the bar—indoors and off-leash. It’s cool with the health department so long as no food is served, and apparently free minipretzels don’t count. For a pet-free person, it may at first seem odd to have dogs rooting around amid the chairs, nuzzling for attention, but on a recent visit, all the four-legged boozehounds were very well-behaved....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Headed north to Montreal and Toronto last week and made most of the appropriate pilgrimages for smoked meat, poutine, bagels, a depraved dream come true at Au Pied de Cochon, and much more. Along the way we kept encountering that discombobulating phenomenon of the travel doppelgänger–skewed Canuck incarnations of familiar characters from home popping up everywhere. There was the one-eyed cousin of my cat skulking down a Chinatown alley, and toothy Quebecois analogues of minor Chicago politicians plastered all over the light poles....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Is this Michael Ferro dude for real?” Feder asked. “By what stretch of the imagination could anyone consider it newsworthy that the owner of the Sun-Times attended a Cubs game with his family? But there on Page 67 of Wednesday’s paper was a quarter-page photo of the Wrapports chairman with his wife and kids hanging out behind the Wrigley Field scoreboard with Cubs owner Tom Ricketts....

“Chicago has been called, in its time, the wickedest city in the world, and somehow or other (in exactly what manner it matters not) the impression has gone abroad that it is really a very wicked place indeed.” And yet: “It is possible for a perfectly moral person, one used to all the refinement and peace of the most law-abiding and self-respecting of communities, to spend any length of time in Chicago without being contaminated by the evil that may be found easily enough if sought....

There’s no restaurant opening in 2023 more desperately anticipated than Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s transformation of his brother’s venerable but grotty River North beef joint into a fine dining destina—uhhh, wait. No. I’m thinking of season two of The Bear, the fictionalized heart-attack-on-a-plate that might be the most harrowing depiction of life on the line ever […] Mike Shaker’s sausages snap like firecrackers. His brisket melts away like smoked milk chocolate on your tongue....