penguin.com Thomas Dyja grew up in Belmont-Cragin, went to Gordon Tech, still says “Chi-caw-go” like a good native son. But ask him where he lives now and he gets a little sheepish. “When it came time for college, I had to decide between the University of Chicago and Columbia,” he says. “It was the 1980s. Without question, I wouldn’t be able to get into either one now. For Columbia, I represented diversity: I was a Polish kid from the northwest side....

A playful and exhilarating look at the tricks time plays, Arcadia is Tom Stoppard’s 1993 thinking person’s thrill ride, its multifaceted three hours merrily depicting the effects of entropy on human affairs. Set in one country manse, the action alternates between 1809 and the present, plumbing the mysteries of both the original inhabitants and guests (including Lord Byron) and the driven scholars who attempt to reconstruct their lives two centuries later....

Back in 1990 Tracy Letts invited friends to the first public reading of his Texas trailer-trash black comedy Killer Joe. The response, he told me for a 2007 Chicago magazine story, “was outrage.” Three years later, when the play finally received its world premiere at Next Theatre after having been rejected all over town, the Reader‘s own Jack Helbig launched a critical jihad against it, likening it to “slasher films and hard-core pornography” and declaring, “Some may argue that these disturbing scenes are part of the play’s dark worldview, and I would agree that they are....

There may have not been a more defining moment in my career as a baseball fan than watching Kirby Puckett jog around the bases and pump his fist after hitting an 11th-inning walk-off home run in game six of the 1991 World Series against the Atlanta Braves. A stocky five foot eight, Puckett was more tank than fighter jet. I loved him because he was such an underdog—born in 1960, he grew up in the notorious Robert Taylor Homes housing project just east and south of Sox park....

The Reader goes to press every Tuesday, which means it’s been several years since I’ve eaten dinner on a Tuesday before, oh, 10 PM. Tuesdays portend meals composed of break-room detritus (gummy worms are a serviceable dessert, but it’s a real bummer when there’s no chocolate to be found) or, depending on my level of fatigue once I get home, popcorn popped on the stove and generously sprinkled with smoked paprika....

Arts groups loomed large in the announcement today that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is awarding $325,000 in new grants to eight local organizations to foster “international connections” and advance “Chicago’s growing role as a global city.” Winners include the Art Institute, Chicago Children’s Choir, Chicago Human Rhythm Project, Facets Multimedia, Next Theatre Company, and Pegasus Players. (Non-arts recipients are the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights and the Chicago Sunday Parkways Stakeholders Committee....

This year’s fest, themed “The Body,” kicks off Sunday, October 24, with Festival Day on the University of Chicago campus. That day’s events include discussions with U. of C. scholars on the following topics: The Metropolitan Opera production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose (10 AM, International House, 1414 E. 59th, $5); The South-Side Health and Vitality Studies: Body and Community Wellness (10 AM, Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th, $5); artist Tania Bruguera and Renaissance Society education director Hamza Walker in conversation on Sculpting Politics, Debating Art (11:30 AM, Goodspeed Hall, 1010 East 59th, $5); Human Vulnerability—Human Rights (noon, International House, $5); Studying the Body: Rare Medical Texts of the History of Medicine (noon, Oriental Institute, 1155 E....

The 15th European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, March 23 through 29, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are reviews of selected films; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Fairy Physical comedy is so rare in movies now that a team like Bruno Romy, Fiona Gordon, and Dominique Abel is something to be treasured—their Belgian features (L’Iceberg, Rumba) teem with deft slapstick and clever sight gags, skillfully directed and often gut-laugh funny....

September Chicago Architecture in Motion Short films documenting the city’s architectural past, among them Conrad O. Nelson’s Halsted Street (1934), Jack Behrend’s Equitable Building: Time Lapse (circa 1960s), and Beverly Willis’s Girl Is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright (2009). The program repeats Saturday, September 25, at Chicago Filmmakers. Chicago Architecture Foundation Jack Goes Boating Brought together by a blind date, two misfits (Amy Ryan and Philip Seymour Hoffman) hit it off, even as the couple who brought them together (John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) grapple with issues in their marriage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a slew of recent 40th-anniversary commemorations has made clear, 1969 was a landmark year in American culture. It was the year of Woodstock, the moon walk, Stonewall—and in Chicago the blossoming of an off-Loop theater movement that emerged from the grassroots community theater activity of the mid-1960s. In 1969 the first professional off-Loop theater, the Body Politic, was established at 2257 N....

The Smurfs 2 I haven’t seen any of the films Raja Gosnell has directed, which include Big Momma’s House, the live-action Scooby Doo adaptation and its sequel, and now The Smurfs 2. But when I received an offer to interview him last month, I jumped at the opportunity. I have, admittedly, very little knowledge of how big-budget family movies get made; in fact I tend not to think much at all about matters of filmmaking when considering the genre....

Sometimes things that are too weird to be true actually happen, and when they do it can throw off your sense of what’s possible. So after Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, it didn’t seem out of the question that F. Murray Abraham, Timothy Hutton, James Garner, Stockard Channing, Wayne Knight, and George Wendt would all be coming to town in a touring production of A Christmas Carol, set for an eight-performance stand December 22-27 at the Civic Opera House....

Happy Valentine’s Day! Outside of being pretty much the best restaurant ever, Handlebar boasts an incredibly musical staff. Valentine’s Day will see the restaurant closing its doors for the night and gathering all the staff bands together on the Empty Bottle’s stage to celebrate a decade in the business. Pink Frost (formerly known as Apteka) will be headlining the event with their guitar-heavy alternative rock. The Runnies, the organ-forward garage trio featuring Russ Calderwood of Radar Eyes and Mary McKane of Outer Minds, will be playing as well, along with Touched by Ghoul, Melina Ausikaitis, and Old Black & Blue Eyes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1920. What an interesting question. Before we canvass the diversity of public opinion on this issue, let me advance a hypothesis: It’s because Chicagoans are—and apparently always have been—the lamest, most bloody-minded drivers of the Western World. I speak here as someone who has lived and driven in both Quebec and New Jersey. There are maybe a dozen people in all of Cook County who use their turn signals....

Q I’m a gay man in my late 20s who has been trying to deal with an attraction to young boys since I hit puberty. I know that what I feel is wrong and wish to Christ that I could have a normally wired brain. I have never abused a child; I do not look at child pornography. But I need to speak to a therapist because I can’t get through this on my own....

I was just down the shore from the North Avenue beach house, getting my ass thrashed but good and enjoying it perhaps a little too much. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nevertheless it felt good to be sitting in the sun, to be distracted by the occasional big wave splashing over the revetment that runs north from Oak Street Beach, and to be playing chess again, even if I was losing $3 on the game....

The Chefs: Thomas Rice and Kurt Guzowski (Tete Charcuterie)The Challenger:Ryan McCaskey (Acadia)The Ingredient: Monkfish liver Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monkfish are about three feet long and can grow to five feet in some cases, monstrous both in size and appearance (just do a Google image search and check out that gaping mouth full of teeth). Because they’re large, so are their livers: like the fish, they vary in size, but can easily weigh a pound or more....

Not long after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, Princeton professor Christy Wampole contributed to the New York Times an essay called “Guns and the Decline of the Young Man.” She argued that two previously valued social identities—whiteness and maleness—are on the wane, and what we’re seeing in incidents like the one in Newtown is a sort of death rattle. “Young men—and young white men in particular—have increasingly been asked to yield what they’d believed was securely theirs,” Wampole wrote....

The recent outbreak of World Cup Fever has been accompanied by a simultaneous outbreak of Vuvuzela Fever, or more accurately Cut It Out With the Vuvuzelas Fever. I’m not going to get into the politics of vuvuzela hate, other than to note that most of what I’ve seen on the Internet is along the lines of “LOL foreign cultures” or “someone please make these foreign people stop doing this thing that is popular in their foreign country because I don’t like it....

Masa Azul/Facebook Salsa de molcajete Who didn’t have high hopes back in August when it was announced that Jonathan Zaragoza had been hired to take over the kitchen at Logan Square’s Masa Azul? Up until then it had been a great tequila bar and a middling southwestern restaurant. That’s all changed now. Zaragoza, scion of the clan that runs the great Birrieria Zaragoza and a veteran of Sepia, has brought the menu up to par with a lineup of tacos: pork belly, shrimp, mushrooms, a superjuicy Yucatan-style cochinita pibil, and of course the mole-rubbed roasted birria his family is known for....