For the last 50 years, Franciscan Outreach has been running a west-side shelter that offers homeless men and women showers, food, and a place to rest. The shelter’s 260 beds are filled pretty much every night. “We’re looking at a $150,000 bill,” says Diana Faust, executive director of Franciscan Outreach. “That will kill us. We don’t have that kind of money.” As a candidate, Emanuel—looking for ways to distinguish himself from Daley—pledged to get rid of the exemption on the grounds that the city couldn’t afford it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today marks the arrival of Finally Rich, the Interscope debut from infamous local rapper Keith Cozart, aka Chief Keef. Cozart’s rapid ascension nearly fits the contours of the calendar; he was an unknown outside of the south side until January 2 when a video of a young fan jubilantly screaming upon hearing the news that Cozart had been released from jail hit WorldStarHipHop and went viral; on March 12 Cozart released his second mixtape, Back from the Dead, and was the focus of an in-depth Gawker profile that launched a major-label bidding war; in June he signed a cushy deal with Interscope that gave him his own imprint, a movie deal, and his own line of Beats By Dre headphones; and now Finally Rich comes out several days before the prophesied Mayan apocalypse, and chances are some of Cozart’s critics think the timing fits such an occasion....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This morning, I count four swimsuit issue ads (six, if you include all three iterations of one rotating ad box; seven, after their overloaded Flash interface went haywire), including four lined up in an S-shaped grid–an odd choice, given the unsubtle nature of the content. Despite the vaunted collaboration with CNN, the featured videos are boilerplate commentary and the nightmare fuel of Rick Reilly dressed like an aging hipster and making Z-grade late-night humor jokes against an Xtreme electronica soundtrack....

Judging from his discography, keyboardist Craig Taborn is pretty well in control of his ego. In almost 15 years, he’s released only three albums under his own name–he prefers collectivism and collaboration, and they keep him extremely busy. Two recent ECM releases demonstrate his knack for catalyzing radically different projects: with Roscoe Mitchell’s Transatlantic Art Ensemble, he sticks to piano and splits the difference between jazz and contemporary classical, while on Prezens, from guitarist David Torn, his Hammond B-3 and Fender Rhodes flow and churn like lava through the post-Agartha Miles-style maelstrom....

Adult., The Way Things Fall (Ghostly International) Detroit’s most abrasive electro-punk duo have trimmed their sound’s serrated edges and refashioned themselves into an Italo-inflected new-wave pop group in the same neighborhood as fellow electroclash scene survivors the Chromatics. The production is smoother, the hooks are broader, and The Way Things Fall is way more accessible than anything Adult. have ever done—but beneath the poppy veneer lurks the faceless existential horror their fans demand....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jason Hammond sat in on the panel at the Prop Thtr that discussed the play we had just seen there, The People’s Republic of Edward Snowden, which is constructed as a news conference Snowden is giving in Moscow; Natasha, a vamping Russian intelligence agent, passes along to Snowden the questions her smartphone tells her the world most wants answered—boxers or briefs?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few records due this fall have made me as happy as Kanni (which is due from Fat Cat on September 10), the stunning new album and first internationally available release from Niger’s Tal National. The band’s native land isn’t a place that springs to mind when one thinks of African music, and indeed, the album feels like a crafty, hard-hitting hybrid of sounds assimilated from all around the continent, especially Congolese soukous and Ghanaian highlife—at times the spiraling, fast-moving, clipped guitar notes remind me of Thomas Mapfumo’s chimurenga sound....

It’s legacy time for the boom generation. Patti Smith got her documentary, the alter cockers of rock got their Hall of Fame TV spectacular, and now Sam Shepard is starting to collect lion-in-winter appreciations. Not that he doesn’t deserve them. Though best known since the mid-1980s as a character actor specializing in affable but resolute Okie types (Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff; Garrison, the commanding officer in Black Hawk Down), Shepard had a whole other career as an incendiary playwright whose earliest work started the cognoscenti chattering about beat rhythms and shamanic possession....

Here’s how it works: each year since, well, last year, Reader editors have asked a Chicago writer we admire to judge the submissions to our annual fiction contest. There’s no reason at all to think that the ability to pen a good novel automatically makes someone an expert at appraising other people’s art, but it’s worked pretty well so far. In 2010, Adam Levin, author of The Instructions (and now Hot Pink, a story collection due out in March), picked an extraordinary bunch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The genial Mr. Syed, owner of late Bhabi’s Kitchen*, once told food writer Colleen Taylor Sen that most of his non-Indian customers limited their ordering to just the same three dishes—tandoori chicken, butter chicken, and sag paneer. “He suggested I write a little ‘cheat sheet’ for his customers explaining dishes and suggesting combinations so that they could expand their horizons,” says Taylor Sen, author of Curry, a Global History and Food Culture in India....

Because theater and TV seem at first glance to be variations on the same performing art—people act out a story; we watch—lots of actors, directors, and writers assume they can leap easily between the mediums. But they’re different enough that it doesn’t always work. A script meant for the stage can come out cramped and talky on TV; something created with TV in mind—easy-to-read characters, an emphasis on visuals, dialogue enhanced by the camera—can feel underwritten or empty in a theatrical production....

Some argued that it was only fair for kids who live across the street to be able to attend the school, while others said if parents were interested in neighborhood schools, they should check out Burr School, a few blocks away. A couple of parents were concerned that the space crunch would force three- and four-year-old students to nap in the basement, prompting a father to respond that when his daughter was asleep, her eyes were closed and it didn’t matter where she was....

When the news broke that, come the ides of March, Chicago would welcome its first-ever gin-focused cocktail bar—Logan Square’s Scofflaw—it was like the shot (of Malort) heard round the world: at long last, we might narrow the embarrassing gap between us and the competing bicoastal metropolises that, for various reasons, have always preceded us in just about everything on our plates and in our glasses, from gastropubs to consumption of Fernet-Branca....

J. Howard Miller Rosie the riveter I recently asked a group of Chicago curators and artists to help me compile a list of exhibition spaces that weren’t receiving any mainstream attention. The overwhelming response to that request was “Wait, there are galleries in Chicago receiving mainstream attention?” It’s a tongue-in-cheek riposte to a very sobering reality—visual arts coverage in Chicago is slipping. In a city of three million people, there is not a single full-time art critic....

Q I’ve written before, but I didn’t hear back from you—probably because my e-mail didn’t contain flogging or santorum or whatever. But I won’t be IGNORED, Dan. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This man, my first love, is the worst person in the world for me. Yet I’m in love with him. I have ALWAYS been in love with him. He wants me to leave my white-collar husband for him, a very blue-collar guy....

Four years ago, Barack Obama edged John McCain in Chicago, 1.1 million to 150,000. And remember the ecstasy downtown that night? An estimated 175,000 jammed Grant Park, and they unleashed a deafening roar when their hero took the stage. Strangers embraced on Loop sidewalks, and there was dancing on State Street. Mechelene Head, a 40-year-old Lawndale resident, burst into tears as she told a Sun-Times reporter, “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alexander just announced the location and features of the new American Rhythm Center, a cooperative studio and office space he’s been working to establish for several years. The location is a spot that no less than five Reader writers (including me) put on their 2011 Best of Chicago lists: the Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan. The ARC’s three new or remodeled studios should be in limited use by late July, in conjunction with CHRP’s annual Rhythm World Festival....

A year and a half ago, amid proclamations that the music industry had been killed by downloading, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra launched its own label, CSO Resound. The former giant of the once-profitable classical music recording business had decided to “take control of our own destiny,” says marketing vice president Kevin Giglinto. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t be put off by Beyond the Score‘s bland title....

A sympathetic newspaper story is an act of neither charity nor friendship. It’s a transaction. When the upright guy in the story turns out to have feet of clay, a newspaper covers its butt. A friend hangs in there. Brotman’s story on Wolfson ran last Labor Day. “For the last 19 years,” she wrote, “he has worked regularly at McCracken Middle School in Skokie, where he is so highly regarded that teachers often called him at home to request he fill in for them....

The Invasion of Skokie CHICAGO DRAMATISTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven Peterson’s uneven comedy-drama, The Invasion of Skokie, begins on June 24, 1978, the eve of the planned march, and carries into the following day. It takes place in the fenced-in backyard of the Skokie bungalow belonging to Morry and Sylvia Kaplan, observant Jews who have the usual appurtenances of suburban life, including new patio furniture and a vague sense of disappointment....