Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A spokesperson for Bramhall High School in Stockport, England, insisted in March that concern over possible accidents was behind a recent decision requiring students to wear clip-on ties, rather than the conventionally knotted kind, as part of the school uniform. A few weeks later the Daily Mail reported that the British governmental agency that enforces health and safety laws had warned its own staff not to try moving office chairs and tables by themselves but to instead call a porter 48 hours in advance....

Toward the end of 2010 an R&B singer asked Jeremiah Chrome, then known in Chicago’s underground electronic-­music scene for his Italo-disco revival group Clique Talk, about making some beats. An unabashed R&B fan, Chrome said yes, then drafted Brandon Boom—even more of an R&B fan—to help. A week later they met with the singer to play him what they’d done so far—and thus ended their producer-client relationship. The R&B singer had actually wanted Italo-disco beats....

I don’t think it is. And Jeremiah Wright is very well respected and very learned. He can draw on foreign policy and make it relevant for today. What black preachers do is try to take social commentary and match it to biblical teachings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because that’s the way the media paints them. They’ve tried to paint them from the very beginning that they’re sneaky, conniving, will do anything to win....

When it comes to Indonesian music, most of us think of the gamelan orchestra–of which there are many variations–but with some 300 ethnic groups the country has much more to offer. A few years ago Smithsonian Folkways put out a stunning 20-CD overview and still barely touched on forms that had emerged in recent decades. For the past 15 years Ismet Ruchimat–a veteran of the influential Jugala Orchestra led by Gugum Gumbira, who developed the popular dance style Jaipongan in the 60s–has been making music with the 17-piece SambaSunda, based in Bandung, the sprawling capital of West Java....

As some of you already know, I had a beef with the performance of Million Dollar Quartet I saw last month at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the usual responses pointing out that I’m an idiot came a fascinating and funny takedown from the actual guy in the sound booth. His name is Nick Keenan. He’s the number two sound engineer at the Goodman, and he, like others—including the Reader‘s Albert Williams—took issue with me for blaming the wrong person....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April Jeffrey Felshman wrote about Reginald Berry, a former inmate at the Tamms supermax prison. No one is supposed to stay longer than a year at Tamms, where prisoners are kept in permanent solitary confinement, yet dozens have been there since it opened in 1998. While corrections officials stress that only “the worst of the worst” criminals are sent to Tamms, a group of advocates known as Tamms Year Ten has called for reforms, saying treatment of prisoners there is cruel, illegal, and counterproductive....

More than 1,800 acts played this year’s South by Southwest, and that’s not even counting all the unofficial events—including several small anti- or parallel festivals—happening all over Austin. I saw about 20 and overheard dozens more spilling from outdoor concerts as I walked from party to showcase to in-store. Often I caught a song here or there simply because I was waiting on the curb for the traffic signal to change....

When a new group of Chicago investors took Sun-Times Media off the hands of the old group last December for $20 million, one of the new owners drew me an exciting picture of the journalism Chicago could be in store for. The picture hinted at a communion between old media and new—to be specific, the legacy print daily and a young digital start-up with big aspirations and an impressive pedigree. “There’s no deal between the Chicago News Coop and the Sun-Times at the moment,” said Bruce Sagan, who sits on the board of the group that runs Sun-Times Media—and sat on the board of the recently shuttered CNC....

The mural that Tyrue “Slang” Jones painted last fall on the shabby-chic wood-plank facade of Wicker Park’s Violet Hour lounge was a traffic stopper: a twilight-hued, larger-than-life nightclub scene that posed curvaceous women in slinky gowns and a couple of strangely reptilian little waiters against heavy drapery and a backdrop spangled with sea horses. At one end, a fanged Mickey Mouse seemed to lunge across a swooping piano keyboard, his giant gloved hands proffering an upturned hat....

I recently got a call from a teacher at the University of Chicago Lab Schools who wanted to let me know just how many private school teachers detest the educational policies of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And one of the ways the school does it? “We have a pretty good contract,” the Lab teacher tells me. In that instance, Mayor Emanuel made a change without any evidence of having substantively studied just what the hell he was doing, which is pretty much the same thing he did with his longer-school-day ultimatum....

friday8 GWEN STEFANI Given all the American Idol ham and cheese glutting the Top 40, perdurable pop princess Gwen Stefani is a welcome relief. Though she’s superficial to the point of noxiousness and obsessed with amassing cultural cache, her ridiculous affectations make up for it. Her worst ideas are her most interesting: releasing a single with a yodeling chorus, hiring Harajuku girls as her posse, passing off sports bras as haute couture....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The follow-up question always seems to be: ‘You work with all the animals at the zoo? Even the . . . ?’ I always find it interesting what people jump to. ‘Even the elephants? Even the dolphins? Even the snakes?’ “There’s a zoo in Colombia that has an elephant, and they asked if there was anything we could do to help them with this elephant that had an infection in one of its tusks....

Brocken Inaglory A fish Leo Smith, who’s been an assistant curator of zoology at the Field Museum since 2007, has spent the last several months working on the upcoming exhibit “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence,” which opens this Thursday. Smith studies the evolutionary biology of fishes, particularly venomous and bioluminescent ones. He talked to me recently about his research and the upcoming exhibit; part one of the discussion focused on the “Creatures of Light” exhibition, the difference between bioluminescence and biofluorescence, and how male anglerfish become parasitic when they meet females....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She calls her pop-up series Salo (which makes this dinner “Salo-Ween”), though tonight’s really just a party for friends (plus one media guest, me, chosen because she says she liked the eclectic range of things I write about). It’s actually being held in the Ravenswood apartment of another pop-up dinner club proprietor, Julia Pham of Relish; Pham, a veteran of The Little Goat and other kitchens, is helping her do prep....

The Reader’s Choice: Theo Huff Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a city like Chicago the best blues acts are practically a matter of historical record—the more pressing question, in light of the periodic hand-wringing from critics and fans about the future of the genre, is who the best blues acts will be in 30 years. My hands-down pick for most promising newcomer on the local scene is 20-year-old soul-blues vocalist Theo Huff....

Flyers. Still helpful. The other day I was handed a flyer, an honest-to-goodness Xeroxed flyer. That’s not something that happens too often in the Facebook era. And it was for Cave, one of Chicago’s best bands, playing an unexpected show at off-the-beaten-path hole-in-the-wall El Mamey bar in Humboldt Park. This is prime time to catch Cave. The Kraut revivalists have shifted their lineup a number of times over the years, and I think the one they’re currently operating with is their best....

Security was so tight at Columbia College last week for President Warrick Carter’s annual State of the College address, he could have been delivering the State of the Union. Columbia security staff, bolstered by uniformed private guards, were stationed both outside and inside the single open entrance at 916 S. Wabash, where Carter was to be speaking on the fourth floor. They were checking for college IDs. So I had to wait until the next morning to hear Carter slip out of presidential mode and tell a student questioning his $650,000 annual compensation, “Oh, shut up....

Born in Queens, raised on Long Island, and schooled at NYU, Dave Attell is your prototypical New York comedian: quick, raw, and dissident. He’s also undeniably funny. A frequent pick among his peers as an inspiration or favorite, the former Insomniac host says he was influenced by Colin Quinn, another New York stand-up who’s found success in television. Attell grimaces through jokes, forgoing deadpan or sarcastic smirks as if to emphasize his slacker cynicism....

It must be tough to tell your own story when loads of talented writers have already told it. But that’s the task Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas took on in their new joint memoir, Life, on the Line (Gotham Books). Achatz was already an acclaimed chef, and Alinea—the restaurant he owns with Kokonas—had been deemed one of the best in the U.S. when he was diagnosed with Stage IV tongue cancer in 2007....

Ina Carter was standing in her kitchen when she first heard the voice. Deep but feminine, it spilled down from the second floor of her Bronzeville house in a rough, powerful wave. It was a grown-up kind of voice, a voice to make you clap your hands and throw back your head. It belonged to her eight-year-old daughter, Mae Ya Ta’Nell Carter Ryan. She was singing a child’s nonsense tune—just a little song she’d made up about how her family loved her....