Legendary science-fiction author Frederik Pohl is 91 years old and uses a wheelchair to get around his home in suburban Palatine. Degenerative nerve damage cost him the use of his right arm about six years ago, so he taught himself to type with just his left. In effect, he writes with one hand tied behind his back. But he writes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pohl says he got the idea for the novel in 1991, when visiting Pompeii with his wife, Betty....

The Chef: Lee Wolen (the Lobby at the Peninsula)The Challenger: Ryan LaRoche (NoMi Kitchen)The Ingredient: Durian Grown in southeast Asia, where it’s often referred to as the “king of fruits,” durian is infamous for its overpowering smell. Ryan LaRoche, who chose the ingredient for Wolen, compared it to rotten onions, gym socks, and a hockey locker room (and he’s a fan). The fruit’s stench has even gotten it banned from public places in some parts of Asia....

You’re probably reading this and thinking: “The last thing Chicago needs is another bar guide.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So why did we do it? Well, because every other guide only tells you about the bars that have “the most divine craft cocktails” or are “a good place to watch the Bears game” or where you can “find the very best drink specials....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The beer’s bone-white head is loose, foamy, and generous, but it doesn’t stick around long. You might persuade yourself that you can see a touch of mango orange in its jewel-clear amber color, not least because you get a whiff of the fruit as soon as you open the bottle—to me it smells most like an Ataulfo mango, the golden-skinned comma-shaped variety with almost custardlike flesh....

An friend dropped me an amused note the other day: “A few thousand words about a 249-word story.” The few thousand words—1,700-plus to be more precise—ran July 20 in the Evanston RoundTable under the headline “A Short Newspaper Article Complicates Reactions to Teen’s Murder.” The brief Sun-Times story that caused the complications ran July 6. “At 249 words,” Jones reported, the Sun-Times article “drove a wedge between competing emotions in the community—sympathy for the family and concern about neighborhood violence—and seemed to have had the effect of splitting south Evanston in two....

One of my all-time favorites, this beautiful 12-minute short by Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield), made for French TV in 1995, is a jazz parable about locating common roots in contemporary Watts and one of those rare movies in which jazz forms directly influence film narrative. The slender plot involves a Good Samaritan and local griot (Ayuko Babu), who serves as poetic narrator, trying to raise money from his neighbors in the ghetto for a young mother who’s about to be evicted, and each person he goes to see registers like a separate solo in a 12-bar blues....

mother and child written and directed by rodrigo garcia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This notion of the writer as director, and the screenplay as a contract, is fairly unusual in the movie business—especially on big studio films, where writers revise scripts on the set to please anyone from the director to the producer to the stars. But Garcia’s attitude makes particular sense when you consider his background: his father is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude....

When David Protess—the hotshot professor who helmed the Innocence Project—got in trouble at Northwestern University, James Sotos saw an opportunity. Sotos is an attorney with a client and a message, and he believes that the more compromised Protess’s reputation, the better his chances of getting that message across. Simon is now serving a 37-year prison sentence. Sotos, his lawyer, says he’s innocent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The release of Porter was a road-to-Damascus moment for Ryan and Illinois....

Yeezus, I can’t believe this is the cover of Yeezus Unless you decided to go on an Internet-free sabbatical in the past week there’s a good chance you’ve heard something about Kanye West’s sixth album, Yeezus, which comes out June 18. Actually, there’s a chance (though a slim one) you could’ve heard a sample of the album without the aid of the World Wide Web Friday night, when the rapper debuted the music video for Yeezus‘s angry and unflinching first single, “New Slaves,” by projecting it on the sides of buildings in 66 different parts of the world....

The search for a summer jam is on, and I think I’ve found a great tune, or at least one I know I’ll be blasting all summer: “Teenage Hate” by Philly-via-D.C. pop-punk trio Ambulars, which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track. With its surf-rock beat, sunny guitar riffs, and Michael Cantor’s sweet, sincere, and plain singing—Cantor’s voice has an everyman punk vibe to it, and he comes off as someone who could hold his own in a school choir without any interest in being flashy—”Teenage Hate” is the kind of pop song that beckons you to run to the nearest window, pop it open, and deeply inhale the fresh air....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It came as a surprise to many of us,” says Carla Jankowski, a retired English teacher who has been running the workshop at the Bezazian library in Uptown for the past four years. “They had a big fund-raising event in the spring. In the past they had a lot of support. They told us there were issues with money and it couldn’t sustain itself anymore and the situation was too dire to do anything....

In a recent article in State Tax News (subscription required) abridged in a UIUC press release, tax expert J. Fred Giertz explains that under Blagojevich’s gross receipts tax proposal small businesses who pay outside lawyers, accountants, and janitors would be subject to the tax on those services–but big businesses with their own in-house lawyers, accountants, and janitors would not. The exemption for firms with $2 million or less in yearly sales does little good; it’s a loophole that would, for instance, allow “a four-partner law firm with annual receipts of $7....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “[Hillary’s] hawkishness relative to Obama’s is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it’s a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama’s circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake....

GLBTQ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clean and nicely furnished, with abstract art adorning the brick walls, Sofo is the quintessential home-away-from-home drinking establishment. You can show up in an old T-shirt and jeans, or walk in direct from that fancy benefit decked out in your tux, and no one will say boo. It’s not a dance bar, although spontaneous dance parties occur, and it’s not a sports bar, although the big game is often showing on one of the several TV screens, competing with music videos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Friday singer-songwriter Sam Beam brings his Iron & Wine juggernaut to the Chicago Theatre, Allmann Brothers vet Dickey Betts brings his southern-fried choogle to the Copernicus Center, and the diabolical Biz Markie headlines an old-school hip-hop extravaganza at the Venue at the Horseshoe Casino. Saturday Billy Bragg wraps up a two-night stand at SPACE in Evanston, a Burger Records package tour invades Subterranean, and Birmingham doom-metal heavies Esoteric play Reggie’s Rock Club....

As he explained it, Bensenville is about six miles directly west from Harlem Avenue along Irving Park Road. To ride there, we had a choice. We could pedal to Union Station, put our bikes on the train, and take Metra to downtown Bensenville. Or we could take the CTA to River Road and bike south around O’Hare Airport, slipping through Schiller Park and into Franklin Park before riding northwest into Bensenville....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like most hip-hop fans, I’m normally about one mediocre album—or weak single, exceptionally bogus cameo, corny video, ignorant TV appearance, etc.—away from disavowing even some of my most favoritest rappers. But I’ve always had a soft spot, bordering on the irrational, for Bone Thugs. A collabo with Mariah Carey or Bow Wow is enough to spike a record that I’d otherwise like; putting them both on one song would normally have me howling for blood....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week the New York Times ran an article about an interesting new model for musicians to sell their work directly to the public. The piece focused on Rabbit Rabbit Radio, a cool online subscription service launched by singer, violinist, and composer Carla Kihlstedt and her husband, the drummer and composer Matthias Bossi—who recently rolled through town playing songs that first emerged through the website....

Army & Lou’s422 E. 75th | 773-483-3100 $American, Barbecue/Ribs | Lunch, dinner: Tuesday-Saturday | Closed Sunday, Monday | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 3, Monday-Thursday till midnight | Cash only Cafe Trinidad557 E. 75th | 773-846-8081 In a 1998 Reader story, Calumet Fisheries’ Hector Morales lamented the decline in business that came with the death of the steel industry on the southeast side. But the tiny shack at the foot of the 95th Street Bridge is still smoking its own chubs, trout, and salmon steaks, heads, and collars over oak logs....

Chicago theater cognoscenti routinely lament what little opportunity there is for sustained commercial success in the off-Loop scene. Even the best-reviewed, best-attended fringe production has about a snowball’s chance in hell of extending for years, “moving downtown,” or snagging the golden ticket to New York. That may be so, but we’re better for it. The off-Loop scene is vital precisely because it’s not beholden to commercial interests. By and large, fringe artists put up shows they hope will matter, even if they appeal only to select audiences, lose money, and disappear after four weeks....