Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the City Council races three incumbents lost outright: the 7th Ward’s Darcel Beavers, who’s only held the seat for a couple of months, after being appointed to replace her father; the 20th Ward’s Arenda Troutman, whose campaign imploded after she was charged with bribery last month; and the 42nd Ward’s Burton Natarus, who’s best known for his off-center speechmaking (on anything from comic books to wake in the Chicago River) and attempts to legislate cleanliness and social order....

The ninth annual Creative Nonfiction Week offers readings and discussions with writers and Columbia College faculty and students. Unless otherwise noted, events take place at Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, eighth floor; all are free and open to the public. For more info call 312-369-7611 or see colum.edu/cnfw. —Jerome Ludwig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MONDAY 19Bring the Reader In: Fiction Techniques in Nonfiction Panel discussion with fiction-writing professors emeriti John Schultz and Betty Shiflett, literary agent Michele Rubin, alumnus Arnie Bernstein (Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing) and alumnus/faculty member Kathie Bergquist, who’s written four bios of pop stars for teens....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some say it was his commanding lead among young voters. Others argue that young voters didn’t matter much at all, but African-Americans obviously did. Karl Rove thinks Obama won by registering new voters and getting a good number of them to the polls, which allowed him to pick up a slightly bigger share of churchgoers, independents, Latinos, and white guys....

But visit David Royko’s website today and you’ll see that the space devoted to his father is a sideline. After years of growing up not particularly happy to be Mike Royko’s son and eventually working through the issues with his father, his digital scrapbook is a small pleasure, perhaps a solace. Scroll down his home page and you’ll come across a link to the material titled “Mom & Dad.” Above that are the links to “Psychology” (a psychologist, Royko runs the divorce mediation program for the Cook County court) and “Music” (he began covering bluegrass for the Tribune in the early 90s)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • David Bromwich on the election in the New York Review of Books? (“Lower, meaner, duller campaigns there have been, but never one in which so many issues were treated with such studious avoidance by the presidential candidates of both parties.”) —Steve Bogira • About the U.S. government’s ever-evolving “disposition matrix” of militants targeted for killing? (Romney: We can’t kill our way out of this mess....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Man Forever A side project of Oneida drummer Kid Millions, Man Forever pays homage to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music—or, more specifically, to the score for Metal Machine Music developed by 11-piece acoustic ensemble Zeitkratzer—with layers of sped-up and slowed-down drum rolls, played on precisely tuned acoustic drums and laced with bass feedback. Man Forever’s all-star road band includes bassist Richard Hoffman (Sightings) and drummers Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Shahin Motia (Knyfe Hyts), and Allison Busch (Awesome Color); for this stop they’ll be joined by drummers Seth Sher (Coughs, Ga’an) and Dylan Ryan (Herculaneum, Icy Demons)....

Chicago footwork producer Morris Harper, better known as DJ Spinn, had the best set at this summer’s Pitchfork festival. His early-evening slot on the fest’s last day overlapped with performances by reunited British shoegaze band Slowdive and electro-­pop darling Grimes, but his turnout didn’t seem to suffer for it. The tree-shaded Blue Stage felt like a family reunion; dozens of friends and collaborators joined in, including Mano’s Treated Crew and hyperactive footwork dancers the Era....

On May 9, Chicago Children’s Theatre will give the city its first taste of a trend that’s started to catch on elsewhere: plays for babies as young as six months. CCT’s artistic director, Jacqueline Russell, promises a highly interactive show where crying, nursing, and running around the room will be pretty much A-OK. And Dot and Ziggy is the first toddler piece that you’re developing from scratch yourself? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thursday at 6 PM, the Gene Siskel Film Center will screen the 1986 experimental work Handsworth Songs as part of its weekly Conversations at the Edge series. The film was created by the artist group Black Audio Film Collective in response to the race riots that had recently erupted across England. The mosaiclike structure—which incorporates interviews with riot victims, archival footage from the 50s and 60s, and musical performances—successfully conveys the unorganized resistance of minority groups against the overwhelming racism of the time (as a pointed news clip reminds us, Margaret Thatcher was all too willing to stoke racist sentiment for political gain)....

As an old goat who came to town just in time to watch Council Wars erupt, I never, ever imagined the day would come when a candidate named Hynes would invoke—much less quote—the wisdom of the late, great Mayor Harold Washington. Historically, winning the Democratic primary in Chicago was tantamount to winning the subsequent general election. But confronted with the prospect of a black mayor—particularly an outspoken one—white folks here lost their freaking minds....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had to roll my eyes a little bit at a tweet from the New York Times‘s fashion and design blog the Moment. The writer was complaining about “schlepping” to far-flung arrondissements during Paris fashion week, which is going on now. Admittedly, the schedule is pretty grueling, and time is of the essence when you’re trying to hit a half dozen shows in one day, but this resource-deprived fashion writer would love to have someone send her to Paris, even if I had to become intimately acquainted with the outer reaches of le métro....

The Chef: Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe) The Challenger: Duncan Biddulph (Rootstock) The Ingredient: Gjetost Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Invented about 150 years ago in Norway, gjetost is made from whey, milk, and cream boiled together until the milk sugars caramelize. “It’s really creamy and super sweet, kind of like if dulce de leche was a cheese,” Jason Hammel said. Both cow’s and goat’s milk are used, and he thinks the goat’s milk contributes to the cheese’s characteristic taste, adding “this barnyard quality to the sweetness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by the greatness of each new release on Analog Africa, but this Frankfurt label just keeps knocking me out. The latest salvo from Analog Africa’s proprietor, crate digger supreme Samy Ben Redjeb, is Afro-Beat Airways: West African Shock Waves, a bounty of post-Fela music cut in Ghana and Togo between 1972 and 1978....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve noticed other pundits making it easier on themselves by framing the question in terms of President Obama. Which is fair enough. “Maybe he will get Congress and some allies to go along in the end,” said the Tribune editorial page Sunday. “If so, it will come in spite of his own failures of imagination and leadership.” In the Friday Tribune syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg said Obama was behaving in a way “you don’t have to be a pan-Arab autocrat to think is incredibly stupid....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Old Town is a far cry from Alsace, where Pierre and Michele Zimmermann ran a bakery that had been in the family for 110 years. They sold the place in 2009, hoofed it across the Atlantic, and opened La Fournette, a bright space on North Wells where a visitor may be greeted at the front door with an artful array of breads—a good invitation to a good product....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oden is a Japanese winter stew in which all sorts of absorbent, wiggly, squishy bits simmer for hours—even days—in a broth based on dashi, soy sauce, and mirin. I had my first taste of it a few months ago at the great izakaya Torihei, in Torrance, California. There it’s served in a fairly refined “Kyoto style”—you order individual bites of “white radish,” “hanpen fish cake,” or “half raw egg with salmon roe,” and out comes the particular morsel bathing in a small bowl of light dashi....

“There are no rules in shots,” Henry Prendergast says. He and Robert Haynes are preparing a sort of miniature cocktail inspired by the old-fashioned and modeled after a tequila shot: you lick your hand, shake some demerara sugar on it, lick the sugar, take the shot (whiskey with a little Angostura bitters in it), and then bite a slice of orange. The drink was a whiskey smash—one of the simplest cocktails there is....

Critic’s Choice Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Erik DeBat began his art career in the mid-1980s, as a teenager leaving his mark along the transit lines of Chicago’s north-side neighborhoods. By the time he was 20, he’d quit the street stuff and enrolled as a design student at the School of the Art Institute. Although he dropped out to start a streetwear company, DeBat continued doing studio work, gradually evolving toward a style inspired by pop art and abstract expressionism....

Last summer, before the bottom really fell out of the economy and everybody and their dog started brooding about risk, author Richard Cahan says he got to thinking about it in a creative context: how avoiding risk narrowed his own choices as a writer and the choices of artists and arts organizations in general. Their caution is understandable. For many small theater companies, Cahan notes, a single risky decision that doesn’t pay off “can spell doom....

QI’m in my final year of high school and I decided to come out as a lesbian—a very foolish move as I live in a small town that’s not exactly brimming with tolerant people. But I know there are other closeted people at my school and I figured if none of us ever take the first step, it won’t ever get any better around here. But the response from my peers was worse than I expected....