Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Um, I mean the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. At bottom right is the “high-density, automated shelving system.” Chicagoist “digs” it; Blair Kamin fears it will look self-indulgent. Then again, Kamin hates on Walter Netsch’s Brutalist Regenstein Library, which is my favorite building on campus–an imposing, grim bunker of books that doesn’t make nice and keeps the riffraff out, the Berlin Wall of university libraries....

I think it’s both just and hilarious that NFL owners think that Rush Limbaugh is too much of an asshole to share their elite club with, say, Dan Snyder. Not everyone agrees. Carol Slezak: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I happen to believe that pro sports are a bottom-line business. If Limbaugh wanted to buy the company you worked for, you’d be hard-pressed to stop him....

Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images The marquee for Roger Ebert’s memorial celebration When I was starting out as a journalist in Saint Louis, a friend there whose career had already clicked into high gear said to me one night, “If I wanted to I could own this town.” But since he could, he didn’t want to. He was soon in Chicago, and then in New York. The point of being young and ambitious is to find the place you can’t own and then throw yourself at it, fattening on its juices until it finally tires of you and chews you up....

I just received the review of the book Pushed written by Noah Berlatsky [“The Obstetric-Industrial Complex,” June 29] and I cannot agree more with Mr. Berlatsky. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With my hospital births, with half of them, I was blessed to have a very understanding OB, who respected my desires and enabled me to have good hospital births. This is a rare occurrence though....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the Cause, Katherine Nero’s debut feature as writer-director, screens tonight at 8:30 PM at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival. Shot mainly on the south side, it centers on a successful lawyer who’s the daughter of former Black Panthers. Her father fled to Canada three decades earlier after shooting a police officer; when he’s brought back to Chicago to be tried for his crime, she agrees to defend him in court....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Riot Fest kicks off tomorrow with an evening of punk-rock nostalgia at Double Door. The Busted at Oz reunion trots out most of the bands featured on the early Chicago punk compilation of the same name, recorded on the three final nights of the notorious Uptown club Oz in March 1981. Last week the Effigies canceled because original guitarist Earl Letiecq had to attend to urgent family matters; headliner first, the bill now consists of Naked Raygun, the Subverts, Steve Bjorklund of Strike Under backed by Joe Haggerty (Pegboy, Effigies) on drums and members of Articles of Faith, Silver Abuse, and Toothpaste (who weren’t actually on the comp but did exist around the same time and shared members with groups on it)....

Watching local supergroup Football onstage is like watching one of the last couple of cars in a demolition derby, where you know it’s going to burst into flames, emerge victorious, or both. Their brute-force rock ‘n’ roll attack—a minimum of chords, played sledgehammerly—seems custom designed for wrecking gear, and all four of the guys involved (current and former members of the Baseball Furies, the Ponys, Tight Phantomz, and France Has the Bomb, among many other bands) seem locked in a competition to see who can cause the most chaos....

If the days of bashful, taciturn poets are numbered, Chicago poet Anthony Madrid sure has the shtick to prove it. He strikes a lofty pose, flicks open his first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (2012), and begins his weirdo routine. The poems—babe, he has those all memorized. In the same way Tibetan paper-singers hold a piece of blank parchment for dramatic effect, Madrid stares deep into his book, closes his eyes, and gapes or diverts his gaze, meanwhile draping his free arm elaborately, as if caressing the shapes his words make....

Various retail locations, letherbee.com Jeppson’s Malort—originally made in Chicago, but now produced in Florida—is still more (in)famous here, but since January there’s been a truly local Malort in town: R. Franklin’s, created by the Violet Hour‘s Robby Haynes in conjunction with Brent Engel of Letherbee Distillers. Made with grapefruit peel, juniper, elderflower, and star anise in addition to the requisite wormwood, it’s citrusy, floral, and sweet, but has every bit of the herbal, bitter finish that Jeppson’s lovers (and haters) expect....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As readers know, this differs from the regular format of our Cocktail Challenge, where the bartenders themselves choose the ingredients, which have ranged from the innocuous (dragon fruit, falernum) to the satanic (Kraft cheese powder, cod milt). But this means that Mike Ryan of Sable, who kicked off the feature back in 2011, won’t have to tangle with the invasive weed garlic mustard....

[Plus: Mick Dumke on the Illinois Senate Democratic primary.] But with the February 2 election only days away, the time has come to make up my mind. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, I’ve been known to rail against the abuses of the TIF program a time or two before. But there’s a real connection to this office. The program collects about $500 million in taxpayer money each year, and roughly 10 percent of that would otherwise have gone to Cook County....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The event’s been postponed, but in lieu of that, check out Chicago-based Cuisine Populaire’s Web site, which is more than just a promotional tool for the outfit that made the film. Bob Borchardt started the company in 2004, and it evolved from issuing food-focused podcasts and e-newsletters into a globetrotting video production company. Borchardt hires himself out to food producers and the like to film such events as the Telluride Wine Festival and Spain’s Copa Jerez Cooking Competition, but in the meantime publishes semiregular travel features on the Web, focusing on a particular region or city’s food culture....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Hypocrites’ lauded 2008 revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opens off-Broadway 2/26, at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village. Directed by Chicagoan David Cromer–who also appears onstage as the Stage Manager, narrating Wilder’s story of life and death in a small New Hampshire town at the start of the 20th century–the production is a joint effort between Barrow Street and producer Jean Doumanian, a former Saturday Night Live writer-producer who helped bring Steppenwolf’s August: Osage County to Broadway last season....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several months ago, our comedy contributor, Ryan Hubbard, gave a Critic’s Choice to comedian Maria Bamford. I should have, but didn’t, look into whether I’d like her work (I have the utmost respect for our critics, but I don’t like everything they like). Of course, had I done so, I would have only kind of liked it – her back catalog is hit or miss....

ARFTCo’s Another Year Without a Witty Title Chicago Christmas Spectacular! Local playwrights reveal their twisted relationships with the holiday season in this cheeky Christmas variety show directed by Michael Buino. The brief skits run from off-color carols to a hard-hitting North Pole newscast and a choir-robed ensemble singing, “On the first day of change the Democrats gave to me . . . ” Highlights include “Gate B-28,” a hilarious airport rant Samantha Garcia spits at an unlucky gate attendant....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s time to start rummaging around in the sock drawer for warm tights. This year I like the idea of shimmying into some luxurious cashmere specimens. Besides being warmer, they add a little bit of texture to an outfit—so much more interesting than plain black cotton-blend tights. Lori’s Shoes has a sweater-like cashmere-blend version for just $35, while at Nordstrom they’re just $28 and come in a variety of colors, including rich burgundy (though cashmere makes up a fairly small percentage of both these blends)....

John McNally has made a career of writing about the embarrassments, anxieties, and challenges of adolescence, most notably in his 2004 novel, The Book of Ralph, and his 2000 story collection, Troublemakers. So who better to edit a new collection of essays on the subject? McNally’s own hilarious contribution to When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School (Free Press) traces the fluctuations of both his hairstyle and his weight from kindergarten through high school, when the pathologically shy former fat kid comes face-to-face (sorta) with the “knee-weakening power of cleavage....

When I was a teenager, the leaders of my church youth group brought up sex a lot—mostly to tell you how off-limits it was. Sex is a gift bestowed on humankind by God, they’d say. But it should only be enjoyed within the bounds of heterosexual marriage. Everything else—adultery, homosexuality, pornography, masturbation, lustful thoughts, premarital hanky-panky, and maybe an especially satisfying sneeze—goes against God’s will. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Using the theme of lunacy to unify diverse true-life Latina stories, Teatro Luna comes up with a show that’s bold, often funny, and ambitious. Among the highlights: a woman’s cartoonish “vigilante fantastica” escapades, a self-proclaimed peaceful person’s hilariously foulmouthed road rage, and song-and-dance scenes that pull together ensemble members’ confessional stories about sexual obsessions and other crazy stressors. But if you don’t know Spanish you’ll feel left out at times, particularly in the moon-goddess mythology-lesson transitions....

Few art movements in the modern age are as primarily identified with a single decade as op art is with the 1960s. More than abstract expressionism before it, op art was easily digested by an increasingly consumerist society, and buoyed by countercultural currents ranging from public political protest to personal mind-altering experimentation. Although it didn’t preclude images of people or things—as a slew of psychedelic LP jackets attests—op art was notable for taking abstraction to a new plateau, merging color theory and the science of optics with the heightened precision that emerging technologies afforded....