Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don Terry is another member of the class of 20 editorial employees that the Tribune sent packing on February 13. And like Chandler, Terry is a Lisagor finalist. His category is best feature story, and his entry is a story he wrote last year for the Tribune Magazine — which is now on such thin ice at the Tribune that some weeks, like last week, it doesn’t appear....

I was suffering through an incredible hangover during my fantasy baseball draft last year. Not that it really even mattered; I was screwed from the get-go. Since my inaugural draft in 2008, each team I’ve built has been worse than the prior year’s team. My first go-round ended with a second-place finish, because, honestly, I had no clue what I was doing—I closed my eyes and went for any Cabrera or Lincecum or big name available....

Gary, Indiana, is the Pompeii of the midwest: a city of ruins where life can seem to have just suddenly stopped. The “Magic City,” as it was nicknamed by its founders, was established as a company town for U.S. Steel in 1906 but fell into a depression almost half a century ago from which it has yet to fully recover. The city’s fortunes were inextricably tied to those of the industry, and when steel took a downturn in the late 60s, so did Gary....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most city residents it’s difficult to recycle effectively. If you live in a house or small apartment building served by city sanitation crews, you’re most likely going to have to take your recyclables to a drop-off center or take the chance that blue bagging will actually keep your newspapers, cans, and bottles out of a landfill. If you live in a building with more than four units, you’re paying (in rent or condo fees) for a private waste hauler to take your garbage....

Leor Galil, Reader staff writer, is obsessed with … Jeremy D. Larson, managing editor of Consequence of Sound Rhye, Woman I’ve been dramatically lighting candles and drawing my curtains every night while listening to the quiet storm of Mike Milosh’s project Rhye. If you aren’t swayed by the Sade funk on the record, you gotta go see him and his band live. The horn stabs on “Last Dance” sure aren’t MIDI onstage—and by the first Rhodes solo, you’ll trade whatever you’re drinking for a glass of burgundy....

Revisiting Claire Denis’s films at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s near-complete retrospective last month, I was impressed by how well the French director’s body of work coheres. Not only do certain themes and stylistic devices recur across her films, but these patterns demonstrate a unity between form and content. Denis often deals with the legacy of European colonialism in Africa and with the African diaspora in postcolonial Europe, privileging the fleeting impressions of multiple characters over narrative coherence....

“People all over the country are fighting for what little green space is left, some of them trying to maintain a mere view of nature.” Re “The Urge to Weigh In” by Michael Miner, Hot Type, June 19 The arguments about where to site Latin School’s soccer field and the new Chicago Children’s Museum (which my family won’t be joining if it pigheadedly sticks to its plan for a crypt) are a few screws loose each....

Andrea Bauer The goods at Nhu Lan It used to be that if you had a hankering for banh mi—baguette-based Franco-Vietnamese subs garnished with daikon, carrot, jalapeño, cilantro, and mayo—you had to head to Argyle Street, where you could find tasty and thrillingly cheap versions in various holes-in-the-wall as well as at the venerable Ba Le Sandwich Shop. When rival purveyor Nhu Lan Bakery opened in Lincoln Square back in 2007, Mike Sula feared a bit for its future, praising it as a worthy challenger, yet questioning its prospects in a location so far removed from the hub in Uptown....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that Sacha Baron Cohen is too famous to get away with the hit-and-run pranks of Borat and Da Ali G Show, he’s just another superstar comedian playing to the cheap seats. His grotesque ethnic this time around is Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen, a vain North African strongman reminiscent of Saddam and Gaddafi, and for every clever gag (a video game that gives points for beheading Westerners) there are three stupid gross-outs (drinking urine, milking a woman like a cow, licking a lover’s unshaven armpits)....

Q I accidentally discovered that my son-in-law is into BDSM sex as a dominant. A few weeks ago he was holding one of my dog’s leashes and tried to stop my dog (a docile 13-year-old golden retriever) from running up to another dog by violently yanking on the leash. My 65-pound dog was violently spun around with a loud snap. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t tell my daughter that I had snooped in their home and found his ligatures and spanking porn....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bacon Cookbook, James Villas (Wiley, $35) The former food editor of Town & Country reports in his introduction that U.S. bacon consumption has increased 40 percent over the past five years, so I’m amazed that the market hasn’t been throughly glutted by cookbooks focusing on the gateway meat. Not everyone has the strength to resist bacon’s dark side, an inexorable force that can pull one into a spiral of overindulgence or inspire ill-conceived creations (bacontini, anyone?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This month the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a retrospective on Pierre Etaix, the venerable French comedian whose work as a writer-director-star dates mostly from the 60s. I try not to toss around words like revelatory, but I’d never heard of this guy before, and almost every one of his comedies in the series blew me away. In this era of cheap wisecracks, the sight gag is a dying art; with Jackie Chan settling into middle age, the only contemporary aces I can think of are Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon (Rumba, The Fairy)....

thursday23 Thursday23 Foreign BornNovalima, Issa Bagayogo Friday24 Abe VigodaAkron/FamilyBig ScienceDemi Lovato Saturday25 Jack-O & the Tennessee TearjerkersObits Monday27 Matthias Goerne & Christoph Eschenbach Tuesday28 The Dead Weather Wednesday29 The Dead WeatherMatthias Goerne & Christoph EschenbachMary Halvorson & Jessica Pavone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Electronic beats provide a backbone for the music of Malian singer and kamele n’goni player ISSA BAGAYOGO as well. His attempts to break into Bamako’s music scene in the early 90s earned him little but a drug habit and a job as a bus driver, but when he returned a few years later he hooked up with Yves Wernert, a French producer who talked him into wedding the circular riffs and gruff, bluesy incantations of his Mande songs to electronic beats and textures—a decision that earned him the nickname “Techno Issa” and eventually made him an international star....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not that the Shaw brothers and I had any deep or abiding relationship — in fact, I doubt Bob Shaw would recognize me if we passed in the street. But they were a couple of colorful, political pirates and over the years I’ve enjoyed writing about their legendary bare-knuckled battles against everyone from Congressman Jesse Jackson to Reverend James Meeks....

There’s been a lot of noise lately about an alleged restaurant renaissance in Little Italy, but as long as we’re flogging historical cliches, why no talk of the sleeping tiger that is Chinatown? Just count off the hipster Hong Kong cafes, the Richland Center’s subterranean food court, the baijiu-focused China Place Liquor City, Tony Hu’s trippy lounge Lao You Ju, and the forthcoming Lure Izakaya from former Mulan chef Kee Chan—to say nothing of the dedicated noodle puller stoically stretching dough in the window of Hing Kee—and you’ll be as surprised as I am that more food pooh-bahs (foobah to you, fouchebag) haven’t noticed the once semidesolate Chinatown Square booming with lots of new and interesting places to eat....

The crowd is turning on Cole Konrad. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To break this stalemate, Lloret—a Spanish fighter who specializes in submission, or forcing opponents to quit—needs to gain distance between his chest and Konrad’s, so that he can grab a stray limb and torque it. This can’t be done. Konrad is too big (he has an advantage of about 30 pounds), too broad (Lloret has problems just wrapping his arms across his back), and too technically sound....

The most important woman in Chicago journalism attended the landmark Chicago Journalism Town Hall in early 2009 and sat quietly in back. Few people knew she was there or who she was, but the noisy room would have gone stone silent in an instant if she’d stood and said something like, “Many of you have some very interesting ideas, but this is what the MacArthur Foundation is willing to pay for....

Someone at my table suggested that the quick trip down the tasting menu at Han 202, the unusual new Bridgeport Asian restaurant from the folks behind Evanston’s late Restaurant Guan (previously Ninefish), would be the perfect date for sophisticated teenagers. It’s serious but in no way stuffy, and at $20 for five expertly turned-out courses, it’s also one of the best deals in town—an affordable lesson in fine dining for budding fressers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight Evanston-reared rapper Probcause headlines a local hip-hop show at Lincoln Hall that boasts a ludicrously packed bill—the Palmer Squares, DGainz, Taylor Bennett, Jay2 “the Kidd Classic,” and six other acts are slated to perform. Save Money’s Caleb James takes the stage just before Probcause, and I imagine he’ll spend his set rolling out tracks from his recent mixtape, The Jones; James released the mixtape in the middle of an overcrowded music festival season (the release party took place during Pitchfork Music Festival), and he’s gotten through the musical glut of summer by promoting his mixtape with a series of stylish videos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When brilliant Guinean singer Sory Kandia Kouyaté died on Christmas 1977, his passing was mourned throughout the western part of Africa. He was at the height of his powers, and it seems certain that if he had lived longer—he was just 44—his legend would’ve reached much farther than his own continent. After Guinea secured its independence in 1958, Kouyaté became one of its most important cultural ambassadors, touring the world with Les Ballets Africains de la République de Guinée (he even sang a duet with Paul Robeson in Austria)....