exitzeroproject.org Earlier this year Christine Walley, a professor of anthropology at MIT, published Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press), a hybrid memoir/monograph about her childhood on the southeast side, where her father was laid off from the first steel mill to shut down as the industry collapsed. The book wasn’t a total success, but a project accompanying it is fascinating and important. Walley and her husband, the filmmaker Chris Boebel, are collecting testimonials from residents of the old southeast—now a radically changed landscape, both emotionally and physically—for an interactive online map; visitors to exitzeroproject....

David Axelrod, another noted political strategist and a Daley friend, said of Daley’s decision to enter the race: “This is obviously a difficult time for the state, but if you believe in public service, that’s when you want to serve.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the end, Daley apparently did not believe enough in public service in difficult times. In just over three months, his commitment to the race declined by 100 percent....

“How many restaurants still have their own matchboxes?” was the host’s boast as I edged my way toward the exit at BLT American Brasserie. I didn’t have an answer for him, but by then I suspected that was the best thing going for this sprawling, overdecorated glorified Applebee’s of a restaurant from New York-brand chef Laurent Tourondel, at one time the man behind BLT Steak, BLT Fish, BLT Prime, BLT Burger, and BLT Market—none of which he has any connection to anymore, thanks to a convoluted lawsuit with former partners that’s allowed him to use the initials but none of the dishes he created....

It would be stupid to buy a newspaper. The Trib? The Sun-Times? Hell, the Reader and its fellow papers? Journalists (I will irresponsibly use this as a synonym for “people who work in broadcast or print,” even though we’re all kind of journalists, which I will get to later) blame the bloggers (ditto, for people who work online). Bloggers blame the journalists. Everyone blames the economy, and management. Was it Ben Goldberger in the Blog with the Aggregator?...

Do Make Say Think has gotten tangled up in a few indie trends over the years: first in the post-rock craze (CRAZE!) of the late 90s and more recently in the hysteria stirred up by the Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, who reminded Americans that Canada exists and that musicians actually live there. All the while this quintet has quietly gone about its business of writing consistently powerful and soothing songs–some dense with drones, others filled with twinkling space–and wrapping them all up in a record every now and again....

Back and 4th: A Hotflush Compilation Various artists (Hotflush) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At Decibel that year, three DJs—Mary Anne Hobbs, DJG, and Sub Swara—all played the one record that seemed to sum up the way dubstep had captured the dance-music mainstream, entering into conversation with house and techno without genuflecting to them. The appeal of Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” is obvious on first listen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cubs fans got a glimpse of Soto at the end of last season, and they liked what they saw. After a Most Valuable Player season at Triple-A Iowa, where he hit .353 with 26 homers and 109 runs batted in, he batted .389 with three more homers and eight RBI while catching 18 games in September. Manager Lou Piniella liked what he saw, too, as Soto started the first two games of the playoffs in Arizona....

Six years after the release of his best-selling World Series of Poker tell-all, Positively Fifth Street, local poet, novelist, teacher, and competitive cardplayer James McManus gives a little something back to the game that made his name. A comprehensive history, Cowboys Full traces card playing back to Korean shamans and Chinese imperial courtesans, then follows “America’s favorite game” up the Mississippi from New Orleans and through the battlefields of every significant American conflict....

Interstellar In a watershed moment for American film criticism, Andrew Sarris conceded in the Village Voice that he may have been off base in his negative assessment of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); he made a point of getting stoned before seeing it a second time, in the hopes of relating better to the hip young viewers who’d made the movie a countercultural phenomenon. Sarris did more than acknowledge his own bias—he acknowledged the growing influence of counterculture on cinema as a whole....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Chicago Public Media was working up its annual budget earlier this year, there was a hot debate inside WBEZ over whether it could get by with one education reporter or should hang on to two—Linda Lutton, the staff beat reporter, and Becky Vevea, a freelancer who’d filled in while Lutton was embedded last fall at Harper High on behalf of This American Life....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And aside from all that, the idea of prescreening content with consumers strikes at what newspaper people consider fundamental to the print newspaper experience — albeit a print newspaper experience that more and more of the public is rejecting. And that is the element of serendipity, the quality of unexpected surprise and discovery that any well-managed newspaper provides. Tell any self-respecting reporter that the subject of his or her latest work in progress just laid an egg with a focus group, and the reporter will reply, “Maybe so, but wait till they see what I do with it!...

On May 14, 2011, I was one of 100 or so people who squeezed into the tiny basement performance space in the back of Logan Square DIY venue Summer Camp. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and condensation from the low-hanging pipes dripped on us—or onto the floor, where it mixed with sweat, rainwater tracked in from the downpour outside, and God knows what else to make treacherous slick spots. As the four bands on the bill—Brighter Arrows, Raw Nerve, Cloud Mouth, and Grown Ups—tore through their sets, the room grew progressively hotter and nastier....

Basil D Soufi/Wikimedia Commons “Lamentably stuck in adolescence,” according to Rachel Shteir Many years ago, trying to convey the scope of a serious problem facing Chicago (or someone somewhere—I don’t remember the story at all beyond its compelling argument), I asked readers to consider some highly troubling statistics. I advised readers not to take the numbers literally as I had just made them up. Even so, they “should give you some idea....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow at 6:30 PM, Cinema/Chicago (organizers of the Chicago International Film Festival) and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland will host a free screening of the 2010 Polish feature Venice at the Cultural Center, to be followed by a Q&A with lead actress Magdalena Cielecka (there’s a second screening, sans Cielecka, scheduled for Saturday at 2 PM)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She wrote: “The office ghosts live on as long as people who knew them are in the office. For a while to come, some people around here will still hear Mitch or Ken picking up the phone and saying, ‘Copy desk,’ or see Charlie striding through the newsroom one last time, wearing his guitar.” Charlie is columnist Charles Madigan, and he tells me he read Schmich and “blubbered....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re in the mood for some live theater, our writers recommend the following holiday-themed productions: Charles Dickens Begrudgingly Performs A Christmas Carol Again, “a wonderfully charming evening of tea, biscuits, and holiday spirit,” says Marissa Oberlander; The Christmas Schooner, “the yuletide traditions of the mostly German-American characters are warmly and engagingly staged,” claims Zac Thompson; and It’s a Wonderful Life: Live at the Biograph!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Look, I’m in the prime U.S. Fischer demographic. I was 12 when he beat Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship in 1972, and the match transfixed me and many other young players. Chess has never been more popular in the States. I took on my dad in a match at the same time — and whipped him, something that gave me pause when I read all the Oedipal theories in Ruben Fine’s Psychology of the Chess Player not long after that....

QI’m a 38-year-old straight male in a long-term relationship. We have two children, still quite young. I am not sure what killed the intimacy of our relationship, but my spouse and I have been physically disconnected for years. This led to some rather sleazy adulterous behavior on my part. We recently discussed the topic at length (at which time I informed her of my indiscretions); we have decided to remain together for our children because we work well together as parents and we are pretty good friends....

Blueberry pancakes with vanilla-mascarpone butter The appeal of diners, for me, has always been the populist, unaffected approach they take to food. Menus that can rival Tolstoy in length offer a little something for everyone, which means that oatmeal often finds itself on a table next to calamari next to gyros next to chicken-fried steak. Diners are distinctly American in spirit—a broad selection of items for a broad swath of humanity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Friday at the Empty Bottle, composer, writer, philosopher, violinist, and art-world gadfly Henry Flynt gave an incredibly rare performance as part of the annual Adventures in Modern Music festival. It followed on the heels of several east-coast gigs this year, his first since the mid-80s, and from what I’ve read this show followed the same template those did....