Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s undeniable that over the last 20 years Chicago has fared far better in most ways than Detroit and the rest of the rust belt. And as its leader over that time, Daley can take credit for some of Chicago’s successes. Large swaths of the city, including downtown and the north lakefront, do look better than ever. Millennium Park, the flower beds, the reconstruction/gentrification of the South and West Loop, the thriving arts and tourism districts–if you like all of this, you can rightly point to the mayor as contributing to your happiness in ways small and perhaps great....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sunday Doughnut Shop is the idea of sous chef Vincent Knittel and head pastry chef Jeremy Brutzkus, who won a recent episode of Donut Showdown on the Cooking Channel. It will feature “a changing (weekly) selection focusing on classics, as well as seasonally-inspired varieties, while supplies last.” On the TV show Brutzkus made a miso, fennel seed, and ground almond doughnut and a salmon and cream cheese bagel doughnut, among others, but so far the offerings seem more approachable, such as Boston cream or peach cobbler....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I wrote a Hot Type column a couple of weeks ago lashing the Republican National Committee for its campaign to get the faithful to send newspapers automated, prewritten letters championing the president, I fortunately added the caveat that the GOP isn’t the only culprit. That column hadn’t even hit the streets when Bruce Dold, who edits the Tribune‘s editorial pages, alerted me that it was happening again and this time the left was responsible....

These days the news about the environment always seems to be bad. In just the last few weeks we’ve heard that carbon dioxide emissions need to decrease by a radical 80 percent to avoid the worst predicted effects of climate change; President Bush has unilaterally weakened new federal rules on ozone, another greenhouse gas; and his administration has been sued for failing to protect polar bears, whose vulnerability is seen as a harbinger of global warming....

A young, beefy Atlanta media figure stood in the well of his city’s council chambers on February 1, held a sheet of paper with lyrics on it up to his face, and sang a rap song. Cardinale’s 80-second performance made it to YouTube, but it did not go viral. He had better luck a few days later. Once posted on Nouaree’s blog, this heresy did go viral. Cardinale’s language is a little muddled, positing a tension between a “progressive perspective” and belief in “objective reality” as if they were simply opposing choices....

An “I Saw You” is a fleeting attempt at romance facilitated by the Internet, one that could have easily been sparked by suggestive glances during a morning commute on the Red Line. The Reader has been publishing I Saw Yous since August of 2004 (before that they were actually called Missed Connections), and the flirtations, crushes, and stalker-ism have inspired a gallery exhibit, theater improv, probably a marriage or two, maybe a divorce, and countless violations of privacy and good taste....

Black Ensemble Theater, renowned for its party-time revues, outdoes itself in this look at the heyday of Stax Records. The music is a foot-stompin’ mix of classics (Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man,” Carla Thomas’s “B-A-B-Y,” the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself”) and lesser-known numbers like Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her” and Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff.” Playwright David Barr III structures the narrative, such as it is, around concurrent fictional events in 1980: a 20-year Stax reunion concert and the imminent sale of a bar, Pop’s Place....

A group of preservationists has been making the rounds of the neighborhood Olympic forums I wrote about last week, passing out flyers and pestering officials with questions. They’re not officially opposed to the Olympics, but anyone wondering whether Chicago needs the games should pay close attention to their battle to save the Michael Reese Hospital campus from demolition. To actual opponents of Chicago’s Olympic bid, the focus on saving these empty buildings is a head-scratcher, since there are other, arguably more pressing reasons to stop the city from carrying out its plans—such as the probability that they could cost the city billions of dollars it doesn’t have....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The backdrop to this blunt resolution is a series of internal and external audits in recent years that judged Medill–which enjoys seeing itself as a journalism school without equal–as an academic basket case. President Henry Bienen and provost Lawrence Dumas stepped in. Skipping the usual faculty search committee they named John Lavine (pictured) the next dean in late 2005, and in early 2006 they booted aside the incumbent, who had months to go on his contract....

Ragnar Kjartansson, from “God” I tend to seek out in art what I seek out in people—qualities that I don’t have, or don’t have enough of. In my social life, I’m drawn to ebullient optimists, people with punishing work ethics, and savants who can do long division in their heads. Through them, I can patch up the little deficiencies in my own being. In art, I have long been drawn to performance work—both because the idea of putting oneself on display terrifies me and the level of endurance the work requires is pretty much unfathomable....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Complete searchable listings, Raters’ comments, and information on how to become a Rater are at chicagoreader....

Q I’m a 28-year-old post-op transsexual woman. I met a great 31-year-old guy. We’ve been dating for a year, but he recently told me that he didn’t think he was sure he was in love with me. He said that he didn’t know if he could give me any sort of commitment, and that he’s afraid of what his peers would think if they knew my medical past. I can’t say that I’m sure I’m in love with him either, but I do know that we thoroughly enjoy each other’s company and miss each other immensely when we’re not together....

Phoenix Suns guard Shannon Brown was born and went to high school in Maywood, Illinois, and he’s giving back to his hometown by throwing a music festival. Shannon Brown’s Wood-Star Music Festival debuts Sat 8/18 and Sun 8/19 in Union Park with a small but impressive lineup of hip-hop, R&B, and soul from the past and present. The first day, called Soul in the City, features hit-making R&B acts from over the years: headliner Robin Thicke, Monica, Estelle, Dawn Richard, and American Idol winner Fantasia....

Sketchbook Festival Collaboraction Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Graney’s I’S N UR B1UDStR33M COZIN FA60SITOSIZ uses leet, the Internet slang that’s become the bane of English teachers, to tell the story of a 13-year-old boy making his online farewells as he’s dying of an unidentified congenital disorder. The piece amounts to a brief meditation on reduced expectations—for language and for life. Directed by Michael Patrick Thornton, it features Bubba Weiler as the boy, who sits silently in a wheelchair while his text messages flash on screens surrounding the audience and a voice-over translates them....

Mats Bergkvist Tape The Swedish trio called Tape has been creating stylistically elusive, lyrically beautiful, and texturally rich instrumental music for 15 years now, embracing its boundary-dissolving proclivities all the while. The group recently released their sixth album (not including collaborative efforts with folks like Tenniscoats and Minamo) Casino (Häpna), and the trio has never sounded more melodically generous while conveying a gorgeous, mesmerizing, and enveloping vibe. As you can hear on today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Seagulls,” the latest batch of tunes are grounded in undulating guitar arpeggios and long, winding lines played by Johan Berthling (a musician known best as a free jazz bassist, lately for his work in the trio Fire!...

RE|Dance creates a clear sense of place with objects and environments permeated by mystery. One of two Chicago premieres on the company’s new program, “Flight Patterns,” Michael Estanich’s 45-minute sextet The Attic Room features 500 tiny flying origami cranes, books used as stepping stones and building blocks, owl masks, and a large rug that can be a magic carpet or a prison cell, a haven or a shroud. Estanich says he was aiming for a tension between childlike play and the feeling of being “afraid to leave but desperately wanting out....

Thumb through the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, and one of the first things you’ll notice is how unsuitable many of them are for bedtime reading. Perrault lets the wolf gobble up Little Red Riding Hood—and granny too. Andersen’s Little Mermaid fails to win the affections of the prince and throws herself back into the sea. As for the Grimms, their stories are an almost unrelenting parade of deadpan horrors—one child gets her hands chopped off, another is buried alive, and still another winds up in a stew that’s greedily lapped up by his own unwitting father....

It’s no Halloween, of course, but Christmas always brings forth a respectable crop of live shows. Well, maybe not entirely respectable. For every wondrous visit from the ghost of Charles Dickens, there’s an unholy late-night thing about Santa and what really goes on with those elves. Here’s an assortment of new cases in point. For more—and there will be much, much more—check our listings now and over the next few weeks....

News articles say the next magnetic pole shift is imminent. Magnetic fields in Africa are getting weak and they say in some places you can’t get accurate compass readings. What will happen to us without protection from the sun’s radiation? –Tristan in Vermont Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » the 1830s using a magnetometer invented by Carl Friedrich Gauss. Since then the magnetic field has been subject to intensive if somewhat inconclusive study, the upshot of which is that we’re not certain why it’s there, but we’re lucky it is–it does a lot more than make compasses work....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll probably be accused of some bias when I say our multicourse mulefoot aporkalypse was spectacular, but I was surrounded by exacting, discriminating eaters. After months and months of me telling them that this was a special pig–something you’ve never tasted before, really, you gotta believe me–70-some folks, friends and strangers, took the bait and put their money down for Slow Food Chicago....