That a good, intelligent, and thoughtful person like Tony Lagouranis could torture innocent people seems remarkable [“Confessions of a Torturer,” March 2]. However, given the large number of scientific studies conducted by social psychologists since World War II, this should not be surprising. Many studies have shown how easy it is to corrupt good people (e.g., Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, etc). Unfortunately, many people are forced to learn the lessons of social psychology the hard way, through firsthand experience with bad situations....

With Mayor Daley essentially asking for a blank check to pay for the Olympics, the taxpayers of Chicago could use a little boldness from their City Council. But Manny Flores, one of the few aldermen occasionally willing to stand up for good government, seems to be retreating from his vow to fight for a $500 million cap on public spending for the games. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was right on the heels of the parking meter debacle, and many aldermen were sensitive to accusations that they routinely rubber-stamp the mayor’s costly ideas....

Artists have always been starving—it’s part of their romantic appeal. We like to think of them shivering in their garrets beneath tattered clothing, fueled only by a passion to create. If they have consumption or a touch of syphilis, perhaps a crippling addiction to absinthe or opium, so much the better. Anything to add to that tragic bohemian glamour. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In reality, these days artists are more likely to be crippled by student loan debt or bound by financial necessity to other, more stable jobs....

There’s been more talk than usual lately about dead choreographers, due to the passing last summer of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch. A few weeks ago in the New York Times, Arthur Lubow used Cunningham as a jumping-off point to wring his hands at length over the evanescence of dancing and the difficulty of notating choreography. But Cunningham himself didn’t seem to care much about preservation. A member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company board told Lubow the master didn’t appear interested in “what happened to the work,” and Carolyn Brown, an original company member, wrote that Cunningham paid little attention to revivals because he was usually busy making new work....

His sets are intelligent without being pompous, brainy without shying away from what Bill Hicks called “the purple-veined dick jokes,” and full of unique observations about Chicago, relationships, day-to-day life, and statutory rape. But Adam Burke insists he’s not a rare bird in the aviary of local stand-up comedy. The article was inspired by comedian friends complaining about a lack of opportunity in Chicago, but Burke manages to get up onstage at least three nights a week....

“Into the sixties a word was born . . . BLACK.” The poet Haki R. Madhubuti composed this line for a poem he wrote decades ago, but when he read it aloud at the South Side Community Art Center recently, the words still reverberated. Madhubuti was the keynote speaker at the opening of “AfriCOBRA: Prologue—The 1960s and the Black Arts Movement,” the first of three exhibitions on AfriCOBRA’s history, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural impact that together make up “AfriCOBRA in Chicago,” a series jointly organized by the SSCAC, the Logan Center for the Arts, and the DuSable Museum of African American History....

Many mornings Pak Suan is in the garden by 7 AM, alone. That’s not long after he finishes the graveyard shift at Rivers Casino, where he works as a custodian. He spends an hour or so harvesting, or watering the plants in either the main hoop house or the smaller one he built himself near the back of the lot. He pieced it together with leftover sheets of opaque plastic and $300 worth of PVC piping, which arcs over his family’s plot....

Not so very long ago, no one would have guessed that Tuesday’s runoff elections could determine whether the Chicago City Council has a chance to become a fully functioning legislative body. Aldermen almost never vote against measures the mayor supports, and they certainly don’t often question his policies on the council floor. But in the three years since the Wal-Mart vote, the Daley administration has been shaken by a series of scandals and federal investigations even as it continues to privatize public schools, dismantle public housing, divert public money into politically controlled tax-increment financing districts, and push expensive expansion projects for O’Hare and the CTA rail lines, not to mention the bid for the 2016 Olympics....

One of the buzziest buzzwords in the tech world is “the cloud,” which refers to the practice of storing data remotely on networked servers. The metaphor may be blurry, but the idea’s simple: imagine yourself surrounded by an invisible nebula of data waiting to be accessed anywhere there’s an Internet connection, untethering you from the necessity of accessing your digital stuff via a specific device. Ten years on, the original iPod seems quaint with its five-gigabyte hard drive—and if digital music evolves the way most pundits are predicting, the whole idea of a music player that stores songs will follow suit....

As the son of a dancer and an actor, Swedish choreographer Mats Ek comes by his deft theatrical touch honestly. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago artistic director Glenn Edgerton has long coveted Ek’s work, he says, for its “warmth and emotion.” Now Edgerton has snagged the 2009 Casi-Casa (“Almost Home”) for HSDC’s winter concert. Alternately cozy, angry, and amusing, this 40-minute dance for 11 recalls the domesticity of Ek’s Place, which Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna performed in Chicago three years ago....

For its third year the Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival has expanded from one day to three (Fri-Sun 12/3-12/5) and from one venue to three—Double Door, the Congress Theater, and Lincoln Hall. There aren’t any bluegrass or blues artists among the fest’s big names, with the obvious exception of David “Honeyboy” Edwards, but the lineups do include a handful of notable national acts. Folk-rockers Corey Chisel & the Wandering Sons are the marquee attraction Friday at Double Door, with the Great Divide and How Far to Austin among the supporting bands....

In the past few weeks, Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman has called on parents, teachers, students, central office bureaucrats, and ordinary taxpayers to do their part to help the district erase a $900 million budget deficit: Teachers should forgo promised pay hikes. Students must do without sophomore sports. Coaches should be willing to coach for free. Class sizes are likely to swell. Taxpayers should expect higher bills. How can CPS dole out raises while claiming to be cutting back?...

We’ve joined a hipster gym. We didn’t need to buy new workout clothes like before, when we belonged to the YMCA or that posh spot on Lincoln Avenue where everyone wore the same brand of Lycra racerback and neon sweats or, sometimes, no shirt at all. I’m in my black tights, and you bring the high-tops you had before we bought the house. At the hipster gym we wear your old shirts from when we first got pregnant and painted the office soft blue....

Pastoral’s day trip Down on the Farm heads to “the heart of Illinois’ sustainable agriculture” in Champaign-Urbana. After breakfast on the bus, participants will visit Urbana’s Market at the Square, one of the biggest farmers’ markets in the area. At Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery they’ll pick fruit and see how owners Leslie Cooperband and Wes Jarrel make their farmstead goat cheeses, then eat a lunch of locally produced food. Wine and cheese will be served on the trip back; the bus will drop people off at both Pastoral locations in the early evening....

Since 1995, the city has been gradually demolishing the ten major public housing projects managed by the Chicago Housing Authority, which provided homes to 200,000 people at their peak. As the displaced residents are reassigned to mixed-income developments, move out on their own, or disappear from the CHA’s records, a new volume looks back at what life was like for the millions of Chicagoans who made their lives in the projects....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here’s another thought: Mr. Jones, my eighth-grade social studies teacher, was feared around the school for making us take long, horrible tests every term. They always consisted of about 100 questions, all multiple choice but written in such a confusing way that you had to read them over several times to try to figure out if he was asking what you thought or the exact opposite....

The number crunchers at Baseball Prospectus offer some hope to Cubs fans alternating between optimism and dread at the thought of what “Cubbie occurrence” might derail the team this time around. BP’s Clay Davenport is running a Monte Carlo simulation based on teams’ actual performance to determine their odds of making it to the playoffs. The result assigns the Cubs a 78.39568 (out of 100) chance of winning the Central Division and a 96....

Trinna Schramm has never cooked in a restaurant kitchen, nor has she ever aspired to. But how you enjoy your dining experience at Alinea–the best restaurant in the country according to Gourmet’s most recent list–depends heavily on her. As Grant Achatz’s unglamorously titled “expediter,” she does a job that at most other restaurants falls to the chef or sous-chef, coordinating the kitchen and dining room staffs to make sure your meal is perfectly paced....

Charles Boyer and Olivia de Havilland, in one of the most handsome marriages-of-convenience on record Tomorrow night at 7:30 PM Northwest Chicago Film Society will present Hold Back the Dawn, a 1941 drama cowritten by Billy Wilder just a few years before he started directing movies of his own. It’s the sort of neglected studio-era movie in which the local programming organization has come to specialize, and it serves—like other recent NCFS selections Gunman’s Walk and The Walls of Jericho—as a reminder of how our received knowledge of American film history is so streamlined....

Lidia Bastianich: I do, I do. Eataly is essentially a 360-degree experience of food, and it happens to be Italian food, with all of us as partners. And I think it’s really important to give people an opportunity to experience Italian food at all different price levels. And Eataly does just that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why did you think Chicago was the place that Eataly needed to go next?...