My sister married her husband, who is from Saudi Arabia, in January 2005 and they began the process of filing for his permanent residency in February. At this point, they have spent more than two years and thousands of dollars trying to get USCIS to grant him residency, but to no avail. Their case has now been denied three times, in three different but equally ridiculous ways, despite extensive documentation of their life together, affidavits from my family, and their compliance with everything USCIS has asked of them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Imagine you’re in a grocery store and you’re in a real hurry. There are three hungry, demanding people waiting for dinner; you have 30 minutes to plan a menu, buy the ingredients, and make something edible. You’re really sweating here! Like, physically! You turn down the frozen aisle to cool off and look for a nice vegetable medley when some sunburned schmuck with frosted tips and a bracelet made out of guitar picks that are also covered in skulls (a real thing!...

Not All Nerds Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, I would say that the majority of young physicists at the university level do not fit into the mold of what the media portrays as the “typical geek.” I can say this with confidence as I am a member of the physics faculty at Northwestern (where Dr. Tae taught briefly and I should note that I did not overlap with him) and I skateboard, snowboard, have tattoos, etc etc....

In recent years the great Michigan independent jazz label Nessa Records has focused most of its energy on reissuing gems from its catalog on CD—whether by free jazz luminaries like Wadada Leo Smith and Hal Russell or old-school swing and bop masters like Eddie Johnson and Ira Sullivan. But it’s encouraging in this inhospitable climate for record labels, especially ones devoted to improvised music, that Nessa has just released an all-new recording....

Tyler Colman started researching Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink while he was a graduate student in the economics department at Northwestern. The book, published in July by the University of California Press, compares the byzantine, quasi-self-governing appellation system of Bordeaux’s wine growers with that of the more government-regulated Napa Valley producers and shows how those individual systems, along with other factors, determine which wines end up in stores, how much they cost, and what they taste like....

I thought I could bang out a column today—a regular column, a column about my readers’ problems and their freaky fetishes and all those asshole politicians out there. You know, the usual. Perhaps a sex-advice column isn’t an appropriate place to eulogize an articulate, elegant woman, a practicing Catholic named for the patron saint of hopeless causes and, perhaps consequently, a Cubs fan. So let’s not think of this as a eulogy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I should’ve let you all know about this last week, but my latest Spotify playlist is up—in keeping with my usual practice, it’s entirely made up of tunes from the various albums cited in the “Today’s playlist” sections of my Post No Bills blog entries. That means there are absolutely no thematic, temporal, or stylistic connections—just 33 tracks totaling around two hours, almost all of which I thoroughly enjoy....

Columbia College’s 14th annual literary festival, this year themed “Genre Bending: The Faces of Fiction,” presents readings and discussions featuring fiction writers and Columbia faculty, students, and alumni. Events run Sunday, March 14, through Friday, March 19, and all are free. Unless otherwise noted, the ones listed here take place at the Harold Washington Library Center, auditorium, 400 S. State. For more info call 312-369-7611 or see colum.edu/storyweek. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Considering Lil Wayne’s beyond-bonkers release schedule—he puts out tracks and mix tapes more often than most of us brush our teeth—it’s surprising that everyone isn’t completely burnt out on the guy. But he still lights up the blogosphere every time he moves, and that’s a good thing for Chicago rappers the Cool Kids. They just got tapped by DJ Benzi (site may be NSFW, depending on how thong-friendly your work is) to jump on a Weezy track for his upcoming album, and the song’s already making waves....

Thursday13 Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo MaClem SnideGaslamp KillerJulieta Venegas Friday14 Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo MaLocal NativesJean-Michel PilcSonoiTorche Saturday15 Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo MaJean-Michel PilcPlants and Animals Sunday16 Steve Dawson Tuesday18 Fuck the FactsThem Crooked Vultures Wednesday19 Georgia Anne MuldrowShuttle CLEM SNIDE After five albums of witty, quirky art-country, Clem Snide fell apart in the mid-aughts without releasing what was apparently going to be their final record. But last year front man Eef Barzelay, the band’s one remaining original member, reconvened Brendan Fitzpatrick and Ben Martin from the most recent Clem Snide lineup to release and tour behind the lost LP, Hungry Bird....

The Neo-Futurists get even more fabulous than usual this weekend with their annual Pride Month benefit presentation, 30 Queer Plays in 60 Straight Minutes—a collection of the best queer-themed works from the company’s long-running, late-night cult show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Like TMLMTBGB, 30 Queer Plays offers 30 short, ensemble-written performance pieces in a whirlwind 60 minutes. But in addition to the usual frenetic pace, there’s the promise of a greater-than-usual quantity of cross-dressing, gender-bending, same-sex-loving shenanigans....

For something so essential to most people’s lives, combining music with social networking in a deep and meaningful way has proven surprisingly hard. The original MySpace was on the way to figuring it out when everyone bailed on it for Facebook (although the new MySpace does it great, but hasn’t yet reached critical mass), Facebook managed to shit the bed harder on music than any other aspect of its service (aside from maybe its privacy policies), and no ground-up music-based social network, like SoundTracking or Apple’s Ping, has ever caught on....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t comment on how the new Tsui Hark film, Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, plays with a Friday-night crowd; but in a near-empty multiplex at 10 AM on a Sunday, I found it to be great fun. Colorful, silly, and egregiously phony, it went down like a breakfast feast of Pop-Tarts, Fruity Pebbles, and about a half-dozen kinds of ice cream....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beyond the idea that consumers won’t be eager to get used to having to buy fashion at full price–or even at a relatively scanty 15 to 20 percent off–once the economy improves is the interesting note that bargain pricing also has the effect of making customers question whether fashion, especially luxury items, was ever worth the full price. Shoppers can feel “duped” if they pay full price only to see a $1,500 dress go on sale to $600 just a couple weeks later....

I was all set to give a little love to Mayor Rahm Emanuel for finally getting around to making good on his long-delayed promise to create an easy-to-search TIF portal on the city’s website. Right on, Mr. Mayor—jobs are good! My guess is that Mayor Emanuel deliberately timed the release of the TIF portal announcement to gain a little positive PR on the day he was firing a couple thousand of school employees, in part because of the millions of TIF dollars he’s hoarding....

“We’re here because the business model is broken,” said Bill Adee, who’s in charge of innovations at the Tribune, where Sam Zell has brought in a crew from Clear Channel Communications to think the biggest thoughts. “Hopefully they won’t ask journalists to fix it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moderator Dirk Johnson, an NIU journalism professor who used to cover Chicago for the New York Times, wondered at the outset, “How do we keep the fabled romance that gave us The Front Page from turning to the last page,” and the discussion that followed was tinged with an odd sort of forward-looking nostalgia....

The name Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys is demanding not to be taken seriously, and when the foursome from Sydney started fiddling around with their jangly, Westerberg-happy sound, I think that’s pretty much what they were going for. But having released their debut full-length, Ready for Boredom, earlier this year on the do-no-wrong, upstart R.I.P. Society garage label—run by Nic Warnock, the band’s bassist—they’re worth more than just your mild attention. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Any Day Now,” is a perfectly orchestrated bit of restless 90s alt-rock: scratchy, cracking vocals that go for keys they know they can’t hit and perfect, cutting guitar leads that ache, almost in a sarcastic way, as they rise and fall....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What happens when two staff writers with backgrounds in copyediting have a discussion about gender, sexuality, and privacy? For one thing, they spend some time laying down ground rules about how things will be capitalized (don’t worry, we cut that part out of the transcript). For another—well, they talk about some stuff. The chat below started with the much-discussed Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” but quickly moved on due to the fact that one of us hadn’t actually read the article....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday we announced a last-minute contest: Whoever could identify the most people in our B Side cover illustration by Jason Wyatt Frederick would win a VIP pass to all three days of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. As high as the demand for Pitchfork VIP passes is, the number of e-mails we received was still unexpectedly large. Unfortunately we only had three passes to give away, and lo and behold, there were three clear winners....

Every major American city has its nearby rural antique paradise. Manhattan residents escape to the quaint boutiques of the Hamptons. Brimfield, the country’s most famous flea market, is an hour and a half from Boston. And Chicagoans head east to New Buffalo, Michigan, where they hop off the interstate and meander up the Red Arrow Highway. Stopping at the antique malls sprinkled among the B and Bs, wineries, and multimillion-dollar “cabins,” wellie-clad shoppers paw through enameled saucepans and oversize marquee letters in hopes of replicating ideas spotted in the pages of decor magazines....