Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve seen about a dozen names of Tribune editorial staffers who are bailing out, and by and large they’ve been terrific journalists. I’ve discussed the work of some in Hot Type, such as medical writer Judy Peres, sports columnist Sam Smith, and markets columnist Bill Barnhart. Then there’s Alan Solomon. The story about him I had to tell back in 1994 was about how the woman then editing sports removed the department’s TV, and how Solomon’s way of protesting was to send her flowers and a note that said “The whole building, the whole country are laughing at you....

The American public deserves to know what went down, and if the only way to find out is to go to Shabbat services, well, more power to the two-fisted editor of the synagogue bulletin. —Michael Miner, “Barely on the Radar,” August 21 “I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel’s Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people....

Segregated City Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A good deal of resistance to public efforts at desegregation, besides obvious conservative biases, is mere fatigue at the repeated failures of housing and community development programs to break the generational cycles of persistent poverty, crime, single-parent households, and academic failure. Justifying public expenditure is very difficult in the current economic environment for even successful programs, and when the tax burden is placed disproportionately on the middle class, as in Chicago, additional spending on rent vouchers or affordable housing is politically impossible....

Sesame Street at 40 Sing! the Music of Sesame Street Jim Henson & Friends Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To read Michael Davis’s book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is to be reminded how radically different the media landscape was back in 1966, when Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer for New York’s educational Channel 13, and Lloyd Morrisett, a vice president for the Carnegie Corporation, bonded over the idea for Sesame Street at a dinner party....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fucked Up: Like Mastodon and Boris before them, epic Toronto hardcore outfit Fucked Up will be responsible for bringing some gnarly aggression to an otherwise relatively mild-mannered weekend of bands (the Jesus Lizard excepted, of course). While they’re best appreciated in a small, crowded space under dangerous conditions, their wall-of-sound live approach should serve them well even on a huge festival stage....

QAs a 43-year-old single gay guy, I recently had my first spanking experience and am now feeling extreme guilt and self-loathing. I was in a very long-term vanilla relationship for most of my adult life and never got to experience anything remotely kinky, but I’ve had an interest in it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Right now I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I feel like puking all the time....

Small independent publishing houses, bless ’em, tend to run the gamut from bare bones to dicey—and a writer had best be prepared to take up the slack. When Gina Frangello’s first novel, My Sister’s Continent, was released in 2006, for instance, her Portland-based publisher, Chiasmus Press, didn’t provide much marketing support. “This isn’t an indictment of them,” Frangello says. “I love their books and they had outstanding taste and a lot of integrity....

When Steven Hall’s debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate), was published in the UK last year, ecstatic reviewers compared it to everything from Donnie Darko to Moby-Dick, and Hall was hailed as Generation Y’s answer to both Douglas Adams and Haruki Murakami. Now that it’s out in the U.S., the question is inevitable: does it live up to the hype? It’s undeniably very clever, highly intellectual but never highbrow, and surprisingly suspenseful for a novel that traffics in Big Ideas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently read an interesting book called Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry. It was written in 1993, when upgrading to CDs was the latest technological advancement in the gray-to-black-market music business. (Coincidentally, 1993 was also the year the first popular graphical Web browser was released, accelerating the mass adoption of the Internet—one of the only enemies bootleggers and legit labels would ever share....

Rex Huppke has a flair for absurdity. Plenty of journalists speak truth to power, ignorance, and mendacity. But not many of them make me laugh. Facts matter to Huppke, as they do to all reporters, but only Huppke has written their obituary. Last April he announced in the Tribune: “To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet....

The privatization of Chicago’s water system got floated as what I assumed was a trial balloon – or just another random mayoral emanation – in Da Mare’s sitdown with the Sun-Times editorial board (IIRC; can’t find it r/n, unfortunately). But apparently there’s more buzz out there about the idea. Given the parking meter fiasco, the city’s underwhelming Olympic pitch, the recent increase in property taxes, the increased aldermanic pushback as evidenced by this week’s cover story, and the mayor’s historically low approval ratings, I can’t imagine it actually happening, but as a wise man once said, two is a trend....

West Town’s big-time summer shindig goes down Sat 7/7 and Sun 7/8 on Chicago between Damen and Wood, with an excellent main-stage music lineup booked by the Empty Bottle. Atlanta garage punks the Black Lips headline Saturday, after sets from outer-space surfers Man or Astro-Man?, Pet Lions, Stagnant Pools (see Soundboard), He’s My Brother She’s My Sister, and others. On Sunday adorable indie-rock couple Mates of State headline; earlier in the day you can hear the likes of Crooked Fingers, Bad Veins, and R Ring....

“Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams,” someone says in A Raisin in the Sun. Hearing that line on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—which is when TimeLine Theatre Company’s excellent revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic drama had its opening night—felt a little like being doused in cold water. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple weeks ago in the Reader, Steve Bogira took a grim assessment of how black Chicagoans have fared since the march....

Journalism will never subdue its unruly temptation to turn the world into a soap opera. When motives are mixed, we want to unmix them. When the truth lies in shadows, we want to flip a switch. If the reason why can’t be told in 800 words, maybe it’s the wrong reason. And when searching for answers, the human heart is always a more entertaining source than dusty law books. Just last week, ten years later, Royko’s successor at the Tribune, John Kass, ripped the idea of hate crimes for a different reason....

“There are certain things you just don’t talk about.” Those were some of the last words Larry Williams said to me before he stopped answering my questions about his 32 years as a Chicago cop. For many, Burge’s sentence seemed to provide long-overdue closure. For me, after years away from investigative work, it just pulled at the scab on an old wound. It was a potent reminder of everything that wouldn’t get resolved that day in federal court, and all the questions that had haunted me—and still do....

The holiday season: a time for family, friends, and the Third Reich. Just before Thanksgiving the Gene Siskel Film Center presented the Chicago premiere of Amos Gitai’s One Day You’ll Understand, in which a middle-aged businessman wonders what role his mother might have played in the deaths of her Jewish parents during the Holocaust. A few theaters have still been showing Mark Herman’s bathetic The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, about two little kids who forge a friendship from opposite sides of the barbed wire....

I’m beginning to suspect that the increasing prevalence of the “+” sign in the restaurant world (over the ampersand) is less a precious affectation than a sign of something much more clandestine. Since it bears a resemblance to Freemasonry’s Red Cross of Constantine, maybe the chefs and servers at Owen + Alchemy and Charlatan (where it appears many times on the menu) have been meeting in secret, plotting the New World Order or a fake moon landing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jessica Hopper and I have Internet beef over the new Lil Jon/Gucci Mane/some other guys track, “I’m a J.” (You can listen here, if you’re into hearing awful bullshit.) Hopper calls it “phenomal bad goodness.” I say that it makes me want to take my ears to court and sue them for all they’ve got for emotional anguish and lost income that exposure to it has caused me....

Critics can be thin-skinned motherfuckers, so I hope that resident Reader food guy Mike Sula doesn’t take umbrage when I say that he is woefully off point about a crucial appetizer at the Lakeview restaurant Fish Bar. Argument: In an April 2011 review, Sula called a mixture of breaded and fried lemon slices, jalapeños, and onions “interesting but ultimately inedible,” citing the fact that it “dripped with grease.” Rebuttal: Girl, please....

The bar patio may be the go-to summer destination for all right-drinking people, but you’ll find a runner-up in the bakery patio, where it’s more socially acceptable to loiter early in the day. (It’s 8 AM somewhere!) Fritz has got a cute one: a long, narrow pocket between buildings, with tables, good light, and attractive people working on laptops. It’s a fine spot to enjoy the embarrassment of killer pastries the bakery churns out....