Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.” PREPARING FOR CUBA – 02/19/2008 – MiamiHerald.com “Although the nation of 11.3 million people represents a virgin market for all types of products and services, several sectors appear riper for immediate investment than others....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Linda Searl, chair: A partner in the respected Searl Lamaster Howe architectural firm, Searl is ten-year veteran of the commission, a donor to Daley’s campaign committee, and a longtime adviser to Daley and the city’s planning department. Mayor Richard M. Daley: Didn’t we hear something about how he’s going to look out for the children? Arnold L. Randall: As the commissioner for the city’s planning department, he reports to Mayor Daley....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today at Salon, Andrew Leonard reports that the country where Avril Lavigne‘s the biggest isn’t the U.S. or even her native Canada. It’s China, of all places. I find that hard to believe, considering China doesn’t even have any Hot Topics, but the fact that she’s recorded a version of her new single, “Girlfriend,” with the chorus sung in Mandarin looks like proof....

Chloe Riley Chicago director Jake Fruend holding a photo of John, a mysterious friend from his grandmother’s past Sometimes, like the trumpets on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” great art is born of dreams. But other times it’s happenstance—you throw back one too many glasses of champagne with your grandma, and the next thing you know, you’re staging a play about her life. Just ask Chicago-based director Jake Fruend. Several months ago and after several glasses of bubbly, Fruend’s grandmother Diana opened up to him about a friendship she shared with an openly gay neighbor as a teen in San Diego in the 1950s....

The University of Chicago is the hub of the Hyde Park theater, comedy, and dance scenes. Indeed, the school paved the way for the first flowering of Chicago’s off-Loop theater movement in the 1950s, when U. of C. student—and, later, Second City cofounder—Paul Sills directed plays on campus using ensemble techniques he learned from his mother, theater teacher extraordinaire Viola Spolin. Today Hyde Park is a magnet for professional, student, and amateur artists whose work in turn draws audiences from all over the city, suburbs, and region....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Item: The Los Angeles Times is owned by the Tribune Co. Item: The Tribune Co. is based in Chicago. Item: “In 2008, Tribune is struggling under a $13 billion debt load, much of it incurred in taking the company private in 2007, and from plummeting advertising income at its newspapers.” (Wikipedia. A business friend tells me the current figure is actually $14....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a germ of an idea here–there are more conceptual, sometimes abstract covers of contemporary books like Mindless Eating, Fast Food Nation or Heat. And Smith’s individual design analysis, while scattered (she doesn’t cover the more abstract stuff), isn’t that horrible, despite clunkers like, “The ’60s may not have been a good era for design.” But the frame she creates for the discussion is just too glib....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The subject of this thread was the action taken the other day by the new coach, Bo Pelini, in response to an editorial he didn’t like in the student newspaper. The Daily Nebraskan had questioned his handling of disciplinary cases; Pelini blew up and briefly banned the paper’s reporters from the practice field. But one poster did squarely face the underlying constitutional question....

In polls and reviews, readers and critics have converged to name Kurt Elling the most accomplished male jazz vocalist of his generation. So now it comes down to how good he’ll ultimately become–a question only partly answered on the new Nightmoves, due April 3 on Concord. The disc brims with his best pure singing yet: he brings exuberant command to Betty Carter’s “Tight” and focused restraint to a setting of the Whitman poem “The Sleepers....

This should have been the biggest week for Ministry in years—at least since the pioneering industrial band played four nights at Chicago’s House of Blues in May 2008 to end their final stateside tour. But thanks in part to a bout of bitter legal wrangling, Ministry front man and sole constant member Al Jourgensen is sitting the whole thing out. “Why isn’t Al there?” Angie Jourgensen asks of the screening. “They never invited him....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 2009 Polks were just announced by Long Island University, which administers them, and the award for international reporting went to Paul F. Salopek of the Tribune for “Waging War and Peace in Africa,” a series of articles last fall describing a new Pentagon initiative in East Africa. A model journalist in the George Polk tradition, Salopek won a Pulitzer in 2001 (it was his second), for coverage of civil war in Congo....

JUDSON CLAIBORNEBefore Midnight Scholar(self-released) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new Parsley Flakes single is going for five bucks on the Hewhocorrupts site, which works out to around a dollar per minute of music. Normally that’d be a terrible ratio—most seven-inches frankly can’t justify their price—but for what you’re getting here it’s a steal, even if you don’t score one of the 100 copies pressed on what the label’s calling “Ecto-Cooler green” vinyl....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Q101‘s recent decision to play a leaked version of the new White Stripes album, Icky Thump, ended up pissing Jack White off something fierce. Since then dozens of bloggers have debated Q101’s decision, and in a recent Reader article music director Spike defended playing Icky as a necessary move for a medium being eaten alive by the Internet. White’s only public word on the matter was in a recent A....

Byron Cohen/FX Network Diane Kruger and Demián Bichir in The Bridge The Bridge, which premiered July 10 on the FX Network, is an adaptation of the 2011 Danish/Swedish series, Bron (or Broen), and is the brainchild of TV veterans Meredith Stiehm (NYPD Blue, Cold Case) and Elwood Reid (Undercovers, the Hawaii Five-O reboot). Diane Kruger, best known as the fraulein fatale from Inglourious Basterds, stars as Sonya Cross, an El Paso detective who has Asperger’s....

More than most neighborhoods, Uptown is a microcosm of Chicago. Like Chicago, it’s a raging mix of elegant and scruffy that ends in a gilded lakefront. Like Chicago, it looks diverse from a distance and balkanized up close. And like Chicago it has not one history but a kaleidoscopeful. It’s home to peregrine falcons, Mr. Leather, the Aquitania, Jesus People USA, Lincoln Towing, the city’s last cage hotel, the American Indian Center, and what may be the world’s ugliest Buddhist temple....

Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

Each November 1, the Chicago Transit Authority turns on its largely ineffectual heat lamps. Come the first cold snap, pigeons gather to huddle in the scant pools of warmth, heads tucked under wings, apparently confident no one will swoop them up for mass barbecues. Chicagoans of the human sort stand shivering around them, cast out of the heat but loath to disturb their feathered fellow city dwellers. Red-tailed hawks are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918....

Back in late winter, when a volunteer committee picked a documentary about the dark side of wind energy for Evanston’s Talking Pictures Festival, no one was expecting the issue to blow up just in time for the screening this Friday. But it has. Last week Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave his blessing to Cape Wind, a 130-turbine wind farm to be built in the ocean off Cape Cod—the first such project to win approval in the U....

It’s a little-known fact that the Secret Order of Posturing Publicans requires pledge-member establishments to staff up with a minimum 65 percent of scruffy beardos, each outfitted with a tweed scally cap, before they can be awarded their ampersands. Opening well ahead of Wicker Park’s Bangers & Lace and Lakeview’s Blokes & Birds, Logan Square’s Owen & Engine was assured its pick of the hirsute chaps passed over by Longman & Eagle....

Sages say it’s not the destination that matters but the voyage. When we get to where we’re going, we often wonder why we bothered, yet the weeks at sea were full of adventures—storms and pirates and breaching whales, not to mention the hours spent on deck leaning into the wind and brooding. I asked sports editor Chris De Luca why. “We got crunched for space when we stopped doing special sections,” he explained....