Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you don’t know who David Grann is, this appreciation in Slate last year by Jonah Weiner is a pretty good primer. A staff writer at the New Yorker, his stories are so extensively reported that readers are lucky if one of his serpentine tales is published in a year, let alone two. Grann fans were rewarded in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, where his nearly 22,000-word story, “The Yankee Comandante,” was published as the centerpiece....

Judy Fidkowski Some of the crowd at Bartolini’s The newspaper known as the Englewood Economist when it was founded in 1906 would undergo various transformations over the decades—to become the Southtown Economist, the Daily Southtown, and since 2007 the SouthtownStar. But no change was quite so singular as the latest, which brought some 75 past and present employees to the back room of Bartolini’s, a pizza joint in Midlothian, last Friday evening to mourn and celebrate....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, but once a man’s been convicted of murder it doesn’t matter nearly as much whether he actually did it. Not to our justice system it doesn’t. At that point American justice becomes more interested in protecting its own dignity than in righting a wrong done some stiff who got a fair trial even if the jury reached the wrong verdict....

This uneven musical updates the story of the Donner party–the juicy parts, anyway–with a contemporary posse who abandon the “boring and gay” Lorami, Illinois, for California. An old-timey narrator (Mark Vannier in one of several fresh turns) offers historical context, though this party’s members and travails are thoroughly modern. After a food fight and a gruesome stop at Taco Bell, the travelers are out of supplies and the goreless but sexualized cannibalism begins....

It’s unclear whether any of the early field researchers at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute were the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Archival photos show that they traveled widely in the Middle East and Asia and wore lots of khaki and broad-brimmed hats. But it’s hard to tell whether anyone carried a bullwhip, and if a U. of C. prof ever got into a fistfight with Nazis on top of a moving train, we’d probably have heard about it—think of what that sort of thing could do for a college’s image!...

For his first five or so years in the City Council, Fioretti, the Second Ward alderman, was a little wobbly on reform issues, talking the talk more than walking the walk. But in the last few months, he’s had me hoping for the second coming of Leon Despres, the legendary foil of the first Mayor Daley. Fioretti teamed up with Alderman Leslie Hairston (Fifth) to lead the unsuccessful charge against giving Mayor Rahm Emanuel extra power to hand out NATO summit contracts and create an infrastructure trust, which essentially privatizes the funding and selection of government projects....

Country music is white music. Its performers are white; its repertoire is white; its audience is white. That’s the genre’s image, anyway. But it’s largely a myth, debunked decisively in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, a new collection of scholarly essays. The book finds African-Americans throughout country’s history, from early black musicians like DeFord Bailey, on 1920s and ’30s hillbilly records, to Ray Charles’s massive 1962 hit (and the first million-selling country record) Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music....

The Obama Reader Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve got a few myself, and my favorite is from early in his 2004 Senate campaign. Obama was still an underdog, if not an afterthought, in the months before the Democratic primary—among his six opponents were the son of a party power broker and a billionaire. I was working for the Chicago Reporter, a monthly that focuses on racial issues, and had no problem getting his staff to set up a sit-down....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since journalism’s going digital, there must be advantages to a new medium that’s digital from the ground up. Testing this proposition, which has held up pretty well in New York City, DNAinfo.com on Monday launched its Chicago operation. Front and center on the new website was its first scoop: half a million dollars has mysteriously disappeared from former county board president Todd Stroger’s reelection fund....

The walls in our house didn’t have MoMo sucks dick sprayed on it, and there were no gang stars. No writing, just pictures of family, and a Jesus clock. You didn’t smell pee or weed when you walked in the door, just potpourri and maybe some fried chicken. We weren’t pretending that we didn’t live around crack addicts, or that people didn’t get beat up and shot just floors below us in the playground....

Fake Lollapalooza lineups are circulating online already, so it’s time for Gossip Wolf to sniff the wind and make some guesses about the annual Grant Park “alternative” music fest. Our predictions include Danish postpunk kiddies Iceage, erstwhile “Tity Boi” 2 Chainz, “Harlem Shake” lottery winner Baauer, enjoyers of silence Depeche Mode, the less bankrupt Postal Service, former Degrassi star Drake, French pop fiends Phoenix, photogenic producer Diplo, guyliner pioneers Nine Inch Nails, and local hip-hop sensation Chance the Rapper....

Michael Gebert The celebrichef and his friend Perry The Trib‘s Phil Vettel reports that Graham Elliot announced—at Lollapalooza—that Grahamwich, the MasterChef star’s River North sandwich shop, closed as of yesterday. This shines light on two interesting aspects of the food scene circa 2013, the first being that somehow it’s perfectly normal that we receive food-world news in the middle of a music festival. At Woodstock the news was that there was some bad acid out there, man, but 40 years later, it would be bad arugula that would get the same attention....

See also: Friday • Sunday • afterparties • Listen @ Spotify Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jeff the Brotherhood 1:30-2:15 PlayStation stage Nashville two-piece Jeff the Brotherhood is—and presumably always will be—Jake and Jamin Orrall, siblings who’ve already spent years bashing out hazy, uplifting garage punk with just a guitar and a drum kit. Recently they’ve been expanding their palette a bit, and it sounds like they used every instrument in the studio to make the new Hypnotic Nights (Warner Brothers)....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January Britain’s General Dental Council found David Quelch, a dentist in Bexhill, England, guilty of serious misconduct and barred him from further practice. According to testimony, after hearing that an 87-year-old patient had told her doctor she’d found Quelch’s previous conduct unprofessional, Quelch pulled out two of the woman’s teeth over her objections and without anesthetic, shouting afterward, “That’ll teach you not to complain to the doctor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A mathematician at Dalhousie University has used an operation called a Fourier transform to pick apart the opening chord to the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” It’s kind of a big deal because non-Beatles musicians have been trying for decades to figure out the chord, which happens to be impossible to play on a guitar. (According to the Chicago Independent Radio Project blog, Harrison let the secret out years ago, but I guess it’s possible to be a huge Beatles fan and still not have heard that news....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It breaks my heart to inform you all that Charlie Cooper, my better half in Telefon Tel Aviv, passed away on January 22nd.We have been friends since high school, and began making records together a decade ago. We have been so fortunate to tour the world together, while at the same time having a massive amount of laughs at one another’s expense....

A few weeks back Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco served as principal for a day at his old south-side middle school, Crown Community Academy. But Lupe’s got even bigger education plans, FOR THE ENTIRE INTERNET, having recently started a book club. He’s hosting lectures on each selection on his Ustream page, and the reading list so far has featured Huey P. Newton‘s Revolutionary Suicide, W.E.B. DuBois‘s biography of John Brown, and Chris Hedges‘s Empire of Illusion (which, sayeth Lupe, “has a good pace”)....

Surly Darkness 2008 (pictured, in my souvenir tasting glass): Very possibly the best stout I’ve ever had. Only Three Floyds’ Dark Lord can compare, and that’s a bit apples-and-oranges. Dark Lord is richer and heavier (though Darkness is hardly light–we’re talking grades of motor oil here), but on the other hand I feel like I could drink more than four ounces of the Surly without needing to lie down and rest....

Not that I’m able to work up a lot of interest in the Golden Globes’ yearly handouts–just a blip on the conscious monitor and they’re past me, like “huh?”–but, c’mon: “best actress (musical or comedy)” to Meryl Streep for her designing-woman shtick in The Devil Wears Prada? Could’ve played that role on automatic–just press the “imperious” high-attitude button and let your inner computer do the work–which I suspect for the most part is exactly what she did....

Playing out steadily since 2003, STNNNG (pronounced “stunning”) have earned their reputation as an endorphin rush of a live act. But beneath the apparent anarchy, the Minneapolis quintet keep honing their bed-of-knives sound, and the material on their most recent full-length, Fake Fake (Modern Radio)–recorded in Chicago last year with Mike Lust–shows the benefits of discipline. On these ten tight tracks I can hear the Fall’s crackpot articulation, U.S. Maple’s taunting zigzags, and the punishing rhythmic efficiency of Big Black, all integrated into an unrelenting war cry that seems like something dazzlingly new, although really it isn’t....