randomhouse.com The End of Your Life Book Club has one of the ickiest premises for a book I’ve seen in a long time. Will Schwalbe’s mother, Mary Anne, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live. In order to pass the time at her chemo treatments, Will and Mary Anne start a two-person book club, choosing a new title to discuss every month. You don’t have to be like Mary Anne, who incorrigibly reads the end of books first, to figure out where this is going....

In the Neighborhood Chopal Kabab and Steak2242 W. Devon | 773-338-4080 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The exceedingly friendly Ali Khawaja appears to have sunk a lot of naan into his restaurant on the sleepy eastern end of Devon Avenue’s Indo-Pak strip. The room is crammed with elaborately carved and painted tables and high-backed chairs, and the walls are bedecked with Pakistani handicrafts Khawaja traveled the homeland to procure....

There are two giants associated with Fela!, the 2009 musical reaching us now in a touring production that features the original Broadway lead. One, of course, is Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Nigerian musician who pioneered Afrobeat and then used it to incite an insanely courageous protest against his nation’s oil-fed tyrants. The other is Bill T. Jones, Fela!‘s coauthor, director, and choreographer. Having already enjoyed a long career in modern dance, Jones came late to theater....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DePaul University has announced that esteemed acting teacher Bella Itkin passed away February 9 at age 90. Dr. Itkin was the daughter of actor and director David Itkin, a Russian émigré who taught at the Goodman and helped shape its identity as a European-style theater conservatory. Bella, who arrived in America from Russia in 1932, graduated from the Goodman School in 1943 and spent more than 50 years teaching there and at its successor, the Theatre School of DePaul University....

When Barack Obama started his new gig last month, his aides were floored to find themselves in a technological time warp. The Bush White House, it seems, had been stuck in the early 2000s—no IM, no Facebook—and Obama’s staffers were expected to get to work without laptops or Blackberrys. The council may not be known for robust debate, but all those aye votes do yield a staggering amount of paperwork. Each month aldermen consider hundreds of pieces of legislation on matters big and small, from backing the city’s Olympics bid with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to authorizing new parking restrictions on one block of a residential street....

I’d like to thank Sun-Times reporter Tim Novak for reminding me what the Daley administration was really like. You really know how to pick your mayors, Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d say it’s the sweetest deal in Chicago, except that there are so many other sweet deals around here, such as the even sweeter one that allows the White Sox to play at taxpayer-owned U....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ratkje’s recent River Mouth Echoes (Tzadik) covers a lot of terrain, focusing on her more serious compositional side with six pieces from 1997 through 2005. In her brief liner notes she writes, “Contrasts are essential; extremes and clear cuts. Music is a part of life and should sound like that. Noise and distortion have an unlimited earthly beauty, chaos and simplicity often appearing side by side, but also the romantic softness of quiet sine waves or melodic lines....

Every time we go back to the Bulls they’re a different team. That’s the great thing about them. It’s also the aggravating thing–for their opponents but also for their fans. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More recently, Luol Deng, a flowering third-year player at the age of 21, has shown signs of making the team his Bulls. But actually it’s Paxson’s team. Hinrich, Gordon, Deng–and until his recent injury, Nocioni–all battle for supremacy, but in the Bulls’ fluid style of team basketball the chemistry is in constant flux....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Omnivorous Mike Sula profiles chef Brian Jupiter, a New Orleans native who at the new Noble Square barstaurant Frontier is smoking whole pigs, lambs, goats, and wild boars and featuring game dishes such as pulled boar sandwiches and elk shepherd’s pie (there’s a recipe for that here). The rustic western-themed sports bar—presided over by a stuffed black bear—also offers oysters, burgers made with Slagel Farms chuck custom-ground down the street at Rob Levitt’s Butcher & Larder, and whole grilled redfish inspired by Cochon, a restaurant in the Warehouse District of Jupiter’s hometown....

The Version festival has been using mixed metaphors to spread the gospel of independent art and utopian politics for six years now. This year’s theme is The Insurrection Internationale, and the main show, We’re Rollin’, They’re Hatin, combines dice-based fantasy role-playing with the usual brew of anarchist ideals and noise music (or is that musical noise?). According to organizer Ed Marszewski, this will be the most coherent Version to date, inaugurating the peripatetic festival’s recently rehabbed headquarters, a former department store at 3219 S....

In the mid-aughts a wave of steely-eyed southern rappers introduced hip-hop fans to a new piece of slang: “the trap.” Used narrowly, the term refers to a place where drug deals are made—say, an open-air drug market in a blighted city neighborhood. But it can also be used in a broader sense to describe the drug trade itself, as well as the particular psychic state—a blend of paranoia and megalomania—that tends to accompany long-term employment as a dealer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the days leading up to November 22, my class had apparently been unruly on the playground at recess. I don’t think we’d been doing much besides the ordinary chasing and screaming. But our teacher, Miss Merkin, had passed along a warning from the principal that our recess privileges would be suspended if we didn’t soon become more ruly....

The resignation last week of Alderman Sandi Jackson had me recalling that time, not so long ago, when her husband and political sponsor, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., was the great hope for progressive politics in Chicago. On top of that, the trains weren’t even running on time. Worse, the two primary public transit lines—the Red and Blue—were falling apart for lack of adequate maintenance. For the better part of the next year, Jackson maintained a strong public presence, assailing corruption, bloated spending, harsh treatment of unions, and poorly conceived infrastructure planning....

A decade after Russian-American conceptual artists Komar and Melamid surveyed various countries to create the most and least desirable paintings, writer-director Greg Allen sent out a nationwide questionnaire to determine what Americans want in a play. Results from his 2,200 responses, cunningly summarized in the show’s opening minutes, reveal the uselessness of statistics–the Neo-Futurists are more popular than Shakespeare, for example. The “best” and “worst” plays, created by Allen and four winning performers from the data, are understandably unwieldy: Americans apparently most want a secular, realistic play starring an inspiring god and “an ordinary undead....

With Russians dropping dead from polonium poisoning, I’ve begun to wonder about poisoning generally. What’s the fastest-acting, most lethal poison? What’s the most insidious, least detectable? —JP, Syracuse, New York Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Toxicologists have a blunt way of rating a poison’s lethality. Discussed here before, it’s called the LD-50, or 50 percent lethal dose—the amount that on average kills half the target critters....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The urban legend about painting the Golden Gate Bridge—by the time the crews finish, they have to start over again—could just as easily be about the task of profiling every interesting person in the Chicago music scene. Thankfully that’s not what we at the Reader have set out to do with our second annual People Issue. Nor do we mean to tag along after the celebrities of the moment—though if you follow music in Chicago, you’ve likely heard of at least one of our B Side subjects....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suspect that Heli, a Mexican drama playing tomorrow night at 9:30 PM and Monday at 8:30 PM, will be among the most divisive films at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. It contains some of the most graphic images of torture I’ve ever seen in a movie, and director Amat Escalante’s blunt, deadpan presentation somehow makes them even more repulsive....

Citizens of Earth! This is an APB! All Points Bulletin! I interrupt your life momentarily to bring you this: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leech-like creatures from another planet. They exist, though, the hard part is they assume the form of humans thus making it to hard distinguish one of these creatures from a normal person. Nontraditional in form and habit to the annelids and nocturnal neck biters, they are not out for blood....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than one Republican senator blocking the nomination of Richard Cordray for director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has claimed that the real problem is not Cordray, a respected former attorney general of Ohio, but the sweeping powers granted to him under the Dodd-Frank law that established the agency. The Republicans want the directorship replaced with a five-person committee and the agency’s budget directly controlled by Congress....

Drinking to ease nerves on a first date. It’s a good idea in theory and yes, if a stiff drink or two will take the edge off and make you less of a spaz then by all means. Just remember you are on a first date and not spring break. As far as boozing and relationships, I generally save my boatless booze cruise until the break-up. Break-ups suck. I don’t know how else to really state it....