The Chef: Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe) The Challenger: Duncan Biddulph (Rootstock) The Ingredient: Gjetost Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Invented about 150 years ago in Norway, gjetost is made from whey, milk, and cream boiled together until the milk sugars caramelize. “It’s really creamy and super sweet, kind of like if dulce de leche was a cheese,” Jason Hammel said. Both cow’s and goat’s milk are used, and he thinks the goat’s milk contributes to the cheese’s characteristic taste, adding “this barnyard quality to the sweetness....

CEOs must love it when small folk call them evil—nice guys don’t wind up masters of the universe. Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Eric Schmidt—you know they get it all the time. (Google Google and evil or Apple and evil if you have doubts.) But it’s Apple and Google choosing up sides to see who gets to rule the Internet—as Tim Wu details in his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And if the goal’s to bring those sites to heel, it appears a legal reinterpretation of Section 230 isn’t the only way to skin the cat. On May 26 the Las Vegas Review-Journal carried an article on an ongoing tax-evasion trial in the local federal courts. The paper described the accused as “a self-made entrepreneur [who] paid his workers in gold and silver coin, and said they could go by the coins’ face value — rather than the much higher market value of their precious metal content — for federal tax purposes....

The low-budget horror hit Paranormal Activity achieved something of an aesthetic feat by dramatically dialing down the level of action and volume commonly employed in a commercial horror movie to make people jump; its mock-surveillance-camera narrative about a California couple being stalked around their home by an unseen demon was so incredibly dull most of the time that when a door flew open by itself, it had the power to shock....

One arctic Sunday morning last month, the unmistakable aroma of juniper and lemon perfumed the normally musty air behind a heavy steel door in an industrial space on the west side. There “Roger,” a young guy who makes his living with his hands, was committing a time-honored and storied felony. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I got into this just because I like the science of all that stuff,” he says....

In early June, like the owners of other businesses selling everything from bread to milk, Craig Leva issued an apology, posting a flyer explaining to his customers why he’d had to increase his prices. Chicago Candy & Nut, the small retail outlet of his company, Arway Confections, was raising the price of cashews by a dollar per pound. The reason? In late 2007 and early 2008 exporters in Vietnam—as of last year the world’s largest source of cashews—defaulted en masse on contracts, citing rising labor costs and financing troubles....

You’ll Never Walk Alone Bric-a-Brac Records promised that last weekend’s grand opening party featuring Madison’s the Hussy and local duo Slushy would be the first in a regular series of shows hosted at the shop. The brand-new record store is keeping its word, because tonight, less than a week later, they’re having San Francisco psych-pop outfit Burnt Ones play at 6 PM. Burnt Ones’ latest LP, You’ll Never Walk Alone, which came out in May on Burger Records, is some sort of modern psychedelic masterpiece....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the short video Hot Spell (which plays tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center) demonstrates, the recently departed George Kuchar died exactly as he lived: by making proudly amateurish movies that spared the audience no details of his private life. It’s one of Kuchar’s “Weather Diaries,” a series depicting his annual visits to an Oklahoma trailer park during tornado season....

QI’m a bi woman in my mid-20s in a great monogamish relationship with my straight boyfriend. We occasionally invite other women into our sex life, which is really enjoyable for both of us. He isn’t threatened by other women, only by other men, which isn’t an issue since I’m not interested in any other men. So on the occasions when we find a lady we’re both into who’s also into us, anything goes, and it’s awesome....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So yeah, I woke up late, dressed in the same outfit I’d worn the day before (minus accessories), put my hair in a messy—bad messy—bun with one of those plastic hair clips, and went to get some stuff at Bed Bath & Beyond....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think a tiny piece of my soul cracked off last week when this Axl Rose video was spread around the Internet like a bad high school rumor. (Click with caution—you can’t unsee this.) Perhaps I was so bummed because Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction is high on my list of the most influential albums in my life, and I’d like to keep its glory untarnished....

“I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” teenager Anne Frank famously wrote in the diary she kept while she and her family hid out in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. But her diary—recovered after the war by her father, Otto—endured as a testament to an indomitable hope for humanity even in the face of unspeakable atrocity....

As with most pop stars, there is a multitude of personalities contained within the concept of Mariah Carey: the giddy ear-candy dispenser, the melismatic melodramatist, the self-obsessed wannabe movie star, the surprisingly capable prank caller. One of my favorite Mariahs is the one who’s obsessed with old Brill Building pop, and who occasionally gets to take charge and release an unabashed tribute to the girl group era as a single. (And those occasionally become important parts of her catalog....

Suffredin had to make his own version of this choice during county budget deliberations last week. After years of marketing himself as a reformer, he had to decide whether to stand tall on his soapbox as the county government shut down or flip-flop and make a deal that would increase Cook County’s sales tax. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And did he mention the independent governance of the health system?...

It’s a shame that no adapter is credited for GroundUp Theatre’s take on Shakespeare’s famously misogynistic play, set here in a circus: the reworked script is the best thing about this short but often unfocused production. The roles are reversed in several of the “taming” scenes, with the pleasing result that taming is a two-way street for Kate and Petruchio. Less successful is the transformation of Kate’s marriage-hungry little sister, Bianca, into a marriage-hungry brother, Biando....

Lindsay and Ashley Usich, 22, are fraternal twins who live together in Logan Square. Ashley works at a lingerie store and supports her sister, who is the homemaker. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » lindsay: Everything is vintage, from thrift stores in New York, Miami, and Chicago. The white dress shirt I love–they’re effortless and chic. The high-waisted shorts–I love anything with a high waist....

Whether you spent Black Friday hiding from shoppers or joining them in the fray (or reminding them that there are more important things to think about than deals on merchandise), the hours after the stores close are the perfect time for venting all your bottled-up seasonal stress. White Mystery make that easy tonight. The red-headed garage-rock duo headline Red Line Tap in Rogers Park during the Goose Island Tap Takeover, which is partof the brewery’s Bourbon County Brand Stout rollout....

When Kathryn Born got recruited to run a visual arts blog for Tribune Media’s Chicago Now network, she dared to get her hopes up. After years of working in the arts for little or no money, she thought this might be the opportunity she’d been waiting for: a vehicle for reviews, profiles, and news with enough muscle to pay the writers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born had come to Chicago Now from Bad at Sports, the weekly arts-talk podcast created four years ago by Richard Holland and Duncan MacKenzie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I mentioned in my preview for Saturday’s Lampo show by saxophonist Ulrich Krieger, he’s a regular collaborator with Berlin new-music ensemble Zeitkratzer, for which he adapted Lou Reed’s feedback masterpiece Metal Machine Music for mostly acoustic instruments. He’s one of several guests who frequently augment the ten core members of the group–others include trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, reedist Frank Gratkowski, tubaist Melvyn Poore, and cellist Anton Schlothauer....

The good news about American newspapers is that the news isn’t completely bad. The Inland Press Association just examined the financials of more than 120 of the country’s dailies and reported that even though ad and circulation revenues have been dropping for years, “operating profits still ranged from more than 8.5 percent to 13.6 percent of gross revenue in all circulation groups except 25,001-50,000.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....