Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • That according to this New York Times analysis, even under President Obama’s tax plan, lots of people making lots of money wouldn’t pay more? (“A large majority of families making up to $300,000—as well as hundreds of thousands of families with even larger incomes—would not pay taxes at a higher marginal rate.”) —Steve Bogira • That David Mamet’s new play The Anarchist is “arguably the fastest failure of a major writer’s new play on Broadway since the early 1980s”?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Ukra (aka “Dr. Tea”) will sign The Ultimate Tea Diet, a guide to using tea as part of a weight-loss plan, Thursday at 7:30 PM at the Evanston Borders. In recognition of National Tea Month, Vong’s Thai Kitchen offers a “traditional high tea with a Thai twist” every Saturday this month. Along with a choice of herbal, green, or black tea, the restaurant serves gingered butternut squash soup, canapes including tea-smoked duck, and sweets like chocolate beignets and mango rolls....

Over the years I have been frequently astonished by the work of Sun-Times editorial cartoonist Jack Higgins. In February 2001 I wrote, “As an ultimate expression of the rabidly right-wing editorial fervor of today’s Sun-Times, and of the rabidly right-wing cartoons Higgins has taken to drawing, the cartoon becomes even more infuriating.” It was a drawing of BIll Clinton shaking hands with the devil, and the curious thing is that I couldn’t leave it at that....

Michael Glab moved to Louisville, Kentucky, early last year, but like many a displaced Chicagoan he found a way to stay close to the city and his family and friends through his connection with the Cubs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Was the writing therapeutic? “It kept me up with Chicago,” Glab says, “and moving to another state and city is a lonely experience....

Editor’s note: Premise abruptly shut its doors in August 2012. Read more » Andersonville has been bereft of a serious place for cocktails ever since Ben Schiller left In Fine Spirits to join the BOKA Group in 2009, and with IFS chef Marianne Sundquist now making ghost pepper mustard and bar cherries under her new preservation venture Mess Hall & Co., the neighborhood is certainly the sorrier for the restaurant’s demise last March....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only thing harder than getting a reservation at Ferran Adria’s Catalan restaurant El Bulli may be making the recipes yourself. As Mike Sula notes of the recently released A Day at El Bulli, “The handful of recipes included aren’t meant to be duplicated with much success by the average home cook.” (Much like the Alinea cookbook.) Here to help: Ferran Adria’s Sferificación Minikit (“sferificación” is Spanish for “spherification;” “minikit” is, of course, Spanish for “minikit”), available for around $275 USD....

No, it isn’t about that tiny European country with the excellent health care and easily accessible pot. Nor does it explore the practice of splitting the dinner bill on dates. “Going Dutch” celebrates women’s voices in dance, electronic media, and the visual arts. Sponsored by Links Hall and Core Project Chicago, this festival addresses the female experience, considering everything from culturally determined roles (Megan Beseth’s new solo dance, Proper Dress for the Kitchen) to how those roles play out across generations (Canary, Carrie Gant’s group piece about the effect a mother’s past has on her children)....

Wraiths Local four-piece Pink Avalanche, led by sound engineer and former Atombombpocketknife front man Che Arthur, are releasing their debut record next week, and are celebrating it with a listening party at the Burlington on Memorial Day, Mon 5/27, at 9 PM. The postpunk project sees a lot of local underground veterans coming together to create an excellent racket. Pink Avalanche—whose lineup is rounded out by drummer Adam Reach (formerly of Poison Arrows), guitarist Kortland Chase (who was in Chatty Cathy), and bassist Pete Croke (who plays in about 200 bands, including Tight Phantomz, Brokeback, and Reds and Blue)—blend Hot Snakes-styled rhythmic pummeling, Husker Du-inspired rough melodic bent, and atonal guitar meandering a la Fugazi....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the biggest joys of growing up in Crystal Lake was taking a 30-minute drive to Hoffman Estates to visit Record Breakers, a gigantic two-storefront record store. The only one of its kind in that area of the suburbs, the store had massive selections of vinyl, CDs, t-shirts, posters, bootleg concert VHS tapes, books, and pretty much anything else that I wanted to waste my meager teenage wages on....

In early 2002 Sony and Universal started shipping CDs encoded with copy-protection systems that made them unreadable to computers’ optical disc drives. The idea was to prevent users from ripping the music–no ripping meant no file sharing. The labels tried to cut off online music piracy at the pass, but all they did was kick off the latest in a long series of struggles between copyright holders and the general public....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » · Alderman Toni Preckwinkle: She’s in for sure, and if she can convince voters that aldermen do something besides approving the sale of city assets and getting indicted, she’s got a chance. She’d already been raising money and lining up supporters; yesterday she launched her campaign Web site. Claypool’s exit from the race will be a lift to her chances of picking up the votes of lakefront liberals and reform-minded voters—unless another one of those goo-goo types decides to make a run for it...

It’s been four years since any bacon or ham came out of the Peer Foods plant in Back of the Yards, but a vaguely meaty aroma still lingers in its echoing, mostly empty four floors. Due southwest of the erstwhile Packingtown gate, it was one of the last meat-processing plants from the heyday of the stockyards to close down. When the operation moved to Indiana in 2006, about 400 jobs went with it....

“The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right,” declares Hushpuppy, the fierce, nappy-headed girl at the center of this extraordinary southern gothic. Played with iron conviction by young Quvenzhane Wallis, Hushpuppy lives with her father in a wild, ramshackle community, called the Bathtub for its precarious location on a post-Katrina flood plain near the Gulf of Mexico. As her remark might suggest, the movie throbs with a religious belief in the natural world’s interconnectedness, and its setting is a poetic juxtaposing of industrial garbage and oceanic splendor....

The night before the full City Council unanimously approved Chicago’s second Walmart store, about 20 people gathered at Columbia College to hear a couple of investment bankers talk about what they called “insurgent candidates.” “What we want to do is basically demystify the process of running for office and encourage more high-quality candidates to get in the game,” says Delgado. “We think if you have a more competitive environment, then in a small way some of the elected officials would be held more accountable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I had any doubt that localism was gaining traction in the mainstream, it was put to rest by this week’s mail. Day one brought a copy of Plenty, by 100 Mile Dieters Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon; day two saw the arrival of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver with her husband, Steven Hopp, and daughter, Camille Kingsolver....

City Lit Theater’s sixth annual Art of Adaptation Festival boasts eight short dramatic takes on nondramatic material ranging from Poe to Steinbeck. Four of the plays receive stagings on Friday and four on Saturday; Sunday offers the opportunity to see ’em all. On the first day, Dan Jackson applies the Greek myth of a fearsome man-bull to Steinbeck’s story of a hapless man-child in Of Mice and Minotaurs. Mark Mason remakes both an Edna St....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at 7 PM, in an undisclosed location, chef Efrain Cuevas‘s underground dining company Clandestino will cater a fund-raiser for WBEZ hosted by Jim Derogatis and Greg Kot, of the show Sound Opinions. The five-course dinner pairs food and wine with five albums they’ve chosen, among them Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, Naked Raygun’s Throb Throb, and Mavis Staples’s We’ll Never Turn Back....

To hear First Ward alderman Manny Flores tell it, the city is handing him the tool he needs to stem the tide of gentrification in his northwest-side ward: the Addison South tax increment financing district. “This is big,” says Flores. “We have to be bold. We have to be visionary. I believe our community can do some exciting stuff.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the Addison South TIF comes at a cost....

“A Film by David Schwimmer” is not the sort of credit that fills me with anticipation, but I must admit he’s done a solid job with this queasy drama about the statutory rape of a 12-year-old Wilmette girl. Lured to a downtown hotel by a middle-aged online predator, who violates her and then disappears, the lovestruck child (Liana Liberato) defends her assailant after a friend rats her out at school and the FBI are called in; the girl’s dumbfounded mother (Catherine Keener) and enraged father (Clive Owen) try to make her understand what’s happened to her, but they’re no match for her tangled shame, anger, and unreasoning schoolgirl crush....

This traveling festival of documentaries from South Asia runs Friday, March 23, through Friday, April 13, with screenings this week at Chicago Filmmakers and Columbia College Ludington Bldg. Admission to Columbia College programs is free, and discussions with local Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » City of Photos and Team Nepal What’s fascinating about City of Photos (2005, 60 min.) is how photos taken in neighborhood studios illuminate people’s lives: a young man poses “heroically”; a painted backdrop depicting a plane flying into one of two towers proves popular with customers; photos of the deceased are repainted to “open” their eyes....