Anne Elizabeth Moore is putting Revision Street on hiatus, which is a damn shame: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is a knotty problem, but I don’t entirely blame corporate media, with emphasis on blame. [snip] Anyway, the purpose of Revision Street: America was to fit the round hole of contemporary media as only a square peg couldn’t. The US, and therefore most global media, have largely abandoned the long-form oral history mode of information-gathering and news-sharing because it doesn’t soundbite....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alvarez, preparing to launch another television ad in the next couple of days, has collected more than six times as much as Peraica in campaign donations since last winter’s primaries, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections. Between February 5 and October 27, Alvarez raked in at least $1,225,142.35 in cash, in-kind contributions, and transfers from other political organizations....

You’d think that after years of covering politics I’d have learned that my one vote really doesn’t matter—it’s just a grain of sand on a vast beach. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That left me free to vote for Whitney without feeling I was helping to usher in a pack of gay-bashing, social-net-slashing conservatives who’d hand out tax breaks and other goodies to their wealthy cronies....

Hayley Himmelman and Jasmeen Wellere have several things in common. They’re perceptive, industrious 18-year-olds who just started college. They grew up in the Chicago area and excelled in their high schools. Both were raised in homogeneous communities. Her parents wanted to live in Glencoe “because it’s such a safe, wonderful community, great education, great people,” Hayley says. “But they said it was a big risk of me turning out to be a selfish, spoiled brat....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I briefly touched on in this week’s record review roundup, last week saw the release of half-local “wurkstep” duo Sich Mang’s first official full-length record, BLWNTOUT (Rainbow Body), and on Saturday they’ll be celebrating the LP with a huge party at a Michigan Avenue loft space. Rand Sevilla, the half of Sich Mang who’s been residing in Los Angeles for the past year, is back in town, and the reunited duo (which also features Eric Lee Gale of Golden Birthday) will be headlining a bill that also includes Neuport, Ultrademon, and another local weirdo production duo, Supreme Cuts....

Willy Wonka Chicago Shakespeare Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Dahl’s masterpiece in this regard, a kind of festival of prepubescent pain. The source of multiple movie and stage adaptations—including Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s bland musical, Willy Wonka, now at Chicago Shakespeare Theater—it starts with the Dickensian sufferings of poor little Charlie Bucket, who lives in a shack with mom and dad and two pairs of bedridden grandparents—both in fact ridden to the same bed....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spokesman Askia Abdullah says the branch offices exist as a convenience for suburban residents who need to submit property records to the county system but don’t want to have to travel all the way to the Loop. But then the recorder’s staff has to transport them all downtown because the suburban branches don’t have the capability of entering them into the central database....

The cradle of modern fandom The blog Dust & Grooves has a new interview with the artist Rutherford Chang, who currently has an exhibit showing at Recess gallery in New York called “We Buy White Albums.” It consists of Chang’s collection of nearly 700 copies of the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 double LP, starting with his first one, which he picked up at a garage sale in California as a teenager....

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories that explores policing and the drug trade on Chicago’s west side. “The idea,” McCarthy said, “is to go at it like a ground war.” The drug market is a fact of life for everyone who lives in west Humboldt Park. Some people—scores of them, perhaps more—have a stake in it themselves. And it’s not just an inconvenience—violence follows the drugs....

Al-Khaymeih One of the spiffier restaurants on a stretch of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean places in Albany Park, Al-Khaymeih has a large menu with all the Middle Eastern standards plus a few rarities like sumac-dusted fried cauliflower and sarouj, marinated and char-broiled Cornish hen. The food is always fresh and tasty, particularly standout appetizers. The smooth, flavorful hummus goes light on the tahini; the grape leaves are tightly rolled and bursting with lemony rice and vegetables; the lamb, beef, and chicken kebabs are nicely seasoned and generously portioned; and the pita bread, served warm, is made by Sanabel Bakery & Grocery, which shares its owner....

Joseph Sullivan, principal of the high school in seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts, touched off a media firestorm in June 2004 by telling Time magazine that the large number of pregnant teens at his school that year—17 in a student body of 1,200—was partly attributable to “seven or eight sophomore girls” who had “made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.” After this “pregnancy pact” went tabloid, Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk convened a meeting of school and health officials and announced there was no confirmation of a “blood-oath bond....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I was researching bean pies for my story about the odd and delicious dessert of the Nation of Islam, I kept scoffing at the occasional photos I’d run across of sad, grayish pies that look exactly like something you’d expect a mashed navy bean to produce. That’s no bean pie, I’d say to myself. It looks nothing like the appealing bronzed Supreme Bean pies I’d been frisked for at the Nation’s Muhammad University of Islam, nor the equally wonderful pies made by Imani Muhammad, who told me the thin, brown upper layer is a result of the butter bronzing in the oven....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Behemoth “Poland’s leading exporters of blackened death metal just released their ninth album, Evangelion (it’s their first on Metal Blade, which seems to be helping their American profile), and the first thing I noticed about it is how pretty it is,” writes Monica Kendrick. Dinner: Xoco “Still, there’s a certain variety of grump who no matter what is going to stand in line, arms folded, and ask himself, dammit, is there nowhere else in town to turn for a comparable ham-and-cheese torta under $11....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » August’s MTV Video Music Awards were set up like a head-to-head competition between Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, both of whom had big new albums to promote. Gaga opened the show with a performance of her new single, “Applause,” that must have set some kind of record for real-time costume changes in a pop performance, and Perry ended it by doing her new single, “Roar,” in a boxing ring set up underneath the Brooklyn Bridge....

Segregated City Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A good deal of resistance to public efforts at desegregation, besides obvious conservative biases, is mere fatigue at the repeated failures of housing and community development programs to break the generational cycles of persistent poverty, crime, single-parent households, and academic failure. Justifying public expenditure is very difficult in the current economic environment for even successful programs, and when the tax burden is placed disproportionately on the middle class, as in Chicago, additional spending on rent vouchers or affordable housing is politically impossible....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a 2007 Boston Globe profile, Neil Swidey introduced the world to Seamus, the Romney family dog, by way of an anecdote about Mitt, the Romney family patriarch, strapping the pooch to the top of the car for a 12-hour ride from Boston to Ontario. (In a canine carrier, mind you. Tricked out with a little windshield!) The nominal punch line is that the dog defecated wetly on top of the car while the Romney clan drove it down the highway, but this is one of those rare instances in which shit doesn’t necessarily make the story funnier—which is to say that it’s the sort of anecdote that begins with a grown man strapping a dog to the top of a station wagon....

From Friday through Thursday, the Music Box Theatre will present “Noir City: Chicago,” its the fifth in its annual series, coorganized by the San Francisco-based Film Noir Foundation. As usual, the selections range from classics to obscurities. From the first category, I’m excited to revisit Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) and the Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945), both of which should look fantastic on 35-millimeter. From the latter, I’m most intrigued by Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), which stars Edward G....

Other Music, the superb New York record store that created a niche for itself by almost exclusively selling music on the margins (categorized under rubrics like In, Out, Then, and Now), has just launched a site to sell downloads, Other Music Digital. So far the offerings are limited and some of the featured labels—Merge, Matador, and Carpark, to name just a few—are readily available at other download outlets. But the site does include some harder-to-find imprints, such as the Finnish psych label Fonal and the Current 93-affiliated Durtro Jnana....

I have some concerns about my cuckold fetish that you didn’t address in a recent column on the subject. I am white, and all of my cuckold fantasies involve my future wife having sex with well-endowed black men. While this turns me on a great deal, part of me feels guilty. My fantasy is horribly objectifying and racist, is it not? It requires treating another human being like a piece of meat....

It used to be that the only way for an animal to get famous was for it to be in the movies or on TV. And really, those animals weren’t even famous; their characters were. Do you know who played Marcel the Monkey on Friends? Well, her name was Katie. And now you know. Manny the Frenchie, a French bulldog who resides in a duplex in the West Loop, has taken an easier, more gratifying path to fame: being cute and being on Instagram....