The 2,000-foot Chicago Spire isn’t being built for Chicagoans, Paul O’Connor was explaining to me. “The fundamental idea of the place is to be a global pied-a-terre for the superrich from the Persian Gulf states, east Asia, Russia, western Europe, and South America. The spire is a metaphor for ‘global city,’ just as ‘one-newspaper town’ is its antithesis.” I went to him the other day for his take on the tattered state of the Chicago press....

Restaurant listings are culled from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an online database of more than 4,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are reviewed by staff, contributors, and (where noted) individual Reader Restaurant Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the Raters’ collective opinions are best expressed in the numbers. Complete searchable listings, Raters’ comments, and information on how to become a Rater are at chicagoreader....

Q I’m a gay male and have been seeing a terrific guy for a couple of months. Two years ago, during an uncharacteristically wild few months in my life, I had a threesome with a couple, and as it turns out, my boyfriend is very good friends with them. We see them socially and have even all had dinner together. Nothing’s been mentioned by anyone, and I’ve never told my BF....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My objection to the name change is that Stony Island is the wrong street. Brazier had no particular connection to Stony Island, aside from his Apostolic Church of God being a few blocks away on 63rd Street. But 63rd Street was very much his creation: he was instrumental in getting the CTA to tear down the 63rd Street el in 1997 all the way from Cottage Grove to Stony Island....

This musical by composer Adam Guettel and playwright Craig Lucas, based on Elizabeth Spencer’s novel and a 1962 film version, begins conventionally. Set in 1953 Florence, it focuses on the budding romance between an innocent American tourist, Clara, and a passionate Italian youth, Fabrizio–a relationship that disturbs Clara’s seemingly overprotective mother, Margaret. Her concern becomes more understandable when it’s revealed that Clara is mildly mentally disabled as the result of a childhood riding accident....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I started working here, posting her column every week and formatting the pictures, I had to pay attention to it. And I realized I liked it: despite my above-all-things love for classical L7 literary journalism, I liked it a lot. Or, perhaps, because it’s part of that august tradition. As she wrote in her valedictory column, “I loved this job....

Last week the inexhaustible Docurama Films issued a DVD of Detropia, a politically pointed but often lyrical documentary about the economic collapse of Detroit that premiered here last year at Gene Sister Film Center and had some scattered exposure afterward. Just last month it was followed by the firefighting documentary Burn: One Year on the Front Lines of the Battle to Save Detroit, which will no doubt be showing up on cable and video soon as well....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “[Norman Pellegrini] was the last survivor of a group of often contentious individuals, all now gone – Bernard and Rita Jacobs, Ray Nordstrand, Studs Terkel – who created one of the golden eras in Chicago’s cultural history: a radio station that reinvented the very idea of classical music broadcasting into something that adhered both to the highest standards and most democratic impulses....

To Hector Alvarenga, nothing is garbage. Well, some things are probably garbage, but as a scrap collector and professional welder, he sees potential in other people’s trash. That potential is realized inside, outside, and all over his two-story Avondale home, located at the corner of Monticello and Barry. In front, between the sidewalk and the curb, a toilet and an old bathtub have become planters. So have old shoes he’s nailed to a tree....

With all the hubbub surrounding Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, which leaked yesterday to alternately rapturous and nauseated reactions on Twitter, I was going to post Jan Hammer’s “Don’t You Know” because I thought that it replicates some of RAM‘s cheesier elements perfectly. But then I realized that the version of “Don’t You Know” that I’ve been hearing this whole time—recommended to me by a friend—is an alternate, from his 1994 album Drive; they didn’t even know that there was another rendition....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Nine Inch Nails’ absolutely punishing set at Lollapalooza a few weeks back, the last thing I would have ever expected the band to put out was a straightforward pop-rock number. But that’s exactly what Trent Reznor did this Monday when he debuted today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Everything,” on BBC Radio 1. The newest single from the band’s upcoming Hesitation Marks is so weird simply because it’s such an extreme departure from the intensely heavy and unfathomably bleak sounds that they’re known for....

In summer 2002, when writer Eileen Favorite trekked up to Ragdale to begin work on a novel, she was coming off a terrible year. She’d lost a brother to cancer, her father-in-law had died, and her professional life seemed to be on hold: after a string of rejections she’d been forced to face the fact that the realistic coming-of-age novel she’d finished the previous year wasn’t going to sell, and she’d already abandoned an attempt at another novel....

Ted Cox Lahmacun: you might want to have some breath mints on hand I’d be happy if the Brown Line station at Irving Park were my el stop. Just steps away is the brand-new Pide ve Lahmacun, a bright commuter-friendly storefront that’s kind of an anti-Starbucks, offering excellent coffee, brewed hot tea, and salep, a foamy Turkish hot drink traditionally made from orchid tubers. For $2.50 you can add to one of those a Turkish “samosa,” freshly baked dough packets stuffed with feta or meat (all here halal) and sprinkled with black sesame seeds....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The tradition of the Easter bonnet is not what it once was, although for some people, hats never went away. In the African-American community, for example, there is a strong tradition of wearing hats to church; in England ladies wear hats to weddings (and Ascot), and New York has the Easter parade. Despite their relative rarity–or more likely because of it–when people do wear hats, it tends to be very noticeable....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s just say Wisconsin’s going through a rough patch. Same holds true around the rest of the league. Minnesota’s program has been reignited by second-year coach Tim Brewster; Purdue’s appears to be retiring to Wyoming along with last-year coach Joe Tiller. Yet some of the Boilermakers are playmakers, and at home they could burn the Gophers. Michigan is, by Michigan standards, and by Kent State standards, pretty weak; but nobody likes to lose to Michigan State, especially the Wolverines, and I bet they’ll be tough against their rivals....

North Shore Channel Trail A person need trip over only so many stray volleyballs before it becomes clear that, on certain days, the lakefront is best avoided. Sure, on a Monday afternoon in January you’re free and clear to get in a run by the beach, but once it warms up every dog walker, hot-dog griller, and stroller pusher is out to make your workout more of an exercise in patience than, well, an exercise in exercise....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight sees Speck Mountain and Implodes playing a free show at Empty Bottle, as well as Cameron McGill at Schubas and Au Revoir Simone at Lincoln Hall. Tomorrow, local favorites Meat Wave play at Subterranean, and a couple of huge hip-hop shows are going down: Yo Gotti at Metro and Kevin Gates at Reggie’s Rock Club. And of course there’s heavy metal monsters Lamb of God and Killswitch Engage playing at the Aragon on Wed 10/30, as well as glam-poppers Of Montreal at Lincoln Hall....

Kanye West may be a tastemaker, but Gossip Wolf thinks he should have his taste buds checked. For his birthday last week, his rapper BFFs Common and Lupe Fiasco took him out for a dinner at Buca di Beppo, the Italian chain restaurant that is two bread bowls away from full-bore Olive Garden nasty. Was Rainforest Cafe booked up? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shellac has been confirmed as the “house band” for All Tomorrow’s Parties, September 3-6 in upstate New York....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 90s, Johnson lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and played in a series of bands that never quite fit into the town’s indie-rock scene. Spatula used ambitious structures to transcend its power trio lineup; the all-acoustic Idyll Swords leaned on exotic instruments and athletic tempos to forge something like a cross between Gastr del Sol and Sun City Girls; and the instrumental Shark Quest updated the twang of the Raybeats and their ilk, applying it to cinematic ends....

Yale University Press Epstein is the one with the glasses, Raphael the one with the eyebrows. “Knowing when to quit—that, I’d say, is the name of the game.” Joseph Epstein wrote that in an essay called “I Like a Gershwin Tune.” You can find it in his 1998 collection Narcissus Leaves the Pool. Like most of Epstein’s personal essay collections, it was witty and erudite, and also warm. He considered subjects that seemed unworthy of consideration—naps, Anglophilia, the art of name-dropping, and in the case of “I Like a Gershwin Tune,” the popular music of his youth—and gave them depth and substance....