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AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin Obama, testing the climate President Obama is getting hammered. He’s been called out for the sins of the IRS in looking too hard and too exclusively at organizations whose applications for tax-exempt status contained red-flag language such as “tea party” or “patriots.” He’s accused of fogging the facts of last year’s fatal assault on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. And then there’s the reaction against the Justice Department’s seizure of two months of AP phone records as it searched for whoever leaked details of a supersensitive CIA operation in Yemen....

The Reader’s Choice: Relax on Milwaukee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Relax straddles the divide between gentrifying Logan Square and blue-collar Avondale: crotchety old regulars camp out in the back of the huge bar by the dart board and pool table while kids from the Rat Patrol bicycle gang hang out in front, drinking dollar beers and eating popcorn from a greasy machine embellished with a picture of Rick James....

The other day I sat down on a living room sofa and watched The Interrupters. To my right was a TV documentarian who handled the remote and frequently stopped the movie to discuss it. To my left was his friend, a retired gang crimes officer. When The Interrupters was done the documentarian said how well it was made. Watching through very different eyes, the cop was skeptical. But the gang crimes cop gives credit where he thinks it’s due....

The podcast formerly known as Comedy Death-Ray Radio and currently titled Comedy Bang! Bang! mutated again last month: now it’s also a series on IFC. To promote that move into the obscure universe of indie cable, it’s taking its irreverent, mostly improvised humor on the road. The online version features quick-witted host Scott Aukerman (Mr. Show, Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis) cleverly coaxing a variety of guests—mostly comics and celebrities who can take a joke—through a very loosely scripted hour-plus of banter....

When the fat lady sings, there are advantages to watching through the wrong end of the opera glasses. Up close, the Blagojevich scandal is almost overwhelming. The FBI cuffed the governor at the crack of dawn on December 9, and a few hours later U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald accused him of a “political corruption crime spree.” The media reacted to Fitzgerald’s news conference like a football team given a pregame pep talk for the ages—reporters charged into the streets ready to rock ‘n’ roll....

one explanation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Muwakkil’s been fascinated by Harold Washington since 1976, when the writer, new to Chicago, heard Washington describe the intrigue in City Hall after Richard J. Daley died as “Kafkaesque.” “I hadn’t heard many Chicago politicians with literary sensibilities,” Muwakkil says. Today he’s a senior editor at Chicago-based In These Times, and Obama is, of course, a preoccupation—but Washington remains one too....

African Holiday Marketplace Cohosted by Africa International House USA and the Chicago Park District, this sale features fine art, crafts, clothes, toys, and more, as well as live entertainment. Fri 12/11, 1-7 PM; Sat 12/12, noon-7 PM, Harris Park, 6200 S. Drexel, 773-955-2787, aihusa.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BAM Holiday Party and Sale The Broadway Antique Market offers discounts on items from the art deco, modern, and other periods....

The Newspaper Next reports were just touted to me by the API’s director of “targeted solutions,” Elaine Clisham, whom the institute’s Web site describes as a “speaker and evangelist for Newspaper Next.” Clisham disarmingly warned me they were “very Harvard and academic and boring”—the Harvard part being a reference to Clayton Christensen, a professor at that university’s business school whose consulting firm was hired by the API to do the research....

Digital connectivity: can’t live with it, can’t find a decent restaurant without it. The paradoxes of instant, around-the-clock communication drive “All at Once” from Mordine & Company Dance Theater. The concert features a world premiere, All at Once/Acts of Renewal, in which choreographer Shirley Mordine focuses on the negative aspects of new media. “There’s no time to think about things,” she says. “It’s like being in multiple places at once.” Mordine’s deft octet first pulls small groups—rushing, nearly toppling—to the center of a thrust stage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, that’s not actually what the piece says. It says that “New York is shucking off its aging walk-ups, its small and mildewed structures, its drafty warehouses, cramped stores, and idle factories,” and that “in their place, the city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel. Bright, seamless towers with fast elevators and provisional views spring up over a street-level layer of banks and drugstores....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m in Grant Park and can’t quite figure out how to describe what I see. It’s theater. A couple, new to Chicago and wearing pink and blue, are out for a walk. Jesse Jackson is being interviewed behind the Petrillo band shell. Young guys with dreads hang out in trees. The crowd moves out. “Fly Kites not Drones,” says one sign....

For the last few years I’ve been chronicling the clumsy efforts of city officials to spark development in low-income communities without igniting the kind of wholesale gentrification that forces everybody out. Some local teenagers recently provided a refreshing perspective on the problem. The kids, 15 students from Big Picture, a public high school at 4946 S. Paulina, hooked up for a week in June with academics from DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development, a think tank on urban land use....

By Miles Raymer Over the past decade geek culture has really become an independent scene unto itself, and it’s not just about slash fiction and role-playing games. Proudly nerdy otaku have birthed several musical movements. Nerdcore rappers rhyme about Internet memes and Asperger’s. Eight-bit aficionados use the archaic beeps and bloops of NES-era video games as raw material for surprisingly club-friendly dance music. On the more experimental end there are the circuit benders, who twist the electronic guts of toys and simple synthesizers to turn them into noise-spewing tools of anarchy....

THE PIANO TUNER | LIFELINE THEATRE INFO 773-761-4477 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in 1886, the novel depicts the intertwining of two men’s destinies. Mason describes the piano-tuner protagonist, Edgar Drake, as a “man whose life is defined by creating order so that others may make beauty.” Cordial but diffident, straightforward but socially awkward, Drake begins with just two passions in life: pianos and his wife, Katherine....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The reuse agreement is significant for the economic and environmental benefits it would bring,” said Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the city’s environment commissioner. “I think a city that prides itself on being green would be making a mistake to be creating more brownfields,” countered Richard Trzupek, a chemist hired as a consultant by the National Solid Wastes Management Association. Some aldermen had questions about safety–or at least about taking the fall for any lapses in it....

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE ALLSTATE ARENA, 3/1 My Chemical Romance front man Gerard Way is the best spokesperson skinny, sensitive white guys have had in mainstream music since Kurt Cobain–he passionately embraces the role of the outcast who got his ass kicked by football players all through high school. But though there were more than a few punks, freaks, and true believers in raccoon makeup scattered around, given the number of meatheads in attendance either the jocks in the class of ’08 have missed the pro-faggot signifiers Way slips into almost every song–the girly giggle in “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison” is a prime example–or they’ve decided to ignore them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since you are currently on the Internet you have most likely already heard about Rihanna’s performance on this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live and how the entire aesthetic of the green-screen imagery she performed in front of seems to have been lifted wholesale from the tiny but Tumblr-famous underground music scene called seapunk. (And actually the seapunk thing may have come via rapper Azealia Banks, who’s been ripping off seapunk imagery for a minute now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six years ago I was asked to help choose the journalism awards that the American Planning Association would be giving for “outstanding coverage of city and regional planning issues.” One entry, from the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, stood above the others by so many heads and shoulders that there was actually a brief discussion of taking it out of the competition....

Little Dieter Needs to fly German filmmaker Werner Herzog has attained a level of ubiquity few directors have ever reached, mostly thanks to the quality and distinction of his work but undoubtedly aided by his newfound popularity as a YouTube sensation. The idea that Herzog, who gained prominence alongside Alexander Kluge and Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a stalwart of New German Cinema, has become some sort of pop culture icon seems an unlikely career trajectory....

When Mitchell Szczepanczyk started talking about digital TV, people weren’t inclined to listen. At a local roundtable for left-leaning publishers in May of 2007 he warned that the conversion from analog to digital slated for early 2009 could be a disaster. But 2009 was a long way off, and “the issue seemed esoteric,” he remembers. The single-minded Szczepanczyk, with his buttoned-down, computer-programmer looks (his colleague Steve Macek calls him “somewhat nerdy”), registered as an oddball or zealot....