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Want a little sun with that? In Chicago in the summer eaters and drinkers spill out-of-doors into beer gardens and backyards, onto rooftop decks, and across riverfront patios. For this annual restaurant guide we’ve culled from our listings some great spots for alfresco dining and drinking. Many others can be found online in the Reader Restaurant Finder, a database of listings for more than 3,500 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are rated by more than 2,500 Reader Restaurant Raters, who feed us information and comments on their dining experiences....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, writing in the Boston Globe, says “Smart environmentalism has three key elements. First, policies should be targeted toward the biggest environmental threat: global warming. Second, our resources and political capital are limited. This means we must weigh the benefits of each intervention against its costs. Third, we must anticipate unintended consequences, where being green in one place leads to decidedly non green outcomes someplace else....

Anyone paying attention to the GOP convention in Saint Paul knows the press took a rhetorical pounding inside the XCel Center. But they took a literal pounding out in the streets, covering the protests there. There were reportedly 716 convention-related arrests in Saint Paul during the week and another 102 in Minneapolis. Here’s a Huffington Post report on a rally Friday at the Saint Paul city hall on behalf of “dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers” arrested trying to cover the protests....

MOVIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By any objective standard, you’d have to choose AMC’s River East 21, which has good projection and typically offers at least a dozen current releases. But of that dozen, eight will be garbage, and the other four will also be screening at the Davis, just south of Lincoln Square. Back in 2000 the theater became a cause celebre when a developer tried to buy the building and turn it into condos....

Two billion light years ago, when I was teenager at Evanston Township High School, I loved the Chicago Blackhawks. But despite all the goals he scored and games he won—despite the fact that he once heroically played with a broken jaw—Blackhawks owner Arthur Wirtz, too cheap to be believed, didn’t give Hull the deal he deserved. And so, in 1972, Hull signed a contract for more money with the Winnipeg Jets and left Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gary Becker and Richard Posner tackle the issue of gun control in the wake of the NIU shootings, and they seem to agree that perhaps we can tax murderers out of the market. This is quite similar to a proposal made by the noted economist Chris Rock, and perhaps a tax is in fact the fastest route to the heart of, say, Gov....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: J. Cole North Carolina native J. Cole made an auspicious debut on Jay-Z’s “A Star Is Born” and followed it with guest spots alongside fellow on-the-verge rappers like Wale, B.o.B., and Jay Electronica. “Whether or not he’ll live up to the promise of that Jigga track’s title remains to be seen, but his latest single, ‘Who Dat,’ sounds like a club ripper-upper,” writes Miles Raymer....

Editor’s note: Chef Christian Gosselin left the restaurant in April 2013. The Boarding House, for which she teamed with the owners of the tranquil Gold Coast French spot Bistronomic, presents that same sort of inclusiveness for wine drinkers. The space is comprised of a late-night basement bar that also houses the wine cellar, a rollicking ground-floor bar overshadowed by an extraordinary ceiling fixture built with nearly 10,000 inverted stem glasses (imagine God dumping an ocean of pinot noir on your head), and a third-floor main dining room with a mezzanine, a towering western-skyline view, and a discreet scattering of personal details, such as framed silhouettes of the proprietress turning up a glass or walking her pug....

Earth Day official is April 22, but with many organizations now treating April as Earth Month, you have ample time to get in touch with your inner Ralph Nader. Following are selected events; many more are listed at earthday.net/chicago. Purists who refuse to burn extra energy attending official events can hold their own Nader-y Earth Day party at home—just log onto GPOAccess.gov, where you can browse the Congressional Record in search of environment-related developments....

In-person gatherings are still a possibility, so the Gig Poster of the Week continues to publish artwork for upcoming concerts. We at the Reader generally support you in your choice to give local bands your love by going to shows, but please keep safety guidelines in mind as you do so—especially now that it’s painfully […] This week’s featured gig poster features art by anthropologist and graphic designer Kisira Hill....

What exactly was I thinking last night? What was she thinking last night? Hmmm. I could wait around or wake her up and get an answer but I think the best thing to do would be grab my shirt and get started on the walk of shame. It’s early enough so I will beat the other mistake makers from last night and avoid sidewalk traffic which is good because I feel a lot of head scratching will be taking place on this walk....

It wasn’t until Guru died that most people learned about his messed-up relationship with producer and manager Solar. Rumors arose almost immediately that Solar had written Guru’s “deathbed” letter, which bashes the rapper’s former Gang Starr collaborator DJ Premier and refers to Solar as his “best friend.” And this weekend an enterprising Guru fan hacked into Solar’s e-mail and then used Solar’s Twitter account, also hacked, to post incriminating messages regarding Solar’s creepy hijacking of Guru’s life and his willingness to profit from his death....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chi-Improv mailing list has had a fascinating ongoing discussion about progressive music venues and the best way to keep them going, and one point that keeps coming up is a culture clash involving low expectations. It’s made me think about how I expect so many of the shows I see as a matter of course to take place in small, dark, dingy rooms with nowhere to sit and minimal, if any, pay for the musicians....

Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor Danny Brown, Old I loved 2011’s XXX, but Danny Brown‘s new album is even better than I could have imagined. The first half is “old Danny Brown shit,” or in other words backpacker-throwback stuff that bests any backpacker album of the past five years. The second half is a psychedelic crunkstep masterpiece, like Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers with none of the irony or art-house pretension and all of its jokes up front....

Last week Grant Achatz of Alinea, who kicked off this new feature by creating a cocktail using kluwak kupas, challenged Curtis Duffy of Avenues to come up with the next recipe using Chinese black beans. Chinese black beans—not to be confused with the turtle beans you’ll find in your burrito—are soybeans that have been fermented and salted, a process that turns them black. Duffy noted, “they’re earthy, they’re sour, they’re very funky ....

This 15-year-old Japanese institution helped put Chicago’s Skin Graft label on the map– from the other side of the world and despite the fact they were weird even by Skin Graft standards–winning over even the most militant art-noise haters thanks to the helium-voiced Yasuko, who seemed capable of bridging any cultural gap by simply singing louder and faster. Since 2003’s Cell-Scape (the band’s fifth studio album, on their own label, A-Zap), some fans have been muttering about the band “selling out” or “going pop”–which must be understood in relative terms–and Bambi’s Dilemma, their latest, isn’t going to quiet them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local filmmaker Ron Lazzeretti was set to direct his script The Merry Gentleman when he was hospitalized with a ruptured appendix and star Michael Keaton made his directorial debut with the film. (Read all about it in the Reader profile I wrote last year on the occasion of the film’s Sundance premiere.) Keaton plays a suicidal hitman who befriends a relentlessly optimistic receptionist who’s fled an abusive marriage (Kelly Macdonald)....

At the very least, everyone seemed to agree that it’s the best bet right now for Pullman and Roseland. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We are writing a new chapter in Pullman,” Emanuel declared. “This is a great day.” Beale initially flirted with various manufacturers, though it became clear that a big-box retailer would be an easier draw. He thought Ikea might be interested....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the fourth year, Music Box and the Film Noir Foundation present a weeklong festival of vintage noir that includes both old favorites (White Heat, Kiss Me Deadly) and intriguing rarities (William Castle’s 1949 thriller Undertow, shot on the streets of Chicago); check out our roundup with capsule links here. A few years ago I wrote at length about Robert Ryan, a Chicago native, and the fest offers a terrific Ryan double feature on Tuesday: Max Ophuls’s Caught (1948) and Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952), both from the chaotic period when Howard Hughes was presiding over RKO Radio Pictures....

The Better Half Marriage gets a good going-over in this marriage of clowning and dance from Julia Rhoads’s Lucky Plush Productions. Based on the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a man with something to hide attempts to drive his wife crazy, The Better Half is being created and directed by Rhoads and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig of physical-theater troupe 500 Clown. The story, Rhoads says, is ultimately “about resilience inside of contemporary marriage”—but the road there is filled with humorous digressions and metatheatrical layers....