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Life offers little in the way of constants, outside the big ones like death and taxes, but among them is that you can always easily find someone willing to argue that we are currently living through what is undoubtedly the lowest moment in the history of rap music so far. It’s particularly easy to find them right now—though rap’s been going through a genre-wide period of artistic flowering whose only precedent might be rock ‘n’ roll, post-Summer of Love—because of Chief Keef....

It’s not easy to make an airtight argument that Tony Mantuano is the American prophet for Italian food the way Rick Bayless is for Mexican. For one thing, Mario Batali keeps interrupting. But locally, at least, there’s no single chef more responsible for propagating fresh house-made pasta and real regional Italian food in this city than Mantuano. Yes, the rarefied nature of Levy Restaurants’ flagship Spiaggia keeps a majority of folks away from the high end of it, but plenty of alumni from his kitchens have gone forth across the city spreading the light....

We’d be fucking with you if we were to claim that we really know what’s “best.” No, all we can promise is that we at the Reader spend a lot of time—the majority of our professional lives, and a whole lot of our off-the-clock ones—trying to understand the many complicated ways in which this city expresses itself. Our Best of Chicago issue is devoted not to figuring out who or what has excelled the most but, rather, to collecting our observations over the past year of those things that have moved us (Best Revealing Joke About a Family Member), puzzled us (Best Riff on That Weird, Half-Naked, Soft-Focus Portrait in a Window by the Whistler), delighted us (Best Use of a Slushy Machine), surprised us (Best Performances That Make You Think One Guy Is Two Entirely Different People), shocked us (Best Cheap Cigarettes—a mere $3....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1978 the Chicago Daily News went out of business and its staff was merged with the staff of the paper down the hall, the Sun-Times. A number of journalists at both papers lost their jobs in the process; I was one and Bill Granger was another. My response was anguish, his was contempt. I went off to Europe for a while, he pulled up his socks and started writing books....

Deanna Ortiz stood near center court in her royal blue uniform, biting her lower lip, her hands on her hips, as the last seconds of her season and DePaul career slipped off the clock. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In postseason play in any sport, you could say that losing, not winning, is everything, or nearly. Like Ortiz, the vast majority of postseason players close out their seasons and careers in defeat....

This wolf is sad to report that LA-slash-Chicago bassist and producer Griffin Rodriguez (Icy Demons, Bablicon, the Shape Shoppe) got in a serious bike accident last week, which put him in the hospital with brain and neck injuries. He’s able to talk and his condition is improving daily, but he’s got a lot of rehabilitation and possibly more surgery ahead—and he’s going to need help covering his enormous medical bills. Fortunately a friend has already launched a GoFundMe campaign to help raise money for Rodriguez; you can chip in at gofundme....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ladies, have you ever thought while getting dressed for a party, “I really don’t want to carry a little handbag. But I need my phone. How can I bring my phone with me without having to carry it?” Worry no more. CuteCircuit, a London-based fashion company that specializes in wearable technology, has created the M-dress (they’re also the creators of the Galaxy dress, an LED-studded creation that’s part of the Museum of Science and Industry’s current exhibit “Fast Forward: Inventing the Future”)....

From 1988 to 1994 Sassy redefined the teen magazine with its unapologetic feminism, frank talk about sex, and intimate, insidery coverage of music and pop culture. For How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Marisa Meltzer, a freelance journalist who’s written for everything from Bitch to Slate, and Kara Jesella, an editor at the New York Times, interviewed former Sassy staffers and fans and bought up back issues on eBay....

The eyes of the rap world are squarely fixed on Kanye West as he prepares to release Yeezus on Tuesday, and there’s been a glut of chatter around the album even though Ye has generally done a great job of releasing any of his new work on his own terms. (Those awkward outdoor video screenings, anyone?) There’s a lot of pages to sift through given that there’s very little information about Yeezus out there—that is, except for Jon Caramanica’s fascinating interview with West for the New York Times, which is remarkable because it exists; not only does Caramanica manage to get a lot out of a dude who has noticeably distanced himself from the press circuit, but the fact that the paper of record has published such a lengthy interview with a figure of West’s magnitude is a media event in and of itself....

From 200,000 Phantoms Tomorrow at 7:30 PM Chicago Filmmakers will present a program of short works by French experimental filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot at Columbia University’s Hokin Hall (623 South Wabash Avenue) with the director in attendance. Active for about 15 years, Périot specializes in repurposing archival footage and still images from contemporary news reports into what may be termed “cine-mosaics.” The density of his work can be overwhelming—in every short of his I’ve seen, I’ve quickly lost count of just how many images Périot had assembled....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider Tuesday’s installment in the month-long series, typically positioned on page one. The pushy headline, “How U. of I. scheme began,” promises an origins story that reveals how and why the corruption took root. But the story falls short. It’s simply an account of the unverified testimony of Abel Montoya, a former admissions director, to the commission investigating the university’s admissions practices....

“Do you know who any of these people are?” a manager asked my small group as we stood in the karaoke room at BellyQ waiting to be seated in the dining room. He was referring to a series of portraits on the wall featuring popular local chefs dressed up as their preferred “alter egos.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Tradition. Amplified.” That’s the slogan coined for this nominal Korean barbecue restaurant from Kim, the former fine-dining chef (Trotter’s, Le Lan) who was among the first in his class to downshift to a humbler, fast-casual environment, first with his pan-Asian noodle shop Urban Belly and then the pan-Asian street food concept Belly Shack....

Obviously the big news of the day is that Osama bin Laden is dead and the federal government’s already hard at work rolling back a decade’s worth of fear-based, civil-rights-infringing legislation, as it should be. Although it smacks a bit of bloodthirstiness, it’s only human to feel some sort of catharsis at hearing that a terrible man who’s done terrible, terrible things has met the violent sort of end that he probably deserves....

With a color-saturated, cross-cultural, hyper-referential flourish, the new gallery Mana Contemporary Chicago opens its doors on September 22. Its first exhibition collects more than 100 pieces spanning 30-odd years of work by the Mexican-American painter and sculptor Ray Smith, many of them drawn from the artist’s personal collection. “Here | Now” takes a sweeping view of Smith’s far-reaching fascinations, recurring questions, and utterly unique eye. Known for playing at the interstices of things—between modernism and magical realism, between the political and the spiritual, between the traditions and tropes of Mexican muralism and those of European modern art—Smith complicates the question of borders, borderlands, and the places in between....

“I started working at a record store when I was 15, and I’m an organizational freak, so I organize the jukebox like a record store,” explains Matt Rucins, talent buyer and jukebox hero at Schubas. “I have it by section, alphabetized within the section. There’s a classic-rock section, a punk section—country/folk, hip-hop, world music.” Rucins’s meticulous monthly curation of the nearly 100 albums in the Schubas jukebox is guided not only by a never-ending influx of releases from local and national touring acts, but also by the sheer pleasure of getting to be the DJ....

If John Guare had given us only Six Degrees of Separation, it would’ve been enough. Hell, if he’d never written anything but the scene in Atlantic City where Burt Lancaster says, “The Atlantic Ocean was something then. Yes, you should’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days,” his place in history would be assured. But Guare is a formidable American writer, whose absurd, sad, comic wit resonates like a secret password through a huge swath of our current theatrical culture....

Years ago, when we were younger and had more time, my buddy Michael Glab and I would wander around Wrigley Field, trying to score Cubs tickets from scalpers. “We’re all for the idea of the Olympics,” says Jitu Brown, an education organizer for the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, a south-side advocacy group. “But there comes a moment… “ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brown and other south siders realize that their moment is now: their leverage with Mayor Daley and his Olympic planners will never be stronger than in the coming months, as the city is finalizing its proposal to host the games....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The column drew a response from Carol LaChapelle, who emailed me to tell the story of her own first book, Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Stories, “which is based on my 20 years of teaching writing workshops in Chicago.” When she was negotiating with a small press in Oak Park she told the publisher, “If you publish this book, I’ll sell it....

A month and a half ago I wrote a column in response to “Thoughts on Music,” an essay Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted on the company’s Web site where he explained why he thought major record labels should abandon digital rights management, or DRM–a polite name for the security measures injected into the song files sold through most digital-music stores. DRM is supposed to keep you from sharing copyrighted music, whether over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks or through burned CDs, but every DRM scheme ever released has been smacked down by hackers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ll never forget one of the first families I visited. The father was a railroad man who had lost his job. I was told by my supervisor that I really had to see the poverty. If the family needed clothing, I was to investigate how much clothing they had at hand. So I looked into this man’s closet–(pauses, it becomes difficult)–he was a tall, gray-haired man, though not terribly old....