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The negotiations Tom Thibeault calls the hardest of his life were over everything and almost nothing. At stake was the continued existence of the Sun-Times, Pioneer Press, and the dozens of other titles that constitute the Sun-Times Media Group—not to mention the Chicago Newspaper Guild, of which Thibeault is executive director. Were the guild to agree to all the concessions financier Jim Tyree was demanding before he’d take over the bankrupt company, it would turn itself into a nullity....

Photos.com Where’s the logic? The past weekend’s This American Life was devoted to “kid logic.” Host Ira Glass explained at the outset that babies are no longer thought of as “irrational, illogical, self-centered little balls of need and want.” No, scientists now tell us that “children are observing the world, and thinking about it, and coming to logical conclusions from the day they’re born.” Moreover, “kids think with the same logic adults use and apply that logic just as rigorously....

“Naperville’s finest niu rou mian,” tweeted a certain local food critic recently, with a link to a picture of the soup we were lunching on at Mapo Restaurant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But in fact Naperville and its west-suburban neighbors are home to many notable versions of this beloved Chinese beef noodle soup, not to mention hard-to-find specialties like hand-pulled noodles and the medicinal herb soup bak kat teh....

QI’m a 17-year-old girl and, in most aspects, I’m confident with myself, my identity, and my body. Earlier this year, I met a girl. She had some serious drama at home and needed to get out of her house, so I let her stay at mine. Things went a lot further than I was ready for. I had just had my first kiss the month before and I didn’t feel like our relationship was ready for sex, but I went along with it because she never gave me a chance to slow things down or say no....

QI am a woman in a relatively new relationship. Prior to this guy, I had a deep disgust for anything anal-related. After some dedicated work and anilingus on his part, he’s helped me overcome my fears of the “grossness” of the area and made me an enthusiastic convert—as a recipient. I feel horrible about this. Removing the hair would not be enough to give his butt a shape and remove the extra mass that’s trapping and producing the odors....

In Before the Storm, the 2001 history that made his reputation, Rick Perlstein put his readers inside the skin of a pimply college freshman cast adrift on a sprawling concrete campus in the 1960s. “Wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy,” the imagined student is buying his required texts in the campus bookstore when he happens on a slim book with big type. He flips it open and “standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend the individual against the encroachments of the mass....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his landmark text Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel argued that movies had the unique power to normalize taboo subject matter. They did this in two significant ways: one, by transforming “untouchable” ideas into controllable sounds and images; and two, by forcing them into the public sphere as represented by the movie theater. Vogel championed many explicitly confrontational filmmakers, particularly in the avant-garde, yet he also voiced admiration for certain films by Charlie Chaplin and Luis Buñuel, which wielded this subversive power more benignly....

Chicago Children’s Theatre’s enchanting collaboration with Redmoon isn’t necessarily for children—call it a childlike play for adults. While it’ll attract the interest of the preteen set, its themes of loyalty, sacrifice, and resignation to the vagaries of fate are decidedly grown-up. I’m not complaining; better to aim slightly above kids than talk down to them. On its surface, The Elephant and the Whale is a simple fable about an impossible friendship....

thursday18 Thursday18 Joe Lovano & Us FiveYoung Jeezy Friday12 Los LobosJoe Lovano & Us FiveLarry McCrayScout Niblett Saturday20 The ExNorah JonesLos LobosJoe Lovano & Us FiveOmar PeneWhite Mystery, Other Minds Sunday21 Joe Lovano & Us Five Monday22 Seijiro Murayama Tuesday23 GunslingersSeijiro Murayama Tuesday24 Justin BieberGolden TriangleGunslingers YOUNG JEEZY I’m generally a fan of the major aesthetic renovations hip-hop has undergone over the past few years—unlike the many salty dudes who greet such developments with horror, I’m fully into Kanye dabbling in Krautrock, Jay-Z listening to chillwave, and half-Jewish former child actors becoming major rap stars....

For those who crave a walk on the theatrical wild side, Max Truax has become the go-to auteur—a sort of off-Loop Peter Greenaway. Since his Chicago debut three years ago, the 36-year-old Rockford native has made his mark by directing fever-dream productions informed by everything from theremins to Brecht heir Heiner Müller. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last winter he reimagined Müller’s postmodern Hamletmachine as a chamber opera for Trap Door Theatre, blending the German playwright’s bleak meditations on power and destruction with a hypnotic score by Jonathan Guillen and a shape-shifting cast that worked multiple crossgender variations on Gertrude, Ophelia, and the melancholy Dane....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There was a guy who told me if I wanted to pursue being a musician full-time, I had to get out to LA. Of course when I got there, that same guy, who said he’d hook me up, didn’t return any of my calls. Being out there, it’s not like Chicago....

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP “Why does he do it?” I used to wonder in Roger Ebert’s last days, when he was brought in, frail and slow, for a nighttime screening of some nothing studio release at River East 21. With so little time remaining to him, how could he give 100 minutes to something with so little chance of changing his life or coming anywhere close? Of course, the movie hardly mattered; what held out the prospect of changing his life was the time he spent knocking out the review, working inside a format that he’d used thousands and thousands of times but that never seemed to preclude self-discovery....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the more impressive bits of mental contortion required of people who subscribe to the ever-more-convoluted American conservative worldview is that liberals are “the real racists” for seeing racism in conservative expressions of free speech that are totally not racist. While this whole phenomenon began simply, with bigots defending themselves against being labeled bigots for espousing obviously bigoted ideas, it’s had the secondary effect of encouraging bigots on the right to amp up the hate speech until you can barely believe it....

Editor’s note: Kendal Duque left City Tavern later in 2012. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a strange place to reacquaint yourself with Duque, who, after toiling at Tru, Everest, and NoMi, took the city by storm in 2008 as the opening chef at Sepia. There he gathered plaudits before stepping down and dropping, more or less, from sight. You didn’t hear much about his subsequent stint at the Lakeview sports bar Cuna—his bio doesn’t even mention it....

An unlikely source of making D’Angelo’s Voodoo make sense. I’m a huge R&B fan, but D’Angelo’s 2000 album Voodoo never really clicked for me, despite its reputation as one of the finest albums of the aughts. I was a fan of a lot of the Soulquarians’ (an assemblage of musicians that included D’Angelo, J Dilla, keyboardist James Poyser, and members of the Roots, whose drummer ?uestlove is the “mastermind”) music at the time, but for most of the past decade felt like the recording sound was often too dry and the lyrics too heavy-handed....

The story behind Brian Eno‘s Discreet Music is as rich and incidental as the music itself. Left bedridden by a car accident, Eno struggled to put a record of 19th-century harp music on the turntable. By the time he returned to his bed, he grew frustrated when he realized the volume was too low, and was in such a state of pain and exhaustion that he refused to get up again to change the setting....

I’ve been keeping an eye on 21-year-old Miami producer Steve Vaynshtok, aka AbdeCaf, since he dropped me a line just before he was scheduled to play last summer’s North Coast Music Festival. Vaynshtok tinkers with spastic chiptune, brooding cloud rap, and hyperactive disco, and he excels when he manages to instill a song with a smidgen of melancholy; one of the best moments on last year’s Rebuild EP is when a warped sample of Drake’s “Crew Love” first appears on “Old Flame,” providing the silky and syrupy track with its wistful tone....

” . . . life poverty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, the music was certainly beautiful and the singing was accomplished, but those facts in and of themselves don’t account for me weeping into my keyboard. What got me was how the musicians transformed the scene at the mall—or, maybe more accurately, how they brought out what always lay hidden inside it. Singers in street clothes, percussionists pounding tympani on the balcony, shoppers gone silent and attentive as a medieval Latin poem about fate echoed across Bebe and Burberry storefronts—suddenly the plaza was shot through with the knowledge of life and death....

Mariane Pearl’s 2003 memoir about the terrorist kidnapping and murder of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is ideal material for a suspense film, and this docudrama manages to be gripping even though the outcome is no mystery. Closely adapted by John Orloff, the movie functions as a police procedural, with the journalist’s pregnant wife (Angelina Jolie) and a team of U.S. and Pakistani officials struggling to navigate the Islamic underground of Karachi as they search for Pearl....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Alderman Joe Moore (right) has become a reliable backer of Mayor Rahm Emanuel—and says that’s a good thing. Alderman Joe Moore was enjoying an Amstel Light when I arrived at the bar the other night for our beer summit. Clearly, the first thing we would have to agree to disagree on was our choice of beverage. We had agreed to get together because we hadn’t really talked in ages—not since Rahm Emanuel had reached out to him during the 2011 mayoral campaign, and Moore had then invited the new mayor-elect to stop by a 49th Ward meeting....