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I’m a 42-year-old straight guy, married 15 years, no kids. I love my wife and have remained faithful. Recently I opened a Second Life account and created a female avatar for myself because, though I’m straight and comfortable with my gender and sexuality, I’ve always fantasized about being transformed into a beautiful woman and having sex with other beautiful women. SL allows me an opportunity to explore this fantasy of being a lesbian and also lets me engage in types of fantasy sex play I would not normally do in real life, such as BDSM, multiple partners, and anonymous sex....

The flyer for the show I saw on April 4, with Puking Pearls, Condenada, and Modus Ponens, had an address in a part of Wicker Park that was expensive even when the neighborhood was barely gentrified, with a “#2” at the end. I was pretty sure I was on my way to the sort of loft where I wouldn’t be able to afford the rent if I wanted to. So it was a pleasant surprise to arrive at a plain-looking brick two-flat with a couple of punk rockers hanging out in front, suffering through a chilly smoke break....

Holiday dance fare doesn’t have to mean icy fairylands. Sita Ram simmers with the crowds, noise, and brilliant colors of India. Like the original production, which debuted at Lookingglass Theatre in 2006, this remount is a collaborative effort by Chicago Children’s Choir, Natya Dance Theatre, and Lookingglass member David Kersnar, featuring no less than 110 singers, 32 dancers, 12 actors in principal roles, and 23 acrobats. Grammy-nominated composer Jai Uttal mined the world’s music for his commissioned score, taking inspiration from Indian, African, Caribbean, and U....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Isa Giallorenzo: Where are you originally from? Why did you get interested in fashion?Sasha Hodges: I grew up in the northeast close to Boston in a beach town with lots of houses from the 1600s. I can’t remember a time when I was not interested in fashion and clothing....

It’s not exactly a stop-the-presses piece of news, but the Sun-Times is reporting that Senator Roland Burris will not run for reelection—whoops, make that election—next year.For months—pretty much ever since he was appointed to his seat by Rod Blagojevich—Burris and his adviser/spokeswoman Delmarie Cobb have been declining to say whether he would get into the 2010 race. But he hadn’t raised any money, and his prospects were considered dim, regardless of who else decided to jump in....

It’s a black-and-white photograph, slightly weathered from years of being handled, carried from place to place, packed away, and rediscovered: A small child, maybe five years old, sits on the stoop of a house in Monroe, Louisiana, in the mid-1930s, the dirt yard spilling out in front of him. He’s wearing a striped summer shirt and shorts and a big, beaming, gentle smile. He looks like a sweet kid. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV Lookingglass Theatre Company Starkly poetic, mordantly funny, occasionally overblown but often beguiling, the Lookingglass Theatre staging of The Brothers Karamazov balances 19th-century sentimentality with Russian nihilism, hitting the highlights of the book (as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) without attempting to cram in too much detail. Some significant characters have been excised, but those who haven’t read the original—or haven’t read it in years, like me—probably won’t miss them....

Spoiler alert: Some of the answers to Sam Worley’s crossword puzzle (PDF) are discussed in this article. If you’re the type of person who worries about that sort of thing, you’re advised to do the puzzle first. Farrar began her career as Margaret Petherbridge, later taking her married name from John Farrar, a founder of publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She was a secretary to an editor at the Sunday World, which in 1913 printed the world’s first crossword—the creation of an ex-Liverpudlian named Arthur Wynne, who conceived it initially as a diamond-shaped puzzle with no black squares....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There are quite plausible conditions under which groups composed of diverse individuals will be able to outperform groups of ‘experts;’ individuals who are better capable of solving problems on their own. Page uses some simple agent-based modelling to support this claim, and outlines the underlying logic of a ‘mathematical proof that provides sufficient conditions for the … result.’ The necessary conditions are that there have to be enough agents, groups of moderate size, agents who are sufficiently smart, and problems that are sufficiently difficult....

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Derrick Rose If you ask me, people who wait for the messiah aren’t making the best use of their time. Messiahs dawdle. They show up late or not at all. They don’t care how long you cool your heels. And if and when they finally drop by, they don’t fix what they’re supposed to fix. Beckett nailed it in Waiting for Godot. But I also want to point to “The Song of the Messiah,” John G....

Long live Edward Snowden, we need several million of him. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it was also not clearly a good thing. The head of the NSA told the House Intelligence Committee that Snowden’s revelations did “irreversible and significant damage to this nation.” Enemies who not only wish us harm but actively plot it won’t be deterred by libertarian pieties. “It is a mistake to ask, at least arguably a mistake to ask if any particular program ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, indie’s a matter of degree. Way back when she was allegedly more relevant, not everyone agreed she was so. In 1994, Reader critic Bill Wyman hosted a hilarious letters roundtable on the Chicago indie scene, inspired by Steve Albini’s assertion that Phair was “a fucking chore to listen to” and part of a trio of “pandering sluts” that also included contemporaries Urge Overkill and the Smashing Pumpkins....

It took a little while for Jeremih’s mixtape Late Nights With Jeremih to start getting the attention that it deserved, but in the half year since its release it’s earned itself a respectable fan base, especially among taste-making DJs and producers like LA avant-hip-hop producer Shlohmo, whose remix of Late Nights‘ “Fuck U All the Time” has become nearly as cult-popular as the original. Cleverly, the multimedia online magazine Yours Truly paired the two up for their “Songs From Scratch” video series, where musicians are chosen to create a song from the ground up in front of YT’s cameras....

Elections make people do all sorts of funny things—look no further than the past year for the latest and most amusing evidence. Kenneth Griffin, the state’s richest man and CEO of Citadel LLC, a hedge fund conglomerate. Griffin donated more than $5 million to Republican Bruce Rauner’s gubernatorial campaign—a glaring example of how, as we described in June, the state’s campaign finance laws allow wealthy candidates and their friends to buy their way out of the rules that were supposed to put a lid on money in politics....

Bess & Loie Allyson Holleb’s obsession with bags started in 1997, when she went to Paris for the year: she couldn’t always fit into clothes sized for little French women, so she sated her consumer lust with accessories. Now she has so many bags that her own mother refers to her as Imelda. A former buyer for Eileen Fisher’s retail stores in New York, she opened Bess & Loie last week to feed other people’s jones for arm candy....

Cook County Social Club iO 3541 N. Clark 773-880-0199 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cook County Social Club has followed a classic Chicago improv trajectory, from a midnight slot at iO to prime-time Tuesday nights, with the inevitable speed bumps as the four members took turns riding the Second City tour bus, only to come back stronger than ever. Now, with the addition of Second City Detroit star Tim Robinson to make a quintet, CCSC has arrived....

In the opening paragraphs of a long profile that ran in the Reader five years ago this week, architect Stanley Tigerman told journalist Mara Tapp how devoted he was to a project he’d started work on a few years earlier—a museum and education center for the Skokie-based Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. “I want to build this, I want to build it bad,” said Tigerman, then 73. “I have never built for my own kind....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I grew up during what’s said to be a “golden age” of comics; I do not know what a golden age consists of, but there were at least a few of the greatest comics ever created running in most newspapers when I was a kid: Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Doonsbury, and my favorite, Bloom County. That golden age died fast and hard, but there is now Achewood....

It is surely the nature of reporters to resent the functionaries who control the spigots of public information. Three years ago I wrote a column relating the exasperation of education beat reporters with Monique Bond, the head of communications for the Chicago Public Schools. They complained that Bond made it next to impossible to find out what was going on inside CPS. Carroll doesn’t so much disagree with what Brizard said about her insider status as frame it differently....

“Impossible Cities: A Utopian Experiment” | Walkabout Theater Company INFO 312-458-0566 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course while envisioning utopia may be relatively easy, creating a stable utopian community is probably impossible. That’s pretty much the point of the four theater pieces at the core of the show, curated and directed by Redmoon’s Seth Bockley, who also participated. But if the vision part is so easy, how come not one of the five artists came up with his or her own?...