Spend this season of love at the stylish and colorful cocktail bar and restaurant in the heart of RiverWest: The Dandy Crown. I got a chance to preview the love-themed […]

There’s simply no way that Oscar-winning director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (Summer of Soul) would mess up a documentary about rock/funk/soul icon Sly Stone (real name Sylvester Stewart). But SLY LIVES! […]

Before a full house at the Fine Arts Building’s Studebaker Theater, singer-songwriter Neko Case appeared on stage in conversation with Lior Phillips, a Chicago-based South African music journalist. Case received […]

Th news is…a lot right now. Sometimes the easiest, healthiest decision is to just look away. To look inward, to make our circle smaller and focus on what’s right in […]

It’s almost not fair how filmmaker Josh Ruben (Scare Me, Werewolves Within) is both a knowledgeable cinephile, a gifted filmmaker, and very funny performer, but here we are. His latest […]

I’m genuinely excited that actor Ke Huy Quan is having a resurgence right now. His Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, as well as his supporting work in […]

Having re-emerged following the disbanding of underrated outfit Disappears, local trio FACS have been an integral part of Chicago’s punk scene for some time now. Now half a dozen albums […]

Tim Heidecker has too many talents to list from his storied career, so many that I’ll only briefly touch upon a few of them. I’m sure many of my peers […]

It’s the first full February Curated Weekend and it’s a doozy! So while we endure the remaining weeks of winter, let’s plan our weekend with some fun concerts, plays, literary […]

First impressions matter, and Sierra Spirit wanted to make a good one for her Chicago debut Sunday night. After commanding the Chicago Theatre crowd’s attention with the hypnotically assertive opener […]

James Baldwin is the greatest American writer. Period. Even more so during Black History Month 2025. Among Baldwin’s many, many gifts was prescience. As a gay Black midcentury man, he […]

Welcome (back) to Book Smarts, a semi-regular series profiling Chicago’s bookstores and their owners. We began the series way back in 2020…then the pandemic happened. As bookstores closed, the series […]