At first, Book Expo America, the largest annual book-industry event/circus in North America, which opened at McCormick Place Wednesday, seemed like a wonderful dream. I walked into the exhibit hall and saw an enormous banner that read “Harry Potter: It’s Magic”; beneath it, nice people from Scholastic publishing were handing out short, bound excerpts of the new illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I walked a little further into the Hachette booth where publicists stood by handing out free books like they were candy—they also handed out tote bags to hold the free books....

Craigslist was a gut punch to local journalism, but now the business is withering from attrition. Proofreading might be a lost art. I frequently circle the typos, the missing and extra and misspelled words and so on that escaped correction, and tell myself I’ll write about this dereliction of standards—once I have a bunch of them. •”. . . artists began realizing the power of neutral spaces, theaters that we’re literally built with particular shows in mind....

Q I’m a straight guy in my 30s dating a woman in her mid-20s. We’ve been together for a year, and I’m crazy about her. In love, even. She’s gorgeous, sweet, kind, loving, and very sexual. She’s perfect. In her late teens and early 20s, she had a wild sex life. She attended sex parties, had loads of NSA hookups, sexted with random guys she met online, etc. She revealed this to me slowly and carefully out of fear that I’d look down on her, but what she didn’t know is that I have an intense cuckold interest....

“People have this misconception of hops,” says Sam Ruppert. “Every time they hear the word, they think bitter, but hops impart so many flavors in beer that people don’t even realize.” So when Autumn Eytalis (BellyQ) challenged Ruppert, a bartender at DryHop Brewers, to create a cocktail with hops, he set out to showcase their flavor without the bitterness. For the spirit, he used Casa Magdalena—a Guatemalan white rum he describes as earthy and grassy—along with lemon juice and the hop syrup....

Some neosoul artists focus on torch songs and heartbreak, but as her name suggests, pianist and singer Avery Sunshine (aka Denise Nicole White) sticks to the brighter side of the genre. Working with guitarist and arranger Dana Johnson (who’s also her husband), Sunshine mixes old-school R&B grooves, gentle funk, and jazzy gospel vocals on flirtatiously humorous songs of requited love. The couple’s best-known track, 2005’s “Stalker,” is typical of their good-natured approach to romantic desperation, but they deviate from their usual fare with the song’s disco-fied house beat....

PAWS Chicago One Tail at a Time Finalists: Night Ministry, Misericordia, GirlForward

Sultan’s Market Taste of Lebanon Finalists: Middle East Bakery & Grocery, Falafel & Grill

Printers Row Lit Fest printersrowlitfest.org Runner-Up: Chicago Zine Fest

Even the Saints Audition by Raych Jackson

Rose Pest Solutions Eco Tech Pest Control Finalists: Aerex Pest Control, Edge

Within its first 30 minutes, Hansol Jung’s riveting drama hurtles from bliss to slaughter. We’re in Uganda, watching two 16-year-old girls celebrate their love with a giddily joyful “wedding” ceremony. Chris (Kearstyn Keller) is the white daughter of missionaries. Adiel (Adia Alli) is a black Ugandan. Their fears are telling: Chris frets her soul will go to hell. Adiel has more immediate concerns. Being a gay Ugandan, she points out to Chris, is punishable by life in prison....

The 2003 National League Championship Series coincided with the weeklong Jewish festival of Sukkot. During that week, Rabbi Boruch Hertz, an emissary of the Lubavitch Chabad, built a sukkah across the street from Wrigley Field and encouraged everyone, but especially Jews, to come in and pray with him. The move did not upset any existing loyalties, he said, since he always preferred playing baseball to watching. (This is also an easy to way to disavow any claim that his divided loyalties were responsible for the Cubs’ collapse against the Mets last year....

This New Year’s Eve, the “make a bunch of resolutions” types and the “one year closer to death” types came together around the sentiment that 2020 needed to fuck right off. That said, it’s surely sunk in by now that many things continue to be bullshit—and as Americans, we’ve fucked up our own country so badly that it’d be funny if it were happening to somebody else. “New Year’s,” written by Sooyoung Park and Lexi Mitchell of Seam, appears on Frigid Stars, Codeine’s 1990 debut album....

On the northeasternmost edge of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Columbus meets Monroe, stands an arch in a small plot of land, fenced in with tall grass and dead flowers. Shorter than the glass-and-aluminum facade of the Modern Wing, it hovers over nothing and allows no roads through it. Viewed from the north, it is blank limestone; from the south, terra-cotta dense with ornate detail. “Chicago Stock Exchange Building,” it announces, more like a tombstone than an entryway....

UPDATE: On Saturday, June 6, Second City announced the appointment of Anthony LeBlanc as interim executive director. LeBlanc has most recently served as artistic director for Second City, where he previously appeared in two Chicago mainstage revues. A tsunami of tweets from other BIPOC artists and Second City alumni followed, calling out institutional racism. It was reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the 2016 Second City e.t.c. revue A Red Line Runs Through It, when half of the cast quit in response to what actor Peter Kim described in a Chicago magazine essay as an environment where audiences “hurled increasingly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments at me and my castmates: comments demeaning my Asian ethnicity, using the f-word to degrade my homosexuality, and shouting ‘whores’ at the women....

ARTIST: Dmitry Samarov SHOW: Music to My Eyes book release with performances by Kelly Hogan, Tijuana Hercules, Matthew Lux, Azita, and Mute Duo at the Hideout on Wed 4/3 MORE INFO: dmitrysamarov.com

Aymar Jean Christian produced his first Web pilot, Nupita Obama Creates Vogua, in December 2014. The series explored a tumultuous love triangle between Curtis (musician Erik Wallace), Reyes (performance artist Kiam Marcelo Junio), and Gia (drag queen Saya Naomi), and featured original music, art, fashion, and choreography from its three stars. It was the series that launched Christian’s inclusive online television platform, Open TV. Since then he has produced ten projects created by and starring queer people, people of color, and women from a variety of artistic disciplines, and is in the beginning stages of dozens more....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Later that summer, Lawrence Bommer wrote a slightly longer and more descriptive review of their act: