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DePaul women’s team, 13 consecutive seasons @DePaulWBBHoops Exactly zero teams from Illinois made the men’s NCAA basketball tournament earlier this year, but that doesn’t mean March Madness skipped the state: the Northwestern and DePaul women’s teams both went to the Big Dance. While it was NU’s first appearance in 18 years, the Blue Demons have made playing in the tourney a rite of spring. They haven’t missed an appearance since the 2001-’02 campaign, and haven’t finished the year with a losing record since 1998-’99....

Pilsen Hyde Park Finalists: Downtown

Chicago Diner various locationsveggiediner.com Runner-Up: Handlebar

Sherrie Crabb went without pay for a third of the last fiscal year, laid off members of her staff, cut benefits for those who remained, and finally, closed the only homeless youth shelter in southern Illinois, all because the state legislature and governor couldn’t agree on a budget. Family Counseling Center has closed six different office and residential locations, laid off 36 staff members, and cut holiday and personal time off as well as retirement funding, in addition to draining the agency’s reserve funds and shutting down a homeless youth shelter that had been up and running for a little more than a year....

The central image of this allegorical performance, written collectively by Quenna Lené Barrett, Christabel Donkor, Danielle Littman, Jessamyn Fitzpatrick, Clair Fuller, and Nik Zaleski and directed by Barrett and Zaleski, is a 16-year-old woman named Jane Doe. She sits on a dock, emptying the water out of a red aluminum canoe in preparation for a launch. As the title makes clear, the canoe is her body, and her journey consists of the many discoveries she makes and the changes she goes through when she finds she is pregnant and has to decide between single teen motherhood or terminating the pregnancy....

Chicago is a lucky spot for people who like emerging and otherwise overlooked visual art. We have a bunch of college programs in the area that recruit and keep globally savvy artists in our midst, and a bevy of nonprofit institutions that work hard to support both challenging art and the artists who make it. While you can still find groupings of galleries clustered together in some neighborhoods, the global economy doesn’t sustain the “gallery scene” mythology that used to dominate the art world discourse in major cities....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, October 24, 2016. Donald Trump still thinks paid protesters shut down his infamous canceled UIC rally During the final presidential debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump claimed that the protesters outside his canceled campaign rally at UIC Pavilion in March were paid $1,500 to be there. Chicago magazine debunks the conspiracy theory by describing the diverse group of people who attended the protest....

I was getting a haircut at Madison Street Barbers recently when I mentioned that I play hockey just down the street at Johnny’s IceHouse, one of the city’s few indoor rinks and the only sheet of ice in a 16-square-mile area encompassing the city’s west side and many other neighborhoods. The lack of access and long history of racial tension surrounding the sport have hampered efforts to diversify its ranks....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Jim Evans, 76, the metal detectorist. Fall is a prime season, because people will be raking leaves, throwing leaves. Winter, when there’s snow, that becomes busy. Guys wiping snow off their car, their fingers shrink, they lose their rings. And then in the summertime, people go to the beach and lose their rings....

With Christmas and the New Year right around the corner, it’s time to write about the good things in life, not just the bad—the presents under the tree, if you will, as opposed to the coals in the stockings. So un-thank you very much, Republican congressman Peter Roskam of DuPage County, for using your influence to help write a bill that will lead to higher taxes or social service cuts or both for your constituents....

Riot Fest riotfest.org Runner-Up: Pitchfork

Holstein Park Pool Portage Park Finalist: River Park Pool

In the summer of 1995, bassist Caithlin De Marrais, guitarist Kyle Fischer, and drummer Bill Kuehn formed Rainer Maria—which would become one of the elite national acts of emo’s second wave. De Marrais and Fischer had met in a poetry-writing workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the band toured the basement circuit and recorded frequently, with a sound that drew on the sort of emotive posthardcore whose lineage can be traced back to Sunny Day Real Estate....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “This look was mostly improvised last minute. I try to plan, but I usually just end up whipping up something pretty zany just in time. It turned out a lot clownier than I thought, but I dig it!”

As the weather warms up, take the opportunity to get out and about in Chicago. Here’s some of what we recommend doing this week: Wed 2/21: The show Scheduled Demonstration of Virtual Reality With Guest Speakers From the Santa Monica Institute of Technology, at Prop Thtr (3502 N. Elston) and part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, is a whirlwind of genres: “part TED talk, part sketch comedy, mostly impish theatrical insurrection,” The Reader’s Justin Hayford writes....

A couple years ago I immersed myself in the music of Belgian keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin, who’s basically a jazz improviser and has created a unique sound on the Fender Rhodes. On his 2014 solo album, A Fender Rhodes Solo (Bee Jazz), he used an elaborate rack of filters and effects (reverb, chorus, distortion, looping, octave splitter, bit crusher) to render the instrument’s sound otherworldly, only occasionally evoking the warm, enveloping glow of the unprocessed keyboard....