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Ameya Pawar 4243 N. Lincoln 773-868-4747 chicago47.org Runner-Up: Carlos Ramirez-Rosa

Room 1520 1520 W. Fulton 312-952-1520 room1520.com Runner-Up: Salvage One

When today’s newsletter arrives in your inbox, I’ll be in the middle of a daylong fast for Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. I’m by no means religious in the traditional sense—I’ve spent more Shabbats at rock clubs than in synagogues. But I love Yom Kippur, even if my stomach doesn’t (note: my stomach definitely does not love fasting). As a child, I’d considered this day of atonement a suffocatingly strict holiday....

Q: I’m a straight male in my 30s. I’ve been with my wife for 12 years. I have had several affairs. Not one-night-stand scenarios, but longer-term connections. I didn’t pursue any of these relationships. Instead, women who knew I was in an “exclusive” relationship have approached me. These have included what turned into a one-year affair with a single woman, a three-year affair with a close friend of my wife, a seven-month affair with a married coworker, and now a fairly serious four-months-and-counting relationship with a woman who approached me on Instagram....

Englewood-raised rapper Spenzo had planned to release his follow-up to 2013’s In Spenzo We Trust last spring, but 2014 came to a close with no new mixtape. Delays happen, and the process of tweaking and finessing a mixtape—especially one that resembles a studio album more than the traditional rough-around-the-edges (and, increasingly, old school) idea of a mixtape—doesn’t lend itself to a strict schedule. But during the past few months the MC’s been dropping tracks with enough regularity to suggest that his forthcoming Ahead Of My Time mixtape will come out soon....

Chicago Critics Film Festival Part of a critic’s job is to tell you about good movies, but with this unique festival, held every spring at Music Box, critics actually show them to you. Members of the Chicago Film Critics Association handpick notable movies from the festival circuit, many of which have yet to secure theatrical distribution, and the programming is eclectic, with everything from local work to international imports. Since the fest debuted in 2013, the CFCA has hosted such notable filmmakers as William Friedkin, Bobcat Goldthwait, James Ponsoldt, and Joe Swanberg....

Smart Bar Beauty Bar Finalists: Danny’s, Scarlet

Kate Fry and Mark L. Montgomery

I celebrated my 28th birthday at Blackbird six months after it opened. I don’t remember exactly what I ate, but I know pork belly was involved, along with a red that blew open my doors of perception about what grapes are capable of. Blackbird opened my eyes to a lot of things. But I was still a dumb schmuck who knew everything, so I couldn’t just allow myself to be blown away by the experience: I thought it was a bit extra that the menu namechecked the servers’ designer suits, and I thought it was funny to compare the crowded, overlit dining room to the confines of a lab rat....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, October 26, 2016. Enrollment at Chicago Public Schools drops by nearly 11,000 students There are nearly 11,000 fewer students enrolled in CPS for the 2016-’17 school year than there were for last year—a drop of 2.8 percent, according to the district’s final enrollment count. [DNAinfo Chicago]

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past? Let Ben and Maya talk you through it....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Williams joined the Fabulous Turks in the mid-60s, when they were already well-established and gigging around Chicagoland. According to Williams, the group recorded at the Columbia Records studio in 1961 and at the One-derful label’s Tone Recordings in ’64, but he doesn’t remember any resulting releases (and I can’t find any evidence either)....

On a hot afternoon in early June, artist Marcos Raya stood on a ladder propped against a concrete wall on 18th Street and applied a fresh coat of gray paint to one of the oldest surviving outdoor antiwar murals in the country. The artwork, Fallen Dictator, shows a crowd of gun-toting revolutionaries—including one carrying a placard of Che Guevara—standing behind the upended statue of a Latin American military leader. A car rolled by, honking its approval....

Al Scorch plays the banjo like he knows the most scenic spots on the Appalachian Trail. The 30-year-old roots musician, who grew up on Chicago’s northwest side, takes inspiration from all over—he also loves hardcore punk—but his creative process is less about inhabiting different genres and eras and more about putting himself into other people’s heads. “So much of songwriting is getting out of your own experiences and trying to think of what it’s like to be other people,” Scorch says....

When I caught local four-piece Avantist at Ian’s Party in January, front man Fernando Arias smoothly inserted some lines from Frank Ocean’s “Nights” into a cyclonic, humid jam. While I recognized that the lyrics belonged to someone else, Fernando belted them out with such conviction and folded the words into the swirling music so naturally, I might have assumed he dreamed them up himself. The experimental quartet, who blend furious punk with exacting prog rock, are such a force that when you see them play it feels as if no other band can deliver music quite like them....

Ayanna Woods has had her music performed by Third Coast Percussion, featured in the theater project No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, and broadcast on the Emmy-nominated show Brown Girls, but the funky, far-reaching R&B she makes with her band Yadda Yadda has a special place in her heart. Woods started writing some of the songs on her upcoming The Yadda Yadda EP in high school, and she calls them “a home to me over the years....

British singer-songwriter Beabadoobee is only 20 years old, but on her debut album, Fake It Flowers, she’s written songs that sound like alt-pop favorites from the decade before she was born—mostly the Sundays with a hint of Tanya Donelly. To my ears, her music’s combo of sugary sweetness with a hint of bile defines the “alternative” era’s pop songwriting as precisely as a flannel shirt signifies its rock fashion. Beabadoobee (born Beatrice Laus and also known as Bea Kristi) got her first break when YouTube’s 1-800-LOVE-U channel shared the video for her 2017 single “Coffee,” which she’d recorded in a friend’s bedroom—she racked up more than 300,000 views in just days, and in 2018 she landed a contract with West London label Dirty Hit....

When I started at the Reader in 2009, the Road Trips Issue was known as These Parts, which ran in May a couple of weeks before the Summer Guide. After a print redesign in 2011, we made the decision to roll both issues into one, combining the summery travel stories with the summery lists of things to do. This year we split them up once again. We packed the Summer Guide with additional meaty feature stories and gave the travel writing some extra breathing room in an edition two weeks later....

Over the past several years, Graywolf Press has developed a knack for publishing young female essayists who write intelligently and frankly about their lives as women, particularly their experiences of the female body and motherhood. Leslie Jamison considered female pain in The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss examined her decision to vaccinate her son in On Immunity, and now in a worthy successor, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, Belle Boggs delves into the complicated subject of infertility....