It’s unlikely that either Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri, or R. Bowen Loftin, chancellor of the university’s main campus in Columbia, slept soundly Monday night, each having resigned under fire earlier in the day. But the night might have been worst of all for Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media in the Department of Communications and also an adjunct professor in the School of Journalism....

The title says it all. Conceived and written by librettists Michael Shepherd Jordan and Alex Garday with composer Stephanie McCullough and first presented in 2014 as a holiday attraction at the trio’s now-defunct MCL Chicago comedy theater, this is a song-and-dance send-up of the 1988 thriller Die Hard. That movie, which starred Bruce Willis as a wisecracking New York cop fighting international criminals in Los Angeles (in his bare feet, yet!...

Today Drag City announced that singer-harpist Joanna Newsom‘s latest album, Divers, is coming out on October 23. Recorded by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson, it’s Newsom’s first album since 2010’s Have One on Me, which in case you’ve forgotten is a three-disc set and a total chore. But judging from the sound of “Sapokanikan,” Divers might be the first time I actually end up enjoying a Joanna Newsom album—the song’s winding recorder at the end is as graceful as the singer’s relatively restrained (at least compared to her past albums) delivery....

RE|Dance’s 75-minute epic starts out auspiciously. A single dancer appears in front of a luminous white 13-foot-tall origami crane serenely poised on a high platform, one long, slender wing sloping elegantly to the floor. The bird’s sheer size skews our perception just enough that we imagine the dancer as a puny, fragile little baby bird teaching itself to walk. Choreographer Michael Estanich’s focus on birds makes sense—a bird, after all, is the ideal mover, and it’s oddly stirring to picture a dancer envying the creature its ability to migrate mind-boggling distances winter after winter....

Joe Mazza The Vinegar Works Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Courtesy Speakeasy PR Failure Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, September 21, 2017. Chicagoans start to organize relief efforts for victims of Mexico City earthquake Chicagoans are coming together to help the victims of a deadly 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Mexico City. The city helped victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the U.S. and now many are willing to help Mexico City in any way. “Hopefully, we can work with the consulate, where we can probably ask President Trump for some aid; maybe to put a moratorium on the deportations right now as well, because we have a crisis in Mexico,” activist Esteban Burgoa told CBS Chicago....

Of comedian Tig Notaro’s many distinctions, one is that she didn’t have a Twitter account until this past August, right before the release of her latest HBO special, Boyish Girl Interrupted. Partly that’s because she is a very busy lady. Between the release of her special, her Netflix documentary, her wedding to comedian Stephanie Allynne, and a TV show in the works, she has no characters to spare for social media....

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, pool President Obama delivers his State of the Union address to Congress last year. Few of his proposals came to pass. Another State of the Union address is coming tomorrow to a flat screen near you, and I bet you can hardly wait. The federal minimum wage in the wealthiest nation on Earth ​then was $7.25, and so it remains. Tomorrow, Obama likely will again call for an increase—this time to $10....

Warning: This post contains spoilers. The story still generates fascination, if not quite beguilement. It begins when a little girl from the boarding school discovers a Union soldier with a wounded leg while picking mushrooms in the woods. She brings him back to the school, where the teachers and students decide to help him recover rather than turn him over to the Confederate army. As he heals, the soldier inspires the curiosity of all the school’s inhabitants....

Details on prefestival concerts around Chicago from Friday, August 24, till Wednesday, August 29, can be found at the DCASE website. 1:45–2:45 PM Jazz Beat/The Intersection of Jazz and Hip-Hop, in collaboration with Young Chicago Authors and the Jazz Institute of Chicago featuring Stark and the Law, Patricia Frazier, and Christian JaLon 3:30–4:30 PM Chicago Cellar Boys, in collaboration with the Iliana Club of Traditional Jazz 6:30–7:25 PM Nicole Mitchell‘s Black Earth Ensemble: Mandorla AwakeningUpdate at Thu 8/30, 4:30 PM: Due to a family medical emergency, Nicole Mitchell will not perform at the Jazz Festival....

Anyone not following closely would have missed the latest maneuver in the long political battle over expensive, dangerous, and illegal overcrowding at the county jail. The notion that the court and jail system needs reform may be the only point that criminal justice officials agree on. And since most of the problems are out of the public view, officials have felt little urgency to fix them. The issue has been a political and legal problem at least since the 1970s, when the Cook County Jail was first placed under federal court decrees for violating the rights of defendants because of chronic overcrowding....

Easier to admire than it is to describe, João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist (which opens Friday at the Music Box) dances around motifs of faith, death, and transfiguration without quite asserting what it’s all about. The film recognizes its ambiguity, however, and has fun with it, shifting its shape whenever it seems like it’s about to settle on a particular message. Things soon get more complicated. Kayaking downstream, Fernando gets sucked into a rapid and his boat capsizes....

ARTIST: Ash Windbigler SHOW: Sweet Lil’, Basement Family, and Junegrass at the Owl on Sun 8/6 MORE INFO: ashwindbigler.com

Q: I went to Dark Odyssey Winter Fire, the big kink hotel takeover event in Washington, D.C., in February. There was one thing I saw there that is messing with my head, and I hope you can set me straight. There was this lovely little six-person orgy going on with two cute-as-could-be hippie girls and four older dudes. Then these four people came along. They sat and watched—a guy and three women in hijabs and dresses that went wrist to ankle, fully covered....

No one in China escaped the impact of the Cultural Revolution. During the decade-long crusade launched by Chairman Mao in 1966 to purge counterrevolutionaries from the Communist Party and recapture the ideological purity of the People’s Republic, schools and universities closed as students rebelled against their teachers, and cadres of young Red Guards policed the ideas of their elders, violently persecuting professionals, intellectuals, and cultural figures. Local communities descended into witch hunts, and there were armed clashes in the streets....

Mike Reed says summer in Chicago means two things: music festivals and gun violence. “It’s kind of a brain fuck,” says Reed, who’s not just a drummer, promoter, and venue owner but also the founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival. Because last year’s spike in shootings contributed to the city’s highest murder tally in nearly two decades, this year the festival is acknowledging Chicago’s gun violence—and trying to raise awareness of organizations that are doing something about it....

Courtesy Music Box Theatre Found Footage Festival Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.