There are a lot of cities in the world where you could dedicate yourself to eating nothing but street food and eat like a king for the rest of your days: Mexico City, Bangkok, Istanbul, Singapore, Austin, Los Angeles, and on and on. Chicago isn’t on that list. Yes, we have food trucks, but they’re crippled by an unfair law that inhibits them from thriving. We have sidewalk eloteros, fruteros, tamaleras, and taqueras, but they’re forced to exist as outlaws, dependent on the benign neglect of police and City Council members, and always vulnerable to their persecution....

Legacy This year the Chicago International Film Festival turns 50, and in observation of that milestone, WTTW Channel 11 will be broadcasting a monthly series of notable features that screened in the festival; it kicked off last night at 10 PM with Legacy, Tod Lending’s Oscar-nominated documentary (2000) about a family trying to escape from the nightmarish Henry Horner Homes (since demolished) in West Town. We’ve also got a review of 3 Days to Kill, a dopey thriller starring Kevin Costner as a CIA assassin trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter....

Maya Acosta Lila Downs 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 THE INTERNATIONAL VINTAGE POSTER FAIR 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.

Kevork Djansezian Getty Images Beyonce and Jay Z 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.

As the city’s cultural historian, Tim Samuelson has had occasion to amass all manner of Chicago treasures: Eliot Ness’s handcuffs, chunks of the Wrigley Building, and discarded pieces of structures by Sullivan and Wright. Some of the artifacts are displayed in the home Samuelson shares with his wife at the Promontory Apartments, a Hyde Park building with its own historic pedigree as Mies van der Rohe’s first high-rise. In the kitchen, Samuelson keeps selections from his Popeil Brothers/Ronco gadget collection, relatively inexpensive, mass-produced items that he believes have considerable import as pieces of the city’s history....

“I wanted to use bold flavors with [the tonburi],” Cruz says, and “lamb fat goes very well with it.” He seared lamb shoulder as well, serving it with the risotto and dehydrated tonburi, plus two more preparations: tonburi rice crackers and tonburi chimichurri sauce. For the first he cooked the seeds with rice and water, spread the mixture onto a silicone mat, and dehydrated it, then deep-fried the crackers so they’d puff up like chicharrones....

Inside Man Each Thursday, the Logan Theatre screens a famous old film as part of its “Throw Back Thursday (#tbt)” series. This week’s selection is Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing, a true summer movie if ever there was one. Lee is a prolific auteur—he’s directed more than 30 narrative and documentary features since 1983—and one of the country’s most polarizing directors. His oeuvre is marked by peaks and valleys—or, in other words, some outright masterworks and plenty of outright failures....

Law enforcement leaders from throughout the nation are promising a kinder, gentler, more discriminating approach to policing and prosecuting. They’ve formed a group, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, whose cochairs include Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy. “The changes needed to achieve an incarceration rate in line with the rest of the developed world are staggering,” Coates writes. “The popular notion that this can largely be accomplished by releasing nonviolent drug offenders is false—as of 2012, 54 percent of all inmates in state prisons had been sentenced for violent offenses....

There’s something extremely unnerving about picking up the phone and hearing the voice at the other end say, in a Jersey accent, “This is Patti Smith.” Smith is, after all, one of the coolest people in the entire world. William S. Burroughs described her as a shaman; this does not strike me as inaccurate. I always loved the idea of this day, and I often celebrated in my own way, so it was a nice opportunity to remember a lot of people....

Read about picks 40 through 31 and 30 through 21. 18) John Luther Adams, The Wind in High Places (Cold Blue) Another remarkable evocation of natural beauty from composer John Luther Adams, The Wind in High Places takes inspiration from the principles of the Aeolian harp (in a piece performed by New York’s fantastic JACK Quartet), the song of the canyon wren, and the way atmospheric conditions can create the suggestion of a multitude of suns or moons in the arctic and the Sonoran Desert....

Courtesy Matthew Hoffman 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.

At times the tale of Romeo and Juliet feels as dead as the star-crossed lovers themselves. We already have West Side Story, Leonardo DiCaprio as a knight in shining armor, and a countless number of loosely interpreted romances between two people from feuding families. But that didn’t stop Red Theater founder Aaron Sawyer from tackling it anyway. It was thanks in great part to the interpreters that the show ended up getting off the ground....

Battle of the Sexes The 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King was a carnival—the equal rights movement as prime-time game show, broadcast on ABC to an audience of 90 million. This makes it fine material for the offbeat comic filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), and publicity materials show how carefully they’ve replicated the famous match, with Emma Stone a ringer for King and Steve Carell a perfect choice to play Riggs the pig....

The American Mercy Tour Written and performed by Michael Milligan, this is a harrowing two-parter on how and why our country has failed to protect its “huddled masses” from sickness and destitution. “All these people,” says Joe, the bankrupt and humiliated auto mechanic of part one, waving a hand at invisible bank heads and bureaucrats. “They’re just trying to make some money off my wife’s being sick.” Part two shifts to an attorney’s office, where William, an overworked doctor, contemplates a standing offer from Big Pharma to buy his small family-owned practice....

In the 2000s, the word “emo” had trouble finding a single, standard definition. Part of that is due to the genre’s mainstream crossover in the aughts, when the word “emo” was bandied around and dragged through the mud. As the tide of nostalgia slowly shifts from the 90s to the 2000s Buzzfeed has been littering the web with headlines that only further muddy the definition of emo. When Buzzfeed first posted the news that nu-metal band Evanescence will reunite, the site did so with the headline “Attention Emo Kids: Evanescence Is Reuniting So You Can Feel Things Again” (the headline has since been changed)....

A month ago, when I reported that the University of Illinois had apparently hired and then fired professor Steven Salaita because of his anti-Israel tweets, the UI administration wasn’t talking. Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise issued a statement explaining why she’d effectively killed Salaita’s appointment, refusing to forward it to the board of trustees for what was to have been perfunctory approval. And the board of trustees issued its own statement supporting her....

Since forming more than a decade ago, this energetic, highly theatrical combo from Ukraine have focused on translating the traditional polyphonic vocal tradition of their homeland for a global audience. Impressively, DakhaBrakha have done so without sacrificing their native essence—not even when trafficking in dub and electronic effects or borrowing rhythms from around the world. The four members contribute cello, jaw harp, accordion, and percussion, but the focal point remains the keening Balkan-style vocal harmonies of Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska....

Just because something’s unimaginable today doesn’t mean we won’t be living with it tomorrow. The Tribune’s editorial page pleaded this week for City Hall to economize by placing more jobs “under control of private businesses, which would reduce the weight of traditional pension obligations.” “There’s no outsourcing police work,” said the Tribune, but the city should consider everyone else on its payroll. Why not the police? We’ve privatized public education with all those charter schools—once upon a time who could have imagined that?...