When the writer Osama Alomar emigrated from Syria to Chicago in 2008, he and many other Syrians could already foresee some of the troubles that were coming. The country was in the middle of a severe drought, and tensions were high between the Alawite government and the Sunni opposition. But no one anticipated the brutality of the civil war that broke out in March 2011, and Alomar expected he’d come back to visit every two years or so....

Courtesy TKO Records Slaughter & the Dogs circa 1978 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.

Yesterday Chicago rapper-singer Dinner With John died at age 24. Born Walter Long Jr., he founded west-side rap group Pivot Gang with Saba, Joseph Chilliams, and MFn Melo. According to the Sun-Times Homicide Watch, he was stabbed to death in River North, near the Metra tracks north of Kinzie.

Getty Images Fans, analysts, and other philosophical types continue to debate whether soccer or baseball best represents the human condition—but what about doubles tennis? In the ebbing days of the World Cup, it was not enough to make the case for or against soccer. That had all been said. An appropriate adieu required putting soccer in its place, not simply as a sport among other sports but as an expression of the human condition....

Welcome to our winter solstice edition! There isn’t much cinema going on this week as people jam the department stores, but you’ll want to check out Leah Pickett’s long review of The Big Short, an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction best seller about the subprime mortgage crisis, starring Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and Christian Bale. And I’ve got something to tell you about Youth, a philosophical comedy from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), starring Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, and Jane Fonda....

When footwork producer and Teklife leader DJ Spinn takes the stage at Pitchfork Music Festival on Sunday he’ll be joined by a footwork dance crew called the Era. It’ll be the second time this week that Spinn and the Era will perform together in town; tonight the Era and Teklife are hosting a footworking event called Lab Sessions at High Concept Laboratories, which is part of the dance crew’s new residency at the Pilsen art gallery....

Last week saw the release of two rather cynical American films, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux and Clint Eastwood’s The Mule. The first addresses our culture’s acclimation to random violence, while the second considers our nation’s losing war on drugs. Neither film proposes solutions to the issues they raise, suggesting fatalistically that we’re simply stuck with them. But where Vox Lux raises a sense of alarm over this conclusion, The Mule—a more complex and ultimately more provocative work—is disarmingly upbeat....

An organized crime family maintain an underground cell where they keep their enemies shackled to the floor and make them learn how to knit. A woman thinks she hears a dripping sound somewhere in the distance, only to realize that her brain is melting; she shakes the liquid out of her ears as if it were seawater. A world-traveling vampire hunter promises his colleagues that a terrifying monster will arrive to aid them in their mission; the “monster” turns out to be a guy in a fuzzy frog costume....

The war is over. The Pandavas have wiped out their royal cousins, the Kauravas, and Yudisthira is the rightful king of all he surveys. Except that what he surveys is horrible to contemplate: a vulture’s paradise, where mad widows root through heaps of severed body parts, trying to reassemble their husbands. Too traumatized to claim his crown, Yudisthira declares the victory a defeat. How can he rule? What is there left to rule?...

Marc Monaghan for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind 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.

Despite backlash from members of the local Italian-American community, Chicago aldermen are proceeding with their proposal to rename Balbo Drive and move or modify the Balbo Monument, memorials to a henchman of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The tributes were added shortly after Italo Balbo, a leader of the Blackshirts paramilitary units and later Mussolini’s air commander, landed at Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair with a squadron of 24 seaplanes....

Just as Califone arose the from the ashes of Red Red Meat, Red Red Meat was born from the disintegration of Friends of Betty, one of Chicago’s most passionately fucked-up rock bands during the late 80s, when few chose to be genuinely weird. That trio featured singer-guitarist Tim Rutili, drummer Ben Massarella—the two common members of all three bands—and bassist Glynis Johnson. At their peak, Rutili replaced Massarella with John Rowan, who would soon achieve greater fame and/or ignominy as Blackie Onassis of Urge Overkill....

Jason Prechtel was troubled by Ventra. Cubic was a familiar name. It was responsible for the Chicago Card too. I recently spoke with Prechtel about his battle to find out more about the privatization of the CTA’s fare collection system. It’s like, “Wait a second, Chicago media—why not connect the dots further? Why are we looking at Ventra as this Chicago-specific thing when this company has a very searchable track record?...

GlitterGuts‘ photographers and cofounders Sarah Joyce and Eric Strom set up an impromptu studio in Pitchfork’s Book Fort to capture portraits of the authors, readers, and festivalgoers passing through. Book Fort at Pitchfork 2018

When considering the curious rift that’s supposedly developed between our governor and mayor, it’s important to remember that they’re actually pals. They’ve vacationed together, drunk really expensive bottles of wine together . . . one even helped the other make his first million. By the way, while we’re on the subject, the president of SBC at the time was William Daley, brother of Mayor Daley. The governor’s ostensible purpose was to talk about the need for less governmental red tape in regulating the distribution of liquor licenses—not exactly a burning issue of the day....

Maggie Fullilove-Nugent That’s Weird, Grandma 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.

Susy Schultz The Community Media Workshop performs an exemplary media service: it connects Chicago reporters looking for stories to tell with neighborhood organizations whose stories need telling. Over its 25 years of playing this role, CMW has made itself a fixture in Chicago’s media ecology. But now it faces a threat to its existence: there are fewer mainstream-media reporters than there once were, and the ones who survive aren’t looking as hard at the neighborhoods....

It was less than two weeks before the start of Pitchfork, and all Anna Cerniglia knew about the geometric village she’d been contracted to build in Union Park was that it would consist of two small huts designed by the artists Chad Kouri and Heather Gabel. Or maybe one large pyramid. It all depended on Pitchfork’s safety regulations. She didn’t know where in the park it would be located or which carpenter would do the actual construction....

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images Tina Fey is set to play Kim Barker in movie set in South Asia hot spots. I enjoyed reading—and then writing about—Kim Barker’s 2011 book, Taliban Shuffle, a memoir about her assignment to cover Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Tribune in the 2000s, back when the Trib still had a foreign service. Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels intends to adapt Taliban Shuffle to the screen—and Tina Fey will star....