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Philip Glass arrives in town this Friday to appear as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, but he’s no stranger to the city. He first came here in 1952 to begin his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago at the prodigious age of 15. He remembers sitting outside jazz clubs like the Beehive in Hyde Park, too young to be admitted, listening to bebop waft out the door. Philip Glass & Third Coast Percussion Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival....

In the midst of the #MeToo movement and the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation, many well-meaning guys have been analyzing past decisions. Some of us have been wondering if there were times when we could have better supported the women in our lives or done more to put an end to the harmful behavior of other men. Take walking home at night, for example. While all Chicagoans have concerns about crime, some women told me they feel wary of any man they encounter on a darkened street....

Tronc, Inc.—that’s the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, and lesser titles in Michael Ferro’s media family—paid about $2.7 million last year to lease a Bombardier jet, tweets national media writer Ken Doctor, who spotted the expense in the latest Tronc financials. Doctor couldn’t resist commenting that the money was “enough to pay 25 high-end journalists.” Last week Doctor also reported that Tronc was close to buying US Weekly from Wenner Media for about $85 million....

For a brief period after its completion in 1974, the Standard Oil Building at 200 E. Randolph (now the Aon Center, previously the Amoco Building) was the tallest skyscraper in Chicago. The following year the Sears Tower was finished, claiming the crown for itself, but that June designer, sculptor, and sound artist Harry Bertoia unveiled a massive public artwork, commissioned in ’74, in the plaza of the Standard Oil Building. His “sonambient sculpture” originally sat within a 4,000-square-foot reflecting pool and consisted of 11 vertical rows of copper and brass rods ranging from four to 16 feet in height, arranged at right angles or in parallel....

Hachette Book Group I recommend Megan Abbott’s new novel, The Fever, as ideal summer reading with a caveat: it will not last you through the summer. It probably won’t even last you through a week-long vacation. If you are susceptible to cliff-hanger chapter-endings (and who isn’t?), you will probably blow through it in 24 hours. Several of those hours are hours you should have spent sleeping if you want to be happy and alert at work the next day....

There is Too much TV in the world. This year alone there were more than 400 scripted series on the air, according to Variety, and who knows how many more reality and documentary shows. Also, I am just one person. Sure, I would love to do nothing but watch television, but then I would have no free time and I probably still wouldn’t be able to watch everything. There are plenty of shows that are possibly among the best of the year that I just haven’t seen (looking at you Game of Thrones and Fargo) and just as many that I love because they’re so trashy and ridiculous they aren’t making the cut (Married at First Sight, any iteration of the Real Housewives franchise, every competitive cooking show)....

With his dense new album Tributary Tales (Motema), pianist and composer Gerald Clayton acknowledges the influence of new people and new sounds on his music and life, tracing his course from straight-ahead player who grew up on the west coast in a family of jazz heavies to New York musician charting his own path. That journey is thrillingly represented on a track like “A Light,” with saxophonists Ben Wendel and Logan Richardson briskly sketching the sort of slaloming bebop lines one might expect from a Lennie Tristano tune while drummer Justin Brown collides hip-hop flavors within an explosive attack marked by frantic accents, adding to a groove that teems with the complexity of New York’s current jazz vanguard....

Journalism has always been a big, sloppy business in which, for warmth and succor, the highest principle curls up alongside the most shameless shilling. Most of the time we barely think about the contradictions. Once in a while they yank our collar. On Monday night the Headline Club sponsored an advance screening of the new movie Spotlight at the Lake Street Screening Room. Spotlight is a newspaper movie: it tells the story of the 2002 Boston Globe investigation into decades of pedophilia within Boston’s priesthood that the Catholic archdiocese tolerated and concealed....

AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File NAACP lawyer Debo Adegbile outside the Supreme Court in 2009 A battle had been brewing over President Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Yesterday, the Senate, aided by seven Democrats, blocked Adegbile’s nomination, 52-47. Before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the Republican opposition to Adegbile “an affront to what it means to live in America....

The Tribe is a brilliant formal achievement that marks Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky as a filmmaker to watch. It takes place at a boarding school for deaf children, with all the roles played by deaf performers; the dialogue is entirely in Ukrainian sign language, and there are no subtitles or narration to translate the conversations for hearing viewers. (Even those schooled in American Sign Language will be baffled.) Slaboshpitsky uses ingenious strategies to draw the audience into the characters’ world while respecting fundamental differences between the deaf and the hearing....

“This is the people-watching event of the summer,” a friend said yesterday evening at the tail end of a weekend spent observing Pitchfork’s parade of humanity through Union Park. When it comes to festivals, the most interesting sights are often offstage—and that’s especially true of Pitchfork. Throughout the fest’s beautiful final day, Reader photographers saw the multitudes in all their glorious variety: a (seemingly) happy couple dry humping, friends collapsed in nap piles, a man in a flesh-toned body stocking, another wearing cat ears, loners looking ready for Burning Man, a shirtless dude in an umbrella hat, and still more babies wearing headphones to shield their tiny eardrums from the likes of the Julie Ruin and Run the Jewels....

It sounds like the stuff of night terrors, and based on Austrian-born, Paris-based artist-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s other haunting pieces, it very well could be: nine ventriloquists and their dummies gather to chat in a performance inspired by the real-life Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky, host to an annual convention and a graveyard for retired dolls. With the help of Germany’s Puppentheater Halle and regular collaborator Dennis Cooper, known for his “transgressive” literature, Vienne promises to explore the layers and subtleties of voices and identities, embodied and otherwise....

Three men—an ex-con, a disgraced cop, and the kid—hole up in a crummy motel room on the eve of a bank robbery. Each of them is desperate. Each is armed. Only one of them knows the other two, and he doesn’t know enough. Sounds like a classic setup, right? Playwright Cody Lucas clearly thinks so: he has the would-be bandidos in his Tres Bandidos spend quite a bit of time discussing the great movie westerns, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Unforgiven, with the winking implication that this situation echoes and plays on them....

Mike Sula Ramp peta with ramp pesto A few years back friend of the Food Chain Jim Samata was strolling through his western-suburban neighborhood when he caught a powerful whiff of raw onion in the air. He followed his nose to a vacant lot where a mansion had recently been demolished. There, above a shaded gully, some workers were trimming trees and creating the olfactory disturbance when the limbs crashed into the understory....

Patema Inverted Since speaking with visual-effects supervisor Scott Squires the other week, I’ve been unable to watch any movie without considering whether it respects the laws of Newtonian physics. “A large creature requires a few steps to ramp up to a certain speed,” Squires explained. “But frequently directors tell us make it faster, make it faster, make it faster. So, these big, heavy things end up looking like they don’t have any weight to them....

After moving to Chicago from Nigeria in 2014 to pursue a master’s in marketing from Roosevelt University, Efe Iyare recalls the culture shock he had. “I realized that there was a huge bias about me being African and what that represented,” he says.”People had no idea, just based off what they have seen in the media, where I came from or my culture.” The experience left him feeling inspired. “I felt obligated to represent [Africa] in my own way....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 7/18: Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee’s real-life affair yields a trio of films about infidelity. The South Korean director and his actress lover are back with The Day After. 92 min. 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.

Rashad Becker, Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. 1 You might have spotted Rashad Becker’s name in the credits to one of the more than 1,200 recordings he’s mastered at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, an operation established by the label and production duo Basic Channel back in the mid-90s. Since then Becker has set the standard for meticulously mastered vinyl, whether it’s electronic dance, dub, or experimental music. Last year he stepped forward as a sound artist in his own right with the mysterious, sui generis Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol....