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If you have fellow foodies in your Facebook feed, you’ve likely seen this Washington Post piece by Lavanya Ramanathan, “Why everyone should stop calling immigrant food ‘ethnic.'” It’s not an unreasonable issue to raise: Why are some foods are “ethnic” and others aren’t even though, obviously, everything American from pizza to wieners was specific to an immigrant ethnicity at some point (which was almost certainly well after the first bad English cook arrived at Jamestown)?...

Jim Osborn High Wheeler Train Show Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. Just don’t blame us if you freeze to death. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, May 1, 2017. There’s no picture of Richard M. Daley on City Hall’s wall of mayors Former mayor Richard M. Daley, the city’s longest-serving mayor, is missing from the wall of mayors in City Hall. His picture has still not been hung on the wall of the fifth-floor mayor’s office reception area along with the other former Chicago mayors. There’s even a picture of Cook County clerk David Orr, who was mayor for eight days in the 1980s....

Faith No More and System of a Down boast two of the fiercest baritones to spring from early-90s rock, and both bands are back on the festival circuit—which means their front men will face off at Riot Fest. It’s not a literal showdown—they perform on different days—but that means you can see both Serj Tankian and Mike Patton bellow, howl, and roar to the heavens. What if they were actually put to the test, though?...

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, July 13, 2017. Rauner fires staff members, possibly signaling a hard shift to the right Governor Bruce Rauner, fresh off of a defeat in the state budget battle, has fired several staff members this week, including his chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and his spokesperson, according to Politico. He then replaced both chief and deputy chief with with staffers from a conservative think tank, the Illinois Policy Institute....

Sun-Times Media Peter Lisagor When I last reported on the Lisagor Awards, in mid-January, just 71 entries had been received by the Chicago Headline Club and executive director Aimee DeBat was worried—more worried than she let on. That’s possibly the highest number of entries in the long history of the awards. “I’m actually pretty flabbergasted by the number—in a very positive way,” said DeBat Tuesday morning. “Monday was crazy” with last-minute entries pouring in; and after midnight, when she went to bed (her office is in her home), she kept being awakened by her ringing Blackberry, as laggards called and called again begging her to cut them some slack....

With The Wind Rises, animator Hayao Miyazaki paints an empathetic portrait of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer who designed many of the fighter planes used by the Japanese military during World War II. The film is one of the most rapturously beautiful that Miyazaki has made, and all the more unsettling because of it. Miyazaki, who previously told this story in a 2009 manga, claims he didn’t want to judge his subject, though Horikoshi was indirectly responsible for countless deaths....

Little Village is a port of entry for Mexican immigrants, and the neighborhood’s roughly two-mile 26th Street corridor from Sacramento to Kostner is crammed with around 500 local businesses that cater to their tastes: butcher shops, pharmacies, and more than 100 restaurants offering everything from mangonadas—fresh sliced mango spiked with chile and lime and drizzled with savory tamarind sauce—to toddler-size mariachi suits and live doves. Cremeria La Ordeña (3234 W. 26th) has a bulk section to rival any Whole Foods, with an array of chile-lime snacks (pepitas, white beans, chickpeas, and peanuts) and a deli case full of fresh cheeses, sticky-sweet cajeta (goat’s milk caramel), and a dozen different kinds of fresh mole....

Game of Thrones 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.

AhabThe Boats of the Glen Carrig (Napalm) Depression Cherry by Beach House Golden PelicansOldest Ride, Longest Line (Total Punk) Los Angeles noise-rock group Health haven’t released a proper full-length in six years, at least if you don’t count their 2010 disco edits of their sophomore album (2009’s Get Color) or their 2012 soundtrack to the video game Max Payne 3 (which some of their fans don’t even know they’ve done). But no matter how many years you figure Health have been dormant, the new Death Magic is a tremendous return, an evolution toward accessible pop that keeps their ear-­shattering violence intact....

By chance, Governor Bruce Rauner unveiled his hokey duct-tape commercials around the same time students and faculty from Northeastern Illinois University took to the streets to protest cuts that threaten to put their school out of existence. After the commercials aired, Rauner insisted they weren’t campaign spots. “Really, we’re just trying to communicate with the people of Illinois,” he told reporters last week while making a visit to Decatur, which he insisted wasn’t a campaign appearance....

Even back in the late 80s, Jack Riley knew his job was about more than just drug busts. But he also found that a good bust was a thing to relish. In 1987 Chicago, like other American cities, was awash in cocaine from Central and South America, and sales of it had moved into the open. Residents of the west-side Austin neighborhood were complaining to the police that dealers had set up shop in and around the Washington Pines, a seven-story apartment hotel where men were seen hanging out in the lobby all day and night....

The allhallows ghouls have given us the greatest gift of all this year: Halloween on a Saturday. That means more celebrations than ever—and less of a chance that you’ll accidentally show up to work in full skeleton face. But with so many more options, how can you possibly choose the perfect haunt for the weekend? Boneshaker Redmoon’s annual bash includes everything a real party needs: bumper cars, arcade games, cocktails, a temporary tattoo parlor, and aerial artists....

Should the New York Times have published an anonymous op-ed by a “senior” administration official that was sure to send the president on a rampage? Was the author gutless not to sign it? Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post (she’d earlier held a similar position at the Times), has weighed in, saying “yes” to the first question and “possibly” to the second. But Sullivan was witty enough to look past these two obvious debate points into what she called a “quagmire of weirdness: fraught with issues of journalistic ethics and possibly even legal concerns....

This month marks the 50th anniversary of two seminal pieces of Chicago art. Broadcaster Studs Terkel made a tape of reactions from the bewildered crowd that day, and another legendary Chicagoan, Illinois’s newly appointed poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, was also there, reading the poem she’d been tasked with writing for the occasion. She’d seen only a small scale model of the sculpture before that moment, but she’d found it inscrutable, its ambiguity uncomfortable and cold....

The Comedy Exposition of 2014 started with a single tweet. “It’s not so much about filling the void of JFL,” says Hasz, a coproducer of the weekly stand-up show Parlour Car at Bar Deville. “Almost every city with a good scene has a fun, comedian-run festival. And aside from a couple small festivals like SnubFest and the Women’s Funny Festival, Chicago doesn’t really have one.” Hasz and her crew initially planned for the Comedy Exposition to have 40 slots—20 locals and 20 out-of-towners—but they ended up accepting nearly 60 comics....

With Slow Stretch, the new gallery installation from curatorial collective Third Object, interdisciplinary artists Sarah Belknap, Joseph Belknap, and Eileen Rae Walsh dissolve the boundaries that typically circumscribe artists in collaboration. The show, open through April 3 at Mana Contemporary Chicago, is a mess of visual conversation, and although there’s never any question as to which artist produced each work, the idea of “work” as a discrete visual unit is called into question by the three artists and Third Object’s curators....

Cellist Tristan Honsinger fled his native America in 1969 to avoid the draft, settling in Montreal, where he discovered improvised music and changed his musical life. Starting in 1974 he lived in Europe, bouncing around between Paris, Florence, and Amsterdam, where he built his reputation as an indefatigably curious player who worked with a who’s who of heavies including guitarist Derek Bailey, pianist Cecil Taylor, and saxophonist Evan Parker. Over the last couple of decades his best-known work has occurred within the ICP Orchestra, where his ferociously textured bowed improvisations and love of slapstick and European cabaret music have proved simpatico with the absurdist tendencies and surprise-laden MO of founders Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink....

Q: I’m a 59-year-old man in good health. For basically my whole adult life, I’ve had this problem during intercourse with a woman of (1) being very quick to come and (2) having a too intense “cringey” sensation when I come. This has led to often going soft at the prospect of intercourse. This too intense feeling makes me stop moving when I come, which is not satisfying at all. It doesn’t happen with hand jobs or oral sex—they feel fine and good....

Earlier this month, the Chicago Park District announced that it had signed an agreement with George Lucas about how things will work when—um, if—he gets permission to build his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on its lakefront land. Which is one reason why the Lucas Museum is going to need some friends. The announcement directed readers to the website, friendsoflucasmuseum.com, for more information. That turned out to be disappointing—there wasn’t any additional material, just a space to fill in your name and e-mail address for “future updates....