When the average person develops vision trouble, they might just pick up a pair of reasonably priced reading glasses at a neighborhood pharmacy. If they require a more customized solution, they could stop by an eyewear retailer to book a professional eye exam and walk away with prescription glasses that same day. But what if […]
Tag: Vol. 51 No. 16
Issue of May 12, 2022
The Sound Issue
An audiologist’s study of over-the-counter hearing aids, a guide to radiator noises, an investigation of ShotSpotter, and much more
On the cover: Illustration by Joe Mills. For more of Mills’s work, go to joemills.com
Find a print copy of the Reader.
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Posted inMusic
It’s quiet around here until it’s not
“It’s always quiet around here until it’s not,” said my neighbor from down the street, petting her big dog’s head. Her dog was sitting contentedly in the grass near the lagoon in Sherman Park, near my house in Back of the Yards. It’s often silent there, unless there’s a flock of geese fighting—or unless a […]
Posted inNews
ShotSpotter’s deafening impact
The surveillance technology is still disproportionately listening to Black and Brown communities.
Posted inTheater Review
Reunion and regret
Like several post-pandemic shows in Chicago, the Artistic Home’s production of The Pavilion, written by Craig Wright and directed by Julian Hester, is about an intimate relationship between two people over time. It is also about the creation of the universe, being tethered to the past, and literally burning down sentimentality. High school sweethearts Peter […]
Posted inTheater Review
The bones of grief
Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center as part of its Theater for Young Audiences program in 2018. But this play, now in its Chicago premiere with Theatre Above the Law, is like a lot of great YA fiction—relevant to many audiences. Digging Up Dessa Through 5/22: Fri-Sat 8 […]
Posted inTheater Review
People who need people
When everyone on the stage is excellent, it shows a director fully in command of the material. That’s the case with Cody Estle’s production of The Luckiest by Melissa Ross, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Raven Theatre. Plays about a young woman’s disability and impending death always risk straying into Love Story-style bathos, while […]
Posted inTheater Review
War cries
A wooden rowboat and plastic sheets lining two back walls are the only decorations for Sarah Tolan-Mee’s English-language adaptation of Heiner Müller’s 1982 cry-of-anguish riff on war, betrayal, and the messiness of identity. Using the Greek legends of Medea and Jason as a jumping-off point, this is a raging, poetic rant against tyranny and fate […]
Posted inMusic
A guide to midwestern radiators and their calls
In the 2015 horror film The Blackcoat’s Daughter, there’s a midnight scene where a teenager named Kat slips out of her room and into her boarding school’s dorm basement. An older girl named Rose, apparently the only other student left at the school over winter break, grows curious and follows. Old pipes creak and whine […]
Posted inTheater Review
Steppenwolf’s Seagull opens a lovely new space
“Here is a theater. No curtain, no wings, no scenery. Just an empty space.” Konstantin Treplev, the young and hungry artist manqué in Anton Chekhov’s Seagull, intones these words before the disastrous and abortive premiere of his play-within-the-play for his family. But at the Saturday opening of ensemble member Yasen Peyankov’s production at Steppenwolf, it […]
Posted inDance
Light drives the story in TAKE
On an industrial strip of Rockwell just off Elston, beyond a white door with numbers painted in red, past a makeshift bar, through a dark curtain lies a white brick room filled with smoke. Through the haze, folding chairs line each wall, leaving bare an expanse of concrete, above which soar long sheets of white […]
Posted inMusic
Eli Schmitt, jack-of-all-trades in Chicago’s young DIY arts and music scene
Eli Schmitt, 20, moved to Chicago a couple years ago to attend DePaul, where he studies journalism and art history. In that time he’s become a crucial connector in an emerging youth arts movement best known for its bands, which include Lifeguard, Post Office Winter, Friko, Dwaal Troupe, and Horsegirl. Schmitt wears a lot of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘Afong Moy was a real person’
The year was 1834. Indigenous communities were being displaced from their ancestral homelands on the forced march known as the Trail of Tears. Over two million people of African descent were enslaved. And America’s first model minority, Afong Moy, was imported to New York: a 14-year-old girl with bound feet, made to perform for the […]
Posted inOn Culture
The end of Roe
Regarding the recently revealed U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade: WTF? Because, it’s the F we’re talking about, right? That little itch we’re biologically programmed to scratch and its inordinate, inequitable aftermath? As I’ve opined here before, if cisgender men were the ones carrying a pregnancy for nine months, suffering through an […]
Posted inMusic
Ufomammut come back from hiatus with renewed focus on Fenice
I’ve never been the type to have a single favorite artist (I’ve probably got 100, depending on the context or mood), but for more than a decade I’ve counted Italian psychedelic-metal group Ufomammut among the best bands on the planet. So in January 2020, when they announced that their drummer, Vito, was departing and that […]