• Minority Business Development Agency Awards Nearly $2 Million to Historically Black Colleges and Universities

    Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), announced grant awards of nearly $2 million to four Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — including $499,497 for Clark Atlanta University to develop a STEM entrepreneurship curriculum that increases student interest in the innovation economy at three Atlanta University Center Consortium campuses.
    In June this year, MBDA invited HBCUs to propose projects that will
  • Settler’s Prayer to La Linda Nasca

    Settler’s Prayer to La Linda Nasca
    By Amina Kayani
    The post Settler’s Prayer to La Linda Nasca appeared first on Chicago Reader.
  • Review: Wildcat

    Review: Wildcat
    Flannery O’Connor wrote some of the most honest stories about Americans and their many flaws that anyone has ever put to paper. A woman of the south, crippled by lupus as well as the region’s prejudices, O’Connor created characters as funny and cursed as she was, by all accounts.  Ethan Hawke and his daughter, Maya, […]
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  • Review: Unfrosted

    Review: Unfrosted
    Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut is not about nothing. It purports to chronicle the 1960s cereal wars between Battle Creek, Michigan–based rivals Kellogg’s and Post and the desperate scramble to be the first to create a toastable breakfast pastry. In historical fidelity, it is about as factual as Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which more successfully […]
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  • Review: The Fall Guy

    Review: The Fall Guy
    Watching the trailer, one would be forgiven for assuming that The Fall Guy is a vehicle for two of the most popular, attractive actors of our time—Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer) and Ryan Gosling (Barbie)—to score an easy win with an action-romance film coming off their stellar Barbenheimer successes. However, what makes this film great is not […]
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  • Review: Chicken for Linda!

    Review: Chicken for Linda!
    Astounding, vivid, and lively, this animated film directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach follows a relatively simple story to deep effect. Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) is a little girl wrongfully accused of selling her mother’s ring. After the ring is found, her mother (Clotilde Hesme) asks what she can do to make up for the […]
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  • Kim Foxx’s DNC preparations, Uptown SRO hotel, guaranteed income

    Kim Foxx’s DNC preparations, Uptown SRO hotel, guaranteed income
    Foxx prepares for DNC showdown Kim Foxx has a message for people planning to take to the streets when the Democratic National Convention comes to town in August: don’t. The outgoing Cook County state’s attorney told the pearl-clutching Chicago Tribune editorial board she’s scrapping her office’s policy of declining to prosecute peaceful protestors for the […]
    The post Kim Foxx’s DNC preparations, Uptown SRO hotel, guaranteed income appeared first on Chicago
  • Film logs, benshi, and Pedro Costa

    Film logs, benshi, and Pedro Costa
    The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. For the past several years, my moviegoing log has been a Google Sheet; only somewhat more recently have I again taken to Letterboxd to log titles (having joined and then abandoned […]
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  • CSU’s 371st Commencement Features AG Raoul as Keynote Speaker, Honors Montes and Rhymefest

    CSU’s 371st Commencement Features AG Raoul as Keynote Speaker, Honors Montes and Rhymefest
    Chicago State University will host its 371st commencement ceremony on May 9 at the Emil & Patricia A. Jones Convocation Center.
    As a beacon of academic excellence and community empowerment, CSU continues to honor distinguished individuals who have made significant contributions in their respective fields. This year, CSU will host Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul as its keynote speaker and will award Peggy A. Montes and Che “Rhymefest” Smith with the Honorary Degrees of Docto
  • Caregivers Honored at Inaugural ‘Dear Me Care Circle’

    Caregivers Honored at Inaugural ‘Dear Me Care Circle’
    L-R Dear Me Care Circle founder Wynona Redmond with Leader of Heart Award recipient Bobbie Steele, former Cook County Board President (Photo courtesy of Wyn-Win Communications).
    The launch of a new group for caregivers was held on April 27 at the Hyatt Chicago Medical/University District. 
    A full room of caregivers and the family and friends who love them attended the Dear Me Care Circle Pre-Mother’s Day Brunch. 
    Themed “Love Bears All Things,” the event honored famil
  • Black TikToker Claims Restaurant Retaliated Against Her After Poor Review

    Black TikToker Claims Restaurant Retaliated Against Her After Poor Review
    Photo: GoFundMe
    A TikTok user claims a Pennslyvania restaurant owner is retaliating against her after she left a poor review, per the Atlanta Black Star.
    Melissa, known as @kissedbymel on TikTok, said she initially left a poor Google review about Gordo’s Tacos & Tequila on Jan. 12. When she complained about the lack of corn in her meal, Melissa said workers had an attitude with her on the phone and hung up on her multiple times.
    Following the incident, Melissa alleges the restaurant sh
  • Gỏi vịt (duck salad) at Nhà Hàng Vietnam Restaurant

    Gỏi vịt (duck salad) at Nhà Hàng Vietnam Restaurant
    Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at [email protected]. “The duck is better,” a server might tell you if you’re caught dithering between the gỏi gà and gỏi vịt at this […]
    The post Gỏi vịt (duck salad) at Nhà Hàng Vietnam Restaurant appeared first on C
  • Closing time

    On Friday, November 17, members of the Berlin Union and the lawyer for the beloved Lakeview queer club met for what workers didn’t know would be their last bargaining session. Staff, party hosts, DJs, and patrons were riding the high from a successful four-week boycott. For months, the club’s owners, Jim Schuman and Jo Webster, […]
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  • ‘Black Love Reigns Supreme’ at U of C’s Logan Center, Friday and Saturday

    ‘Black Love Reigns Supreme’ at U of C’s Logan Center, Friday and Saturday
    A scene from the theatrical production, “Black Love Reigns Supreme” (All Photos courtesy of Praize Productions, Inc.)
    “Quote:” We want the audience to take away from this experience a profound sense of truthfulness and love within our culture, a genuine presentation of our stories. – Enneréssa LaNette Davis, CEO and Founder of PPI
    “Black Love” is a cultural movement and a concept within the Black community that is exhibited in romantic r
  • Bears Promote Tanesha Wade to Executive VP of DEI & Chief Impact Officer

    Bears Promote Tanesha Wade to Executive VP of DEI & Chief Impact Officer
    Following a transformative NFL Draft weekend, the Chicago Bears have taken another significant step to fortify their organization. The team has announced the promotion of Tanesha Wade to the role of executive vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion and chief impact officer, underscoring their commitment to these values.
    She will be promoted from her previous job as the Bears’ senior vice president of the DEI department. Tanesha Wade has been promoted to executive vice presi
  • ‘Minstrel Show Black’: Makeup Brand Slammed Over New Foundation Shade

    ‘Minstrel Show Black’: Makeup Brand Slammed Over New Foundation Shade
    Photo: Getty Images
    A makeup company is facing backlash for releasing a “minstrel show black” shade of foundation amid criticism that its initial shade range wasn’t inclusive for people with darker complexions.
    The backlash against makeup brand Youthforia began after Golloria George, a Black beauty creator on TikTok, reviewed the company’s Date Night Skin Tint Serum last year. Of the 15 shades Youthforia released, George said none of them matched her skin, and she accuse
  • ‘Chicago is in my DNA’

    ‘Chicago is in my DNA’
    The phrase “love letter” is often overused in reviews, but when author Arionne Nettles calls her new book “a love letter to the city that raised me,” it’s entirely fitting. In We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything, Nettles weaves her personal memories of growing up in Chicago with reporting and historical research […]
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  • This Week In Black History May 1-7. 2024

    This Week In Black History May 1-7. 2024
    MAY 1
    1866—The two-day Memphis, Tenn., race riots, one of the most savage events immediately fol­lowing the civil war, begins. When it was over, former Confederate soldiers, angered by the loss of the Civil War and the new status for Blacks, had killed 46 Blacks and two of their White supporters, as well as raped five Black women and torched over 90 homes, schools and churches. In support of the rebel soldiers, local police arrest­ed hundreds of Blacks and not the Whites who were r
  • Review: The Hills

    Review: The Hills
    Steel promised many immigrants the American dream, but it ultimately left them high and dry, stuck cleaning up the messes made by the mills that prospered and faded away.  “If there’s soot on the windows, there’s food on the table.” This popular saying signified the success of opportunity in the southeast side of Chicago. However, […]
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  • Review: I Saw the TV Glow

    Review: I Saw the TV Glow
    Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s highly anticipated sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow is both a tribute to millennium kid culture and a genre-defying trans coming-of-age thriller. On election night 2000, seventh-grader Owen (Justice Smith) connects with ninth-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) after seeing her reading an episode guide for The Pink Opaque. It’s a show about […]
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  • Review: Flipside

    Review: Flipside
    Flipside is a cluttered, largely forgotten New Jersey record store that’s drawn the focus of director Christopher Wilcha in this documentary—sort of. Wilcha worked at Flipside as a teenager in the late 1980s. In middle age, he returns to the place that shaped his iconoclastic values out of a desire to reexamine his own life. […]
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  • Review: Challengers

    Review: Challengers
    Few young stars have had a rise as meteoric and seemingly inevitable as Zendaya. From an Emmy-winning turn as a drug-addicted teen in HBO’s gritty high school drama Euphoria to playing the woman lead in a pair of sci-fi blockbuster epics (and finding time to be a style icon in the meantime), the 27-year-old has […]
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  • Ritual and realism

    Ritual and realism
    MPAACT resident writer Shepsu Aakhu does something remarkable in this gentle, metaphysical play. He creates a world that successfully blends ritual and realism without succumbing to the weaknesses of either ungrounded otherworldliness or mind-numbing mundanity. Instead, Aakhu gives us a play that reveals the spiritual power in everyday life. Based in part on the Burr […]
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  • Goofs, glorious goofs

    Goofs, glorious goofs
    Could you call Chris Dritsas’s and Zach Hacker’s musical comedy a parody? They probably wouldn’t fight you on it, but I might—the gags, send-ups, and compositions here (music by John Love) are just too original and clever to be confused with rote, overt spoofs like Forbidden Broadway. Rather, Little Orphan Boy is a parody in […]
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  • A gripping Hamlet

    A gripping Hamlet
    A tormented young man is visited by the ghost of his recently slain father, who asks the son to avenge his death at the hands of his own brother—who, to add insult to injury, has taken his job and married his wife (the young man’s mother). The son has friends and enemies but mostly battles […]
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  • Edging push their punk to the point of no return

    Edging push their punk to the point of no return
    Edging tend a joyful garden of chaos amid the decaying concrete of Chicago. On social media, the five-piece band describe themselves as “landscaper punks” because their three founding members connected through landscaping jobs. They also know something about how to prep soil to grow raucous rock ’n’ roll. Their music is a ravenous jungle of […]
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  • Middleton of the road

    Middleton of the road
    Self-indulgent. A blunt word, yet little else feels appropriate for a show that ran three hours and eight minutes—from late start to the end of curtain call—when it is said to be two hours and forty-five minutes. An adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (by Kevin V. Smith and Daiva Bhandari and directed by […]
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  • Bo Durham is Mindy Segal’s right-hand man

    Bo Durham is Mindy Segal’s right-hand man
    We’re not trying to say that alongside every great woman is a fabulous gay bestie, but Bo Durham has certainly been just that for his mentor, James Beard Award–winning pastry chef Mindy Segal. Over the past decade, the pair have been together at restaurant Hot Chocolate, Hot Chocolate Bakery at Revival Food Hall, and now […]
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  • A new genocide exhibit opens at the Holocaust Museum

    A new genocide exhibit opens at the Holocaust Museum
    This week, as demonstrations charging Israel with genocide in Gaza ramped up on college campuses across the country, the staff of the Illinois Holocaust Museum was preparing for the May 1 opening of a new permanent exhibit they’d been planning for four years. Housed in the museum’s towerlike Hall of Reflection, it would be a […]
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  • Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15

    Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15
    Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15. May 2, 2024
    The post Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15 appeared first on Chicago Reader.

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