I thought Pete Shelley was going to die the night Buzzcocks played the Double Door in May 2010. The temperature hadn’t dropped much from its afternoon high of 90 degrees, and the club felt like a steam bath. Shelley’s hair had thinned and he’d put on a ton of weight since I’d last seen the British punk legends seven years earlier. He seemed to be suffering badly under the lights, and as he sweated through the band’s early punk-pop classics—”I Don’t Mind,” “Love You More,” “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)”—I wondered how many times he’d sung them since they first hit stores in 1978, and where his mind went while his body was tearing through them at breakneck speed....

Outsider R&B vet T. Valentine is no stranger to the Reader. He appeared in The Secret History of Chicago Music back in 2012, a dozen years after Norton released a compilation of his scattered, decades-long recordings, Hello Lucille … Are You A Lesbian? The title of the Norton album shares its name with Valentine’s 1985 seven-inch, a bizarre novelty record that made it into the rotation at Northwestern University’s student station, WNUR, and garnered a cult status as the years marched on....

First curated by Upended Productions artistic director Noelle Krim in 2004 during her time with the Neo-Futurists, this magical ambulatory experience is back. Audience members, in groups of 15, are Alice, following a harried white rabbit (a boisterous Caitlin Savage on my tour) throughout Wonderland—otherwise known as Evanston’s Main-Dempster Mile neighborhood. Be forewarned, there’s quite a bit of walking and stair-climbing involved in this 90-minute production, but your rabbit guide uses a buddy system to ensure nobody gets left behind....

If you want to go green this weekend, check out our list of Saint Patrick’s Day events. For those who want to avoid the Irish cheer (and the resulting puddles of vomit), there’s still plenty to do. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 3/11: Chicago’s mystery and crime writers come together for Murder and Mayhem in Chicago at Roosevelt University (430 S. Michigan), literaty festival featuring panel discussions and headlining speakers Sara Paretsky (Brush Back) and William Kent Krueger (Ordinary Grace)....

“One death is a tragedy,” Josef Stalin is reputed to have said. “A million deaths is a statistic.” Psychologists call this phenomenon the “collapse of compassion,” confirming in numerous studies that a person’s capacity to feel for others diminishes as the number of victims increases. Of course the reverse is also true: people respond most strongly to the suffering of a single person, which is why the Muscular Dystrophy Association began using the “poster child” as a fund-raising tool in the 1950s....

These Days thesedays.news @thesedays_news Runner-Up The Athletic

COURTESY OF BILLIONS CORPORATION Man or Astro-man? September is here and music-festival season is still going strong. The Hideout Block Party & A.V. Fest starts Friday night with a headlining set from Death Cab for Cutie—it will be one of their final shows with cofounder Chris Walla, who recently announced he’s leaving the band after a 17-year run. “Canadian songwriter Owen Pallett can devastate a festival crowd with just a violin and a string of loop pedals, but he’s done plenty more than that in 2014,” writes Sasha Geffen....

Pat Foley Chicago Blackhawks www.nhl.com/blackhawks/team/broadcasters Runner-Up Pat Hughes

The Purge, a surprise hit last year, takes place in a futuristic U.S. whose totalitarian government, hoping to exorcise homicidal impulses in the populace, has instituted an annual holiday during which all laws are suspended for one night. The premise of Americans celebrating their national identity through rape, murder, and robbery inspires all sorts of associations, from the genocide of Native Americans to more recent hate crimes, yet writer-director James DeMonaco shrewdly avoided any clear-cut allegory....

A social media firestorm of allegations of sexual harassment and emotional abuse ignited Tuesday afternoon and incinerated Dead Writers Collective, a six-year-old theater company, which announced this morning that it was closing for good. Schneider’s threats came back to bite him instead. Members of the theater community responded with messages of support for DeLay and began giving bad ratings to Dead Writers on Facebook. Then individual actors and crew members began to come forward with stories of bad behavior behind the scenes at Dead Writers and publicly announced their own resignations from the company....

See our roundup of musical events at the Chicago Humanities Festival. When you started out, how was it writing for groups that play contemporary classical, dealing mostly with notated music? Was it difficult for someone who’s essentially self-taught? And how do you feel about that—when you send something out, like to the Silk Road Ensemble, and your hands are no longer on it? I don’t have a lot of time to make what Ligeti called desk-drawer music....

Many filmmakers adapt books, but relatively few make movies that actually feel like books—that is, they achieve the sort of patience and interiority that come with reading. Judging from their second feature, Araby (which screens this week at the Film Center), Brazilian writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa belong to this select group. Araby is literary through and through, from its ample voice-over narration to its self-conscious dramatic structure to its perceptive observations of time’s passing....

Jake Malooley: We’re now two episodes into The Bachelor, season eleventy-thousand. Our bachelor is Nick Viall, a Wisconsin native who recently resided in Chicago before heading off to LA to become a career reality-show contestant. But in episode one the show made a desperate attempt to make it look like Nick still lives in Chicago, with shots of him walking around Michigan Avenue. What do you think? Is he trying to be the star of The Bachelor or is he really “trusting the process”?...

Before I started working for newspapers, I thought that being a food critic conferred upon one a certain kind of power: the ability to strike fear into the hearts of restaurant employees and send them scurrying to do one’s bidding, like in the scene in Ratatouille when Anton Ego finally comes to the restaurant, or the part in Ruth Reichl’s critic-in-disguise memoir Garlic and Sapphires when she finally gets so disgusted with a restaurant’s snooty service and terrible food that she pulls off her wig and unleashes her famous long, dark mane —and mythic New York Times-enhanced superpowers....

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Mitch Albom questions the ancient tradition of championship sports teams visiting the White House for a photo op with the president. “It is surely their right to do so as Americans,” Albom allows. “It is also rude.” “I’m guessing half the athletes who have visited the White House over the years didn’t vote for the man occupying it,” writes Albom. “So what? You can respect the office. The tradition. The reverence of our flawed but still-beautiful democratic system....