“Selfie!” a Sketchbook audience member yelled when asked to toss out a word that best sums up the state of civilization. The word also happens to accurately describe Sketchbook 14: 2049, Collaboraction’s festival of 17 new short plays. As the “2049” might indicate, this year’s fest has a postapocalyptic theme, but the offerings seem to mirror our current digitally driven times, giving us many a self-absorbed character high on pain, loneliness, and futility....

Kate Joyce Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House Last Thursday evening, Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House in Plano was bathed in computer-controlled lights in intricate sequences and patterns. A team of artists called Luftwerk—namely, Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero—was previewing for the press its forthcoming installation INsite at the 2,400-square-foot home, a modernist glass box that used to be a secluded escape for Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago nephrologist....

Remember Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, when we placed fourth behind Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, and Tokyo? 1. He left his heart in San Francisco. Well, yes, there are reportedly more than 50 Norman Rockwell paintings. That potentially leaves about 499,950 plastic light sabers and Yoda mugs. 2. We have no idea what’s in his collection of a half-million objects. 3. No one’s told us what would make the Lucas museum a worthy peer to the world-class institutions that would be its siblings on the museum campus....

Only the most miserable cad would not wish good things to come to Thai and Danielle Dang. The chef and beverage director were, as Crain’s reported, the victims of an audacious scam perpetrated by their former partners at the now defunct West Loop restaurant Embeya. The Dangs lost not only their jobs, but a fortune, by industry standards, in money and equipment. Similar advice could be taken about a few of the braised dishes....

The summer I was 12, there was nothing I wanted more than an aquarium. (I had given up on a horse, settling for what I believed to be more realistic obsession.) I ripped out probably the entire pet store section of the Yellow Pages and, armed with that and a map, begged my grandmother to drive me from place to place in search of electric-hued tropical fish and neon gravel and mermaid figurines and whatever else a fish tank required....

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5148 N. Clark 773-334-9851 hopleaf.com Runner-Up Revolution Brewing

Let’s face it: there’s no way this is going to be a definitive list of the best books of 2015. There were too many books that came out this year and too few reviewers to read them all. Plus, there are some books you’re just more interested in reviewing than others, either because you have definite preferences in authors or genres or because you’re more willing to accept certain recommendations than others....

Jamie Hayes Production Mode http://jamielhayes.com Runner-Up Meg Musick-Makely

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One of the most commanding, entertaining critics of contemporary culture, Roxane Gay is never one to shy away from tough topics. The 41-year-old writer and Purdue University associate professor tackled rape in her 2014 novel An Untamed State, race and gender in the essay collection Bad Feminist that same year, and since being named a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times in March has weighed in on everything from Sandra Bland’s death at the hands of police to the bizarre reality-TV mating ritual of The Bachelorette....

I’m most looking forward to cooking dishes with fresh squash and also to going back to school—I’m taking some science classes! —Lydia Fu, illustrator and organizer at the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media I’m really excited for this upcoming Soulection tour happening, and I’m really excited to hear new music from Eryn Allen Kane and a project from Noname! —Sahar Habibi, local DJ playing the Sound of Tomorrow Presented by Soulection on October 25...

David Grubbs teaches classes in creative writing, performance, music, and technology at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, and before he arrived in New York 15 years ago, he lived and played in bands in Chicago. A Louisville native, he’d moved here in 1990 to attend grad school at the University of Chicago, but if you knew about him then, you probably knew him as a musician. His trio Bastro, founded in Washington, D....

AP Photo/The Oregonian, Beth Nakamura Big business Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • That descendants of the women who personified Aunt Jemima pancake mix are suing for their share of the profits? —Tony Adler • That HBO Go will finally be available for the cableless among us? —Brianna Wellen

Dusek’s is a place where you can get a plate on which everything is arranged in an arty straight line of dribs and globs (and the plate will be too wide to comfortably fit your two-top). It’s also a place where you can have a cheeseburger that oozes goo at you like a deep-fried Twinkie at the county fair. For Dusek’s take on a semiobscure midwest specialty, the Juicy Lucy (in which American cheese is melted inside two patties), chef Jared Wentworth starts with a kind of cheddar Mornay sauce that he slips between two patties of Slagel Family Farm beef....

In the past year the University of Chicago Film Studies Center has hosted an astonishing range of programs at Logan Center for the Arts: a new 35-millimeter print of Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968); a recently concluded series of Chinese opera films, copresented by the Smart Museum of Art; and a double bill, copresented by South Side Projections, of the Kartemquin Films documentary Trick Bag (1974), with director Peter Kuttner in attendance, and the cinema verite classic No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968)....

Once upon a time, when a label existed specifically to release a musician’s own output, it was called a vanity label. These days, though, putting out your own music is simply a smart decision. Lots of Chicagoans are doing it, some with imprints of their own and many more through Bandcamp, Datpiff, or similar platforms—but Aerophonic, the label that Dave Rempis started last year, stands out in the crowd. It casts the saxophonist in a flattering light as an improviser, collaborator, and aesthete: the album covers all bear sharp, geometric artwork by Johnathan Crawford, and the six releases so far capture Rempis in an impressive variety of instrumental contexts, including his working bands the Rempis Percussion Quartet and Wheelhouse....