Yes, it can be annoying when the only obstacle between you and one of the most magnificent pastries you will ever eat is a tongue twister of a name. But it’s not so hard. Just say “queen ah-mahn.” It means “butter cake” in Breton, the language traditionally spoken in Brittany, in northwest France. What should really annoy you is that Bretons have been making this magnificent confection—composed of dozens of layers of pastry and salted butter covered in a crust of caramelized sugar—for at least 150 years, but until recently it was virtually unknown in the U....

AP Photos Rahm Emanuel: Once an ambitious, calculating political operative, always an ambitious, calculating political operative. Having nothing better to do on a lovely Friday, I’ve spent the better part of my day taking a trip through the hidden caverns of Mayor Emanuel’s brain. Apparently, there was a 12-year embargo on releasing documents—like the Emanuel memos—as part of a larger federal initiative to keep Americans ignorant about the crummy stuff their government is up to....

The meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011 is still raw in the minds of many. That’s partly the basis for Blue Fish II, a conceptual performance piece from Chicagoan and native of Japan Ayako Kato of Art Union/Humanscape. The latest installment of her Blue Fish series takes place November 14 and 15 at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the third annual SpinOff contemporary dance series, presented by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events....

Marc ROUSSEL/Wikimedia Commons Sacre bleu! Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • This chilling interview with Peter Lanza, father of Adam, the Sandy Hook killer? —Aimee Levitt

Manley used his apples two ways: he grilled some over an open fire, cooked them down even more, and then blended them with milk, cream, sugar, and egg yolks to make an ice cream base. The rest he macerated with sugar and malic acid (to make up for the lack of tartness in the apples themselves). After being cooked down, the apples served as the filling for a crabapple strudel....

The city’s fortunate to be home to a galaxy of independent groceries, many of them catering to specific ethnic groups. More rare is the outlet that can successfully target the wildly diverse demographics of neighborhoods like Lincoln Square. At Harvestime Foods, older Greek and Latino residents shop side by side with newer eastern Europeans and soldiers in the young, white stroller mafia. Harvestime stocks hard-to-find Greek imports like maras and isot pepper, honey, and house-made loukaniko sausage—and those items share shelf space with higher-end specialty products like local Amish chickens, duck bacon, cage-free eggs, Swedish yogurt, Polish mineral water, and a complete collection of German Ritter Sport chocolate bars, as well as some of the brightest, freshest, occasionally local produce on the north side....

Brett Schneider promises an evening of magic—card tricks, mind reading, and small-scale hypnotism—but what he delivers is something much richer and more satisfying. Working in a performance space configured so that the audience surrounds him on all sides, he pulls us in, using his art to first entertain us, then beguile us, and then unite us into a shared experience (I wanted just now to write “shared hallucination,” but part of me still wants, days after the show, to believe that Schneider’s evening of amazing illusions were real)....

Chicago drone-doom veterans Buried at Sea haven’t had much chance to enjoy the cult following they’ve developed since parting ways in the mid-aughts. The shows on their current west-coast tour are their first since 2011, when they played the Alehorn of Power festival—and at that point, it’d been nearly seven years since their previous gig. The hugeness and density of Migration make it sound thrilling and terrifying even today, which is saying a lot considering the exponential gains in prestige and popularity that doom metal has enjoyed during the past ten years....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, February 1, 2017. Report: The racial wealth gap in Chicago is much higher than the U.S. average Wealth inequality between whites and blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Chicago is much higher than the national average, according to a new study from the Corporation for Enterprise Development. The median income for whites is $70,960 “compared with $56,373 for Asians, $41,188 for Latinos and $30,303 for blacks,” according to the Tribune....

“I like historical comics and how they convey history in such a readable way. I also like how this one conveys the ‘can-do’ kind of midwest mind-set.”—Eric Kirsammer, our Comics Issue curator, on why he chose Cass’s comic (CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO READ A COMIC)

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, February 10, 2017. Have a great weekend! With the power of Obama’s backing, alderman Sophia King has raised nearly $200,ooo Fourth Ward alderman Sophia King has raised nearly $200,000 for the February 28 special election, largely thanks to an endorsement from former president Barack Obama. Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed King to replace former alderman Will Burns, and she’s facing four challengers for her seat....

Any new example of the burgeoning peril to American mindhood is sure to make news. Monday’s Tribune carries an op-ed from CNN contributor S.E. Cupp, who is more concerned than she needs to be about a guide to “bias-free language” that until recently was posted on the University of New Hampshire website. It might be possible to criticize a guide of this nature without leaning on Orwell, but Cupp fails the test....

Founded by Lance Eliot Adams in 2012, the Bridgeport Film Club is a group of independent producers, directors, editors, and screenwriters who help create and finance each other’s movies. Through its Filmmaker Work Exchange program the club offers both established and aspiring artists access to its stable of screenwriters, storyboard artists, and crew members, provided they’re willing to get their hands dirty on a fellow member’s project in return. This process ensures that multiple films are in various stages of production at once, and members float between sets, pitching in wherever needed....

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BJ the Chicago Kid is ostensibly an R&B traditionalist: he’s reimagined Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a posthumous duet with the singer, he repeatedly alludes to the importance of the church in his lyrics, and he even sang the national anthem at President Obama’s farewell address here in Chicago. But it’d probably be more accurate to call BJ a restless polymath—for every reference to religion there’s a lyric about how he’s still looking for a lady friend, and for every homage to the Prince of Soul there’s a whole mixtape of Usher covers....

Contempo, the long-running new-music organization at the University of Chicago, casts a welcome light on five important female composers from Europe with this rigorous program performed by locals Ensemble dal Niente and the Kontras Quartet along with Polish pianist Pawel Checinski, expat Moldovan bayan virtuoso Stas Venglevski, and mezzo-­soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a founding member of Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. While the connective tissue between the pieces doesn’t extend much beyond gender, geography, and modernist impulses, they undeniably share a dark power....

When I wrote earlier this month about the joys and tribulations of being a Saint Louis native and rabid Cardinals fan in Chicago, I had in mind a more complex story. I wanted to add to the mix my opposite: a Saint Louis writer who’s an unabashed Cubs fan. And I knew who I wanted that fan to be: Bill McClellan, a Chicago native and the longtime city columnist for the St....

One of the albums I’ve been looking forward to this year is Common’s Nobody’s Smiling, which is set to come out in the spring—it’s the Chicago rapper’s first full-length since 2011’s The Dreamer/The Believer, and like that album it’ll be entirely produced by fellow Windy City native and hip-hop heavyweight No I.D. Yesterday Common dropped “Made in Black America,” a killer soul-sampling number in which he invokes Malcolm X and Reservoir Dogs....