I’m sitting in a restaurant across the table from Ron Ernst, an indefatigable community activist from the northwest side. On the table before us are computer printouts showing dozens of parcels of property in the Jefferson Park tax increment financing district. Which, of course, is why Mayors Daley and Emanuel have loved TIFs almost as much as I love the Bulls. The city regularly takes underachieving parcels of land out of TIF districts so they don’t bring down the overall haul of taxes....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, April 4, 2017. Chicago “Dreamers” consider whether to stay in the U.S. or leave with deported family members The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. by their parents as children to work and study legally in the U.S. With President Donald Trump threatening to crackdown on undocumented immigrants, many local “Dreamers” are worried about their parents being deported and facing a difficult choice: stay in the U....

When I think of smell and art, I think of the vaguely astringent and gluey odor of the Art Institute. I have no idea what the source is, though I suspect it has more to do with displays and cleaning than with the actual art itself. But why shouldn’t we appreciate scent as an art the way we appreciate sound and vision and touch and even taste? (What is Next anyway but an ever-changing gallery with the art on plates instead of the wall?...

My parents immigrated with my older sister to the United States from Hong Kong in 1981. Soon after, I was born in Flint, Michigan, where I spent most of my childhood. There were a handful of Chinese families in Flint, and it was a close-knit group at one point, but it wasn’t until I moved to Chicago in 2009 at the age of 27 that I was able to familiarize myself with a larger Chinese community....

This year the Gene Siskel Film Center presents the 20th edition of its annual European Union Film Festival, with Chicago premieres of more than 60 new features. If you’re familiar with the fest, you know it’s one of the most vibrant and eclectic film gatherings the city has to offer, and this year’s edition includes new work by Olivier Assayas, Icíar Bollaín, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Dorris Dörrie, Bruno Dumont, François Ozon, Carlos Saura, Albert Serra, Lone Scherfig, and Thomas Lilti....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. The prolificacy of Future Drug-addled emotional Auto-Tune addict Future might be the hottest, trippiest rapper out there right now. His Free Bricks collaboration with Gucci Mane was the perfect way to close out 2016, and the two full-length records he released in the span of seven days last month were a really monumental way to kick off this year....

Ed Paschke almost never took a vacation. The six days a week he spent at his Rogers Park studio painting the vibrant, haunting portraits that were his trademark was vacation enough, Paschke’s son Marc once said. So special was the cluttered room on Howard Street that the artist called it the alchemist’s lair. After Paschke’s death at age 65 in 2004, Marc meticulously photographed the studio and carefully packed up its contents, with the hope that a gallery might one day re-create the place his father, a key Chicago Imagist, most loved to be....

Domu Chicago Apartments 610 N. Fairbanks Runner-Up Apartment People

Dental Salon 939 W. North Runner-Up Big City Dental

Girl & The Goat 809 W. Randolph

Rogers Park Runner-Up Bridgeport

In the final moments of Water by the Spoonful, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Quiara Alegría Hudes, Elliot, a veteran of the Iraq war, stands in a Puerto Rican rain forest. He’s about to spread the ashes of his aunt, the woman who raised him after his crack-addicted mother surrendered custody. Then he gets a text message: Elliot’s father has sold his house. This dramatic inertia is even more pronounced in a parallel story line involving a second set of characters, a quartet of recovering addicts who communicate with each other through an Internet forum for “crackheads....

Eyehategod The first Eyehategod LP in 14 years is due out in late May, and the band has just released a preview track from it, and holy crap, it’s fucking awesome. The new song, “Robitussin and Rejection,” is today’s 12 O’Clock Track, and it may as well be a cut off of Take as Needed for Pain. This is classic Eyehategod, front to back: the Sabbath-on-codeine riffs, the nihilistic and hateful lyrics of Mike IX Williams, the massive wall of guitars....

The sharpest political mind in southeastern Michigan belongs to a 15-year-old girl named Sadia. She’s not old enough to vote, nor is she a citizen—and neither are her parents. Plus she’s superbusy. She’s got school, and then because, birth order-wise, she sits somewhere in the middle of a gaggle of kids, some of whom have kids of their own, she spends a great deal of time caring for infant nieces and nephews, as she would if she hadn’t left Bangladesh for the Banglatown neighborhood of Detroit at the age of eight....

Most people don’t necessarily think “Chicago” as soon as you mention “Gothenburg, Sweden.” Alexi Front does, though. Gothenburg and Chicago, he explains, are both second cities. “They’re both cities that were built on the transport industry,” he says. “They’re both historically beer-drinking cities. And the people who are from second cities have a special mentality.” As Front sees it, that mentality involves (among other things) metal music. Front started out scheduling the fest for between Christmas and New Year’s, when nothing much was happening in Gothenburg....

AMC Lee Pace and Scoot McNairy on Halt and Catch Fire Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s latest attempt to own your Sunday night, is already drawing comparisons to Mad Men. Aside from being produced by the same cable network, they’re both period dramas (set in the 1980s and 1960s, respectively) that recall better days for the American economy. They both have mysterious, magnetic leading men who are flanked by sidekicks and subordinates struggling with their own ambitions....

25th Ward ward25.com/art-in-public-places-initiative Runner-Up Cloud Gate (aka the Bean)

architecture.org/tours/boat-tours Runner-Up Weird Chicago Tours

Because the corn flavor of Cheetos reminds her of elotes, Green says, she wanted to use mescal and lime in her drink. The only other ingredients were Metropolitan Krankshaft beer and the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos syrup, which she says tastes like spicy Corn Pops. “Like if you had your breakfast and took sriracha and topped it with that. I think it’s good. I would drink it.” Rim glass with crushed Cheetos, then light a Cheeto on fire and use it to smoke the glass....

For a city that’s in such close proximity to the dairy-filled state of Wisconsin, Chicago doesn’t have nearly enough cheese-centric destinations. Our neighbors to the north aren’t afraid to pile cheddar on anything on the menu, cocktails included, and you can hardly spit without hitting some sort of emporium off the side of the highway that’s filled with curds, dips, loafs, melts, and things you never imagined could be made out of cheese....