Around this time of the year you’ll begin to hear the phrase “the giving season.” It’s the moment when donation-dependent organizations ramp up their campaigns in the hopes of being included in the gifting air that comes in on a wind of mailers, calls, and fundraisers. For the Nonprofit Issue, we thought it would be […]
Author Archives: Salem Collo-Julin
Posted inFeature
The Reader’s 2023 Holiday Gift Guide
1 Chicago stepping lessons from award-winning south sider Shaun Ballentine of Effortless Stepping. —Salem Collo-Julin Open group lessons Wednesdays at 7 PM, Effortless Stepping Studio, 1850 E. 79th. $20 per person, 21+ only. For private lesson rates or information about having Ballentine do a stepping class at your event, message through Instagram or Facebook. 2 […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Editor’s note: rats!
When I was around five years old, my mother and I were standing on Canal Street near what is now called the Ogilvie Transportation Center. I had my back to the street, eyes on my mom. There was a rumbling under the ground and I remember watching the aglet from my shoelace shake a little. […]
Posted inCity Life
Chris Hayes, off screen
Chris Hayes reaches a larger audience with his MSNBC show All In With Chris Hayes than he did when he first wrote for the Reader in 2001, but his sense of curiosity and sensitivity to the complexities of politics has stayed the same. 2023 has been a year of anniversaries for Hayes at the network. […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Editor’s note: we need each other
In late August, the Chicago Sun-Times calculated that more than 13,000 immigrants had arrived in Chicago since August 2022, when Texas governor Greg Abbott started his busing scheme. While our city is navigating the care and feeding of all our people, and not always getting it perfect, we’ve received an influx of even more people […]
Posted inMusic
The Reader’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2023
In July, I attended a community meeting at the Broadway Armory in Edgewater about the city’s plan to turn the Park District facility into a temporary shelter for asylum seekers. A group of protesters, angry that much of the armory’s programming would be relocated or otherwise disrupted, carried bright yellow signs reading “Don’t Displace Us.” […]
Posted inStaff notes
Pride is our reality
The best way to make a TikTok name for yourself is by making constant, short, pithy videos about the same subject, including your possibly controversial opinions (but not, like, in a Mein Kampf way, just in a “Finally! Someone said it, and they said it well!” kind of tone that travels well in social sharing), […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best internationally known drag pageant system based in Chicago
The art of drag has been around for centuries, and today’s drag ball scene can trace its roots to post-Civil War Harlem, when Hamilton Lodge No. 710 began hosting regular competitions. The modern drag pageant evolved from one-off nights in bars, clubs, and rented banquet halls, to several pageant systems throughout the country; if you’ve […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best chance to hear an octogenarian tell a story about getting it on
Grown Folks Stories manages to do the thing that other storytelling events sometimes fall short of: center the human experience. At Grown Folks, the five-minute stories from Chicagoans who represent a variety of stages of life, backgrounds, and perspectives are always real accounts from daily life. Each night has a loose theme, but mainly nonprofessional […]
Posted inCity Life
Best industrial park to meet ghost cows in
For our Best of Chicago 2019 issue, I wrote about meeting someone in my south-side neighborhood who had grown up outside of the Chicago stockyards, and had memories of a cow that escaped the corral and was chased south on Racine Street by a stockyard worker on horseback. I’ve since heard from several neighbors and […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best of Chicago: Guess what? We love it here.
I am fond of scrolling through Instagram’s stories feature, where you sometimes get to see “reposts,” items created by other people that the accounts you actually follow on the app have scooched over to their stories to share with everyone. It feels like walking by people’s house windows and catching a glimpse of the art […]
Posted inFeature
The year in photography
For the cover of our last print issue of 2022, we wanted to capture the spirit of the year, as we see it, in our own Reader way. We asked photographer Carolina Sanchez to see if she could find a street musician who was being ignored, a situation which many can relate to as the […]
Posted inAgenda
Beyond the Nutcracker, Holiday Detour film series, and more
Ballet 5:8 presents Beyond the Nutcracker, a take on Tchaikovsky with a twist: there’s no Clara, but instead we meet Emma, a young girl growing up in the shadow of WWII. Artistic director Julianna Rubio Slager’s choreography gets away from some of the problematic imagery in the Chinese dance by using the motif of the […]
Posted inAgenda
A Night at the Museum, holiday theater, and more
Chance the Rapper’s youth empowerment charity organization, SocialWorks, hosts their annual A Night at the Museum event tonight at the Museum of Science and Industry (5700 S. DuSable Lake Shore Dr.). It’s a family-focused evening that benefits unhoused people and organizations that serve them; guests are invited to support the effort by bringing new and/or […]
Posted inAgenda
Tree lighting, seasonal shopping, no coast hip-hop, and more
’Tis the season for unbridled consumerism masking as some of us insisting that “gift giving is my love language!” While we can’t stop the avalanche of gifting that is already in motion (although Reverend Billy would disagree), we can encourage you to check out some local pop-up holiday markets and consider purchasing directly from Chicago […]