And Chess Freak

“Before I met Colleen Taylor Sen in Chicago in May, she shared with me several lunch options, but I knew I had to have a sub-continental meal with her, for she is without doubt the most diligent chronicler of the culinary history of our part of the world than anyone else before and after the late KT Achaya,” Sourish Bhattacharyya writes for the Daily Mail.
“On Colleen’s suggestion, we had lunch at Mishthan, a Bangladeshi restaurant on Devon Avenue (Chicago’s Little India), which seemed far more appetizing than the competition.
“We were joined by her husband, Ashish Sen, an acclaimed authority on transportation statistics and an influential Democrat who has served the Clinton administration and is now the vice-chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority.”

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Posted on June 23, 2016

Plus: Martellus Bennett’s Black Kid Adventures

“Chicago-based artist Gina Wynbrandt’s Someone Please Have Sex With Me, released last month by indie comics publisher 2dcloud, is an intense, weird, vulnerable dive into the underbelly of young adulthood,” Julia Wright writes for Paste.
“As the title suggests, the 5-comic collection follows Gina, a horny woman making increasingly desperate, futile attempts to get laid.
“She smokes weed, stalks Justin Bieber and gets sexually bullied by anthropomorphic feral cats – all illustrated in lurid candy pinks, yellows and greens.
“In the proud tradition of gross-out alt-comics doyennes like Julie Doucet and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Wynbrandt revels in smashing the beauty myth, and she seems to be doing well at it.
“At age 25, she’s already been featured in The Best American Comics 2015 compilation, nominated for SPX’s prestigious Ignatz award for her comfort-zone-annihilating 2015 comic Big Pussy, and named one of five comics artists to watch by the LA Times.”
Click through for the interview.

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Posted on June 20, 2016

‘An All-Consuming Fire Of Comics Power’

“The Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) is a weekend-long celebration of independent comics, inspired by Chicago’s rich legacy as home to many of underground and alternative comics’ most talented artists – past, present and future. Featuring comics for sale, workshops, exhibitions, panel discussions and more, CAKE is dedicated to fostering community and dialogue amongst independent artists, small presses, publishers and readers.”
Or:
“An all-consuming fire of comics power.”
This year’s edition was held over the weekend. Let’s take a look.
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Come say hi! @cakechicago Table 22A 🍯💀 #honey #comic #illustration #drawing #horror #comix #cakechicago2016 #zines pic.twitter.com/V7fKmjidtk

— Corinne Halbert (@corinnehalbert) June 11, 2016

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Posted on June 13, 2016

By Gillian James/The Conversation

At the Hay Festival on June 2nd, Melvin Burgess received the Andersen Press Young Adult Book Prize Special Achievement Award for his novel Junk, first published 20 years ago. Since then, the young adult novel has come of age.
Burgess and his publisher, Andersen Press, took a risk when Junk was first released in 1996, when books for teenagers were hardly as gritty as the typical dystopian fare of today.
A book about drug addiction and prostitution aimed at “young adults” was then a very daring thing, and many thought that this was a book that was simply too depressing for the market and would languish on library shelves.
It was, after all, one in which 14- and 15-year-olds take high risks, living away from home in a squat and fueling their heroin addiction through theft.

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Posted on June 10, 2016

Plus: Meet The Chicago 9-Year-Old Loved In Prague

“The Kangbashi district of Ordos, China is a marvel of urban planning, 137-square miles of shining towers, futuristic architecture and pristine parks carved out of the grassland of Inner Mongolia. It is a thoroughly modern city, but for one thing: No one lives there,” Laura Mallonee writes for Wired.

Well, almost nobody. Kangbashi is one of hundreds of sparkling new cities sitting relatively empty throughout China, built by a government eager to urbanize the country but shunned by people unable to afford it or hesitant to leave the rural communities they know.
Chicago photographer Kai Caemmerer visited Kangbashi and two other cities for his ongoing series Unborn Cities. The photos capture the eerie sensation of standing on a silent street surrounded by empty skyscrapers and public spaces devoid of life. “These cities felt slightly surreal and almost uncanny,” Caemmerer says, “which I think is a product of both the newness of these places and the relative lack of people within them.”

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Posted on June 7, 2016

By Steve Rhodes

It would be easy to dismiss as partisan hackery the new memoir by U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, but amidst the passages highlighted by Politico this week, the ones on Barack Obama ring true. Let’s take a look.
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“Meetings with Obama all open the same way, McConnell writes. ‘Almost without exception, President Obama begins serious policy discussions by explaining why everyone else is wrong. After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you’ve missed about his brilliance.'”

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Posted on June 2, 2016