According to the History Channel’s The History of Sex, the ancient Romans ate a specific plant for birth control purposes. It was described as being enormously effective, to the extent that it was extinct by the fall of the empire. I’m sure a quick Web search would tell me the story of a worthless little herb, but I’d like to hear you weigh in on this long-lost miracle drug. –Brett, Memphis...

Popular opinion holds that gasoline is unstable and lasts six months at the most; some claim it loses its “edge” after as little as two weeks. Practical experience seems to show that gasoline can be stored without special precautions for years with no noticeable deterioration. Storage conditions are supposed to make a huge difference, but in my observation they don’t. What’s the straight dope on this? –Sean Costall, via e-mail...

Georgette Heyer’s 1936 novel may be propelled by the French revolution, a stolen ring, and an English nobleman wrongfully accused of murder, but adapter Christina Calvit focuses on his rescuers–among them two charming young viragos enamored of Ann Radcliffe’s shivery thrillers. The results make for a tea-and-swashbuckling romp even more giddily playful in this revival than it was in Lifeline Theatre’s 1996 premiere. Kevin Gawley’s labyrinthine set, Elizabeth Powell Shaffer’s fairy-tale costumes, Victoria DeIorio’s rousing incidental music, Geoff Coates’s exhilarating fights, Ann Wakefield’s perfect dialects, and Dorothy Milne’s nimble cast deliver lighter-than-air intrigue sure to please romantics of all ages....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » GRAHAM PARKER & THE FIGGS In the mid-90s former angry young man Graham Parker gave up on a decade-plus-long pursuit of adult contemporary success and returned to the mix of pub rock, soul, and pop rock that made him a musical godfather to Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Joe Jackson. But on some of the records he’s made since then he’s tried too hard to capture a snarling punk energy that he never had even in his heyday, possibly overcompensating in order to make his righteous indignation at the state of the world crystal clear....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no doubt that conservative know-nothingism regarding stem cells, climate change, and evolution is the main menace right now, if only because it rules all three branches of the federal government. Mooney dissects the falsehoods and deception well, and his emphasis is in the right place. David Epstein reports that in June there’d been an unsuccessful attack on a colleague: “The Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals....

A few months after anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli “accidentally” fell from a fourth-story window while being interrogated by the Milan police for a bombing he didn’t commit, playwright provocateur Dario Fo wrote and toured this caustic satire of the sordid affair, indicting the police a year before the lead investigator was actually charged with manslaughter in 1971. Director Linda Gillum’s high-octane revival boasts a thrillingly ugly set by Keith Pitts and a cast of skilled, committed performers....

Baltimore pipe-organ repairman Caleb Johnston is touring with an organ of his own devising, reverse engineered from several vacuum cleaners, and he plays it like a little kid abusing a thrift-store Casio, leaning heavily on a few keys or absentmindedly wandering over them all. He performs in incomplete sentences–you get the feeling he’d be spinning a grim fairy tale if only he’d fill in the blanks, but his languorous fogs lack verbs and his twinkling tufts lack subjects....

An average spectator might observe a skateboarder as nothing but a person on wheels; they see an athlete—or a delinquent, maybe—pushing and coasting and jumping (“How does the board stick to the bottom of their feet?”), there one minute and gone the next. But from the rider’s perspective, the world is transforming around them. Minute […] Kick off the summer with these events. Many organizations have decided to postpone or cancel public events in light of ongoing concerns about COVID-19....

Scraping bowls is for pussies. This Colorado band, which calls its brand of metal “Rocky Mountain hydrogrind,” titled an early demo Scrape My Lungs–that’s what real potheads do when their dealer won’t answer their pages. Cephalic Carnage got started in the early 90s, just as the Norwegian black-metal scene was reaching its apex of crazy (when Mayhem guitarist Euronymous discovered the shotgun suicide of his bandmate Dead in 1991, he snapped some Polaroids, then supposedly supped on his friend’s brains), but despite their love for blastbeats and demonic vocals, these guys have never fooled around much with corpse paint or cannibalism....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The gamer blog Kotaku is reporting that Electronic Arts’ Chicago branch is shutting down (h/t Miles), putting nearly 150 people out of work and calling into question the future of the Fight Night and Def Jam franchises. Sports games are pretty much all I play, which means I play a lot of EA games, since they have an unfortunate stranglehold on the medium (the Madden franchise is great, but their baseball games are mediocre and their monopoly destroyed the promising, wonderfully playable ASB franchise)....

Perhaps no other figure in pop-culture history knew the true meaning of “15 minutes of fame” quite like Edie Sedgwick, the original celebutante. Attractive, precocious, and famous for being famous, she ended her career rolling around, naked and high as shit, at the bottom of an empty swimming pool in Ciao Manhattan, filmed not long before she OD’d in 1971. Clad in a blond bob wig, heavy and uncareful makeup, a silver minidress, black tights, and cha-cha heels, Justin Moyer performs as a spectral Edie, though he looks more like a dollar-store drag queen when he slides around the stage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because Goldberg read Caplan carelessly (or was done in by an editor), he misdates a comment usually attributed to a speech Smith gave in Albany in 1933. It’s in Goldberg’s interest (and Caplan’s) to dismiss the comment as naive or demagogic. But consider the times (1933, not 1928). The U.S. and the world were four years into the Depression....

A thing Larry Gorski has learned in more than 20 years of hauling away other people’s garbage is that no one bothers to hide anything from the junk man. “You can’t believe what goes on in this city,” he says. The owner of one apartment he called on had stockpiled more than 500 bottles of his own urine, each neatly capped with plastic wrap secured by a rubber band. Some of it was in the fridge....

AMAZONIA: FIVE YEARS AT THE EPICENTER OF THE DOT.COM JUGGERNAUT Hyperion Greg Williams CUBA AND ITS MUSIC: FROM THE FIRST DRUMS TO THE MAMBO Though it’s 600 pages long, the book doesn’t get beyond 1952, the year of Batista’s second coup–Sublette’s working on another volume. But the commentary on artists like Septeto Nacional, Machito, Arsenio Rodrigues, and Perez Prado is astute and illuminating. Sublette also takes care to address the island’s codependent political and cultural relationship to the U....

On her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom sang like a 1920s barnstormer, so eager to test the aerobatic limits of her high-pitched, raw-edged voice with dizzying swoops, spins, and dives that she didn’t seem to care if she crashed and burned in the process. On its successor, Ys (Drag City), the music climbs to the same spectacular heights as the singing: the five songs total nearly an hour, but their length is more than justified by the richness and drama of the orchestration, courtesy of legendary arranger Van Dyke Parks....

Darkly funny and metaphorically potent, this Hungarian debut feature by writer-director Nimrod Antal takes place entirely within the Budapest subway, where the honor system is enforced by roving teams of ticket inspectors. Their shabby esprit de corps is their only defense against the uniform contempt of the riders, and they settle intramural feuds by racing each other from one station to the next as trains bear down on them. Heading one crew of misfits is a philosophical loner (Sandor Csanyi) who’s broken off his relationship with the sun and sleeps on the platforms at night; the poles of his emotional life are an alluring but mysterious young woman (Eszter Balla) who walks around in an animal costume and a hooded killer who shoves unsuspecting riders onto the tracks....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones has been hosting a lively conversation in response to the New York Times article mentioned on this blog earlier in the week. While some of his readers have been chiming in about the state of health of the brick-and-mortar record shop, an equal part of the discussion has focused on the notorious attitude that afflicts so many record store clerks....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June in Lufkin, Texas, 19-year-old Gerardo Flores was convicted of murder for the deaths of five-month-old twin fetuses carried by his girlfriend, 17-year-old Erica Basoria. Basoria testified that inducing a miscarriage was her idea–she’d repeatedly hit herself in the stomach–and that it had taken her two weeks to persuade Flores to help by stepping on her belly, but under state law a woman can’t be charged with causing the death of her own fetus....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, I know we media people have our faults, but you can hardly blame the press for creating the perception that Jesse Jackson Jr. has been critical of Mayor Daley. While openly toying with running against him for the last year, Jackson’s routinely ripped the mayor for everything from the demolition of Meigs Field to cost overruns at Millennium Park....

Last Friday began as an idyllic day at Wrigley Field. The wind wafted off the lake straight in from center field, putting a chill in the shadowy corners of the Friendly Confines, but otherwise it seemed the sort of afternoon that baseball was invented for. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, just the feathery wisps of jet contrails. The sun beamed down on the Cubs as they took batting practice, and as the gates opened and the fans began to fill the stands, organist Gary Pressy announced his presence with the fitting “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)....