Like most e-mail solicitations, the offer I received in February 2005 from Alloy Entertainment was unambiguously sexual: “We’re looking for a writer to write a young-adult book called ‘The Sex Drive.’” Unlike most e-mail solicitations, however, Alloy’s offer did not reek of fraud. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fifteen months later–after Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan partnered with Alloy, accepted a reported $500,000 two-book deal from Little, Brown, and was subsequently revealed to have cribbed heavily from the published work of several other YA authors–the role of book packagers in contemporary children’s literature has been widely examined....

If Judith Harding’s body language weren’t so expressive, her replications of autism and cerebral palsy in this solo show would be appalling. But a disarming candor is characteristic of this performer, who in You Are Here recounted her own adventures in psycholand with never a tear or sermon. In this piece she adopts the straightforward tone of a capable nanny and relates stories of the mentally and physically impaired people she teaches: the students in her shaving-cream sculpture class, the gangsta-rap wannabes foiled by their do-rags, the players in a dramatization of “The Three Little Pigs” who stage a spontaneous Trump takeover....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week in Food & Drink I wrote about the rapid nip and tuck of Chicago’s only Yunnanese restaurant Spring World, which included an expansion of specialties from the southern Chinese province. After we went to press, Hong Kong native Sam Ng was kind enough to provide a rough translation of SW’s mushroom menu, which features all sorts of dried fungi from China....

Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel about Washington spin doctors has been adapted to the screen by first-time director Jason Reitman, who pares away its institutional detail but preserves its libertarian zeal and acid satire of Beltway amorality. Aaron Eckhart (In the Company of Men) plays a fast-talking spokesperson for the tobacco industry who earns his pay making black look white. Except for Katie Holmes as a muckraking reporter, the supporting players are all perfectly cast: Robert Duvall as an aging tobacco lion, Rob Lowe as a vain Hollywood superagent, William H....

There is something new under the sun: a combined festival of butoh and breakdancing, the brainchild of curator Nicole LeGette, who points out that both forms challenge social and physical boundaries. The monthlong fest includes four weekends of performance at Link’s Hall, a free film screening and symposium, multiple workshops, and two international performers at the Chicago Cultural Center. Yumiko Yoshioka, originally from Japan but now living in Germany, was a member of the first all-women butoh group, which was also the first troupe to present butoh outside of Japan, in Paris in 1978....

The first time Chad Pregracke saw an Asian carp leap out of the Illinois River he laughed. Eager to share the joke, he took a boatload of people out on the river. As if on cue, carp flew out of the water–to everyone’s amusement. But then a fish hit one of the passengers square in the mouth and nearly knocked her out of the boat. Pregracke had to take the woman to the hospital, where she got seven stitches in her lip....

The interwoven monologues that make up Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s ballyhooed 2002 docudrama relate the brutal, degrading experiences of six people wrongly sent to death row. But because the script leaves no room for irony, ambiguity, doubt, or suspicion, there’s little drama. Every exonerated individual comes across as a sensitive paragon of virtue while every cop, prosecutor, or prison guard is a malicious hick. Meanwhile the playwrights largely ignore the systemic inequities plaguing our capital justice system....

Am I a moron for believing that “mole people” exist in New York City’s underground? The mole people, as documented in an eponymous 1993 book by Jennifer Toth, are homeless people who live in subway tunnels, sucking down electricity and other resources for free a la Ellison’s Invisible Man. Is Toth lying? Hallucinating? What documentation is there? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City details Toth’s early-90s encounters with several dozen of what she estimated at the time to be 5,000 homeless people living beneath the streets of New York, mostly in subway and railroad tunnels....

In the spring of 2001 the National Guild of Hypnotists, an organization based in New Hampshire, got an e-mail from government officials in Iraq who were looking for someone to treat an unnamed patient in Baghdad. Dwight Damon, the guild president, immediately thought of Larry Garrett, a practitioner in Chicago. “I didn’t think the average person would be interested in this,” says Damon, “but Larry’s adventurous. He’d like the challenge.”...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Nobody goes to a movie because Matt Damon‘s in it,” I argued with my life partner a short while back, who stubbornly insisted that exactly the opposite was true. This was only a day or so before Forbes.com announced that Damon was the most bankable star in Hollywood: $29 return per movie for every dollar he gets in base salary and perks....

Whiskey Week began soberly enough last Monday evening at Delilah’s, as a great bearded bear of a man poured wee samples of scotch around the pool table for the dozen or so people attending “Scotch School.” Martin Duffy is a spokesman for Johnnie Walker and the Classic Malts, a series of single-malt whiskeys representing the various scotch-producing regions of Scotland. He was in town for Whiskey Week, which climaxes with WhiskyFest–spelled the Scottish way, without the e–a three-and-half-hour free-for-all tasting of some 200 spirits in the Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom....

The best miniseries I’ve seen this year, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, made by Adam Curtis for the BBC, hasn’t reached U.S. screens yet (although you can find it online). But the second best, a six-part, six-hour essay by Jennifer Fox (Beirut: The Last Home Movie, An American Love Story), has a related theme–how a free and independent filmmaker in her mid-40s can create her own set of traps....

Thank You for Smoking Let us now praise the children of famous men. Twelve years ago Christopher Buckley–whose father, William F., has become synonymous with postwar conservative philosophy–published Thank You for Smoking, a rip-roaring satire of Washington spin doctors. Now Jason Reitman–whose liberal father, Ivan, directed such Hollywood blockbusters as Stripes and Ghostbusters–has made his feature-length directorial debut with an adaptation of Buckley’s novel. Given their respective pedigrees, viewers are entitled to wonder whether Reitman, who also wrote the screenplay, will have mutilated Buckley’s book beyond recognition....

THE TURN OF THE SCREW WRITERS’ THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Basically, what James did in The Turn of the Screw was make wonders cease. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens insists on the supernatural reality of his apparition; when Ebenezer Scrooge dares to doubt that reality (“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”), the ghost harrowingly sets him straight....

We’re often told that some people facing serious illness are “fighters” and that helps them survive or, conversely, that some people “give up” or the like. My question is, are such phenomena scientifically validated? Is willpower really a factor in whether you live or die? —Nelamm18, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People want to believe in willpower. In a 1989 survey of medical professionals, close to 100 percent said they recognized it and believed it made a difference—and in pretty obvious ways it inarguably does....

Lauren Feece’s ten paintings at Lobby are suffused with the twin desires to touch the visible and memorialize the past. The woman in Reflection stands over a large globe strewn with pale leaves and flowers, her arms reaching out as if to embrace the whole world. In Tulips four women stand amid flowers whose color is echoed in swashes of pink in the background and on some of the figures. Like the other paintings, it’s copied from a snapshot, but Feece has transformed the composition into something highly subjective....

Believe the hype: Marisha Pessl’s debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking), is a lot of fun. Teenage narrator Blue van Meer, overfond of the literary reference and parenthetical remark, is Pessl’s preternaturally studious protagonist. She’s the daughter of Gareth van Meer, himself a model of the philosophically idiosyncratic, sexually prodigious, often drunk professor enshrined in Western postmodernism by folks like David Lodge back in the 80s. The campus-hopping pair have no sooner landed in Stockton, North Carolina, than Blue finds herself entangled with five snotty teenagers whom Hannah Schneider, a charismatic film teacher at her high school, has taken under her wing....

Michael Harvey’s new novel, The Chicago Way (Knopf), takes its name from a line spoken by Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables: “You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.” But Aristotle-reading PI Michael Kelly has a tool that wasn’t available to Eliot Ness: advanced forensics, and that’s right in Harvey’s wheelhouse (he’s cocreator of the A&E show Cold Case Files)....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/12. This year’s festival includes an emphasis on work by, or inspired by, Samuel Beckett. All performances are at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston, unless otherwise noted. Several performances will be at Roots, an offshoot of Curious Theatre Branch located in a private home; the address will be provided when reservations are made....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the reasons I’m so stuck on Theo Angelopoulos‘s The Travelling Players (1975)—number one on my all-time best list, if you must know—involves this very notion of problem-solving. Because, at least in my opinion, based on the film’s internal clues, Angelopoulos was facing a big one here—something that even halfway through the filming he hadn’t come to grips with, perhaps because he wasn’t quite sure what it was....