Lady Gaga stopped in at Frontera Grill - apparently, she knows her Mexican food. more ›

If you get lucky, you can get your bill comped for Leap Day. more ›

Country singer Lyle Lovett said recently that Mexican food in Chicago couldn't be that good "if a guy named Bayless is cooking it." more ›

Eric Fisher has a keen interest in "understanding the workings of cities." Fisher uses geotagging to get a bearing on how people in urban areas travel from one place to another. more ›

Oh Kanye; we can always count on you to deliver the whacked out goods on Twitter when we are having a slow news day. more ›

We weren't in the courtroom, but we were on Twitter. Kind of the same thing. more ›

Sometimes bitter, sometimes hilarious; read the play-by-play from Chicago's food experts. more ›

Occupy Chicago's strength is in numbers. But this tweet still made us laugh, if only for the gallows humor. more ›

Sometimes the best way to digest some bad news is by utilizing gallows humor. more ›

Dan Sinker has compiled all six months of the twitterstream into The F***ing Epic Quest of @MayorEmanuel, a book which adds bits of context. Is it still funny? more ›

A social media scavenger hunt involving teams running willy nilly around the city with their noses buried in their smart phones strives to be bigger and better than last year’s event. more ›

We must admit, we were not at our computer last night. So, we missed the initial conflagration of "Future Next Themes" - a flood of food writers, chefs and diners proposing ridiculous themes for the next menu of Next. A couple of days ago, Time Out gave us the next 4 menus for Next restaurant, including "Childhood," an idea that everyone seems to both love and feel a deep need to mock. more ›

Eric Fischer is something of a map geek. So much so that he's started a series of photos where he maps out the usage of social media in various cities around the globe. more ›

Typically we'd be laughing at a joke made at Fox's expense, but this is way over the line. more ›

Balsan, the restaurant in the Elysian hotel that Penny Pollack called "Shockingly creative and delicious" is giving away a Grand Seafood Tower to one of its Twitter fans. The tower, which normally costs $130 and is pictured over on the right, includes a whole lobster, king crab, prawns, clams, mussels and oysters. The thought of it makes us want to fall over in a happy coma. It can be yours, for the low low price of nothing. more ›

312 Dining Diva tipped us off to this one. Paul Kahan, of Blackbird, managed to get through airport security with a LOT of knives. He tweeted: "Flew outa ohare today. Forgot I had four huge chefs knives in carry on bag. Got patted down for wallet. Knives went through." Thank goodness for the TSA keeping our skies so safe. Maybe if he'd been carrying a 4-ounce bottle of olive oil, they would've gotten him. more ›

We've noticed a number of folks re-tweeting content purportedly generated from the @MayroEmanuel account, but every time we click through we see that it's still frozen in time with the last tweet on the day of last year's mayoral election. After a bit of poking around we've discovered that the account is in fact sending out tweets and then immediately deleting them, so only folks subscribed to mobile updates to the feed's RSS are seeing them. We're guessing this is a bit of marketing courtesy the man behind @MayorEmanual to drive up conversation and buzz in advance of The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel, the book collecting all of the @MayorEmanuel tweets. more ›

The A.V. Club's "Undercover" series has a brilliant conceit: Take up-and-coming bands and film them covering a popular song in an intimate space. The stripped-down nature of "Undercover" yields some great results. But there are some duds in there too. To wit: Local hooligans Smith Westerns lackluster take on a Tom Petty classic. more ›

Chicago native and Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall has lost his endorsement deal with Champion after sending out a series of tweets this week questioning the celebration of Osama bin Laden's death and even questioning the events of 9-11. more ›

Check! Please creator and executive producer David Manilow recently finished a nearly month-long twitter experiment where he listed his favorite restaurants in town, in alphabetical order. While Manilow's restaurant recommendation theme isn't as expansive as Michael Nagrant tweeting his top 500 bites in five years of food writing, it's still a pretty impressive list and also gives a little peek behind the curtain of the producer's culinary proclivities, since Check! Please is a show where the guests recommend their favorite restaurants. more ›

If a tree falls in the forest, did it make a sound? And if a news event doesn't have a fake Twitter account created for it, did it really happen? (Josh Simpson and Dan Sinker, what hath thou wrought?) more ›

Well that was fast. Dan Sinker, the man behind the @MayorEmanuel twitter stream announced today that Scribner press will be publishing his tweets as the fake Rahm Emanuel in book form. more ›

If there's one piece of fallout over the Dan Sinker/MayorEmanuel twitter epic, it's that anyone with access to Twitter and an ability to at least be conversational with it is trying to do the same thing. more ›

Whether you wanted to know who the brilliant mind behind the MayorEmanuel twitter feed was or not, now we know, thanks to the Atlantic. And that man is none other former Punk Planet-er, creator of CellStories and the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, and Columbia College journalism teacher, Dan Sinker. As the Atlantic puts it, Sinker "has a heart made out of Chicago and balls of punk rock." Hard to dispute. more ›

We're really grateful with the response to Steven's post breaking down the "Mayor Emanuel" Twitter feed by the numbers, even though Steven is now depressed that it shows how long he's subscribed to Harper's. Steven also shared this link yesterday that captures every one of the updates to the epic roman a clef that's equal parts Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Miller and Hunter S. Thompson. If you're going into withdrawals waiting for the doppelganger to come back from the time vortex, this will have to tide you over. more ›

The final curtain seems to have fallen last night on the most entertaining piece of ongoing performance art in Chicago, as the MayorEmanuel twitter appears to have called it quits. Dancing to the sounds of Journey with his whole retinue (advisor David Axelrod, Carl the Intern, Axelrod's dog Hambone and Quaxelrod the duck), the prolific and profane twitter doppelganger was coaxed into a "time vortex" at the behest of Richard M. Daley, because when it comes to actual mayors of Chicago, it is like The Highlander: there can be only one. With one last f-bomb, MayorEmanuel was done for now more ›

Here's an unusual tidbit about one of the newer members of the Smashing Pumpkins. According to master Billy himself, Nicole Fiorentino, the current bass player in the latest iteration of the band, is one of the two girls on the cover photograph of the group's epic shoegaze-gone-arena-rock masterpiece Siamese Dream. more ›

You'll always find something entertaining on Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey's Twitter feed. But after reading the above update from last night, and this one, and this one, and this one, we wanted to make certain that Fritchey wasn't speaking from experience. So we sent him a direct message this morning. more ›

Now we know how the doppelganger handled yesterday's game. more ›

Restaurants and social media seem to lead an uneasy coexistence. Many chefs and owners don't quite know how to handle Facebook and twitter, except as outlets for press releases, and mentioning the word "Yelp" can evoke pan-throwing from some chefs. As more and more people get their news and gossip through social networking sites, a few restaurants have risen above the pack and are attempting to figure out how to use this new medium to their advantage, and to the advantage of their customers. more ›