S Nicole Lane

From pyramids to barefooting, water ski clubs have been a Wisconsin family tradition for sixty years.
In late August, I drove from Chicago to Twin Lakes, Wisconsin for the appropriately named Cornfest, where the $5 entrance fee earns you all-you-can-eat corn as well as legendary water performances. Propped up in folding chairs, a good friend and I sat amongst a group of around a hundred folks on the last day of the event. The three-day festival had already kicked off two days before—and as we...

The shores of Lake Michigan have a long, violent past. It was on the South Side of Chicago in 1919 that Eugene Williams would drift into the white swimming area of a segregated beach. Angry white swimmers began hurling rocks at Williams, drowning him. In response to Williams’ death, the worst race riot in Illinois history would occur for a week-long period, during which 23 Black people were killed.
Chicago’s deal in 1851 pronounced the lakefront as “forever open, clear, and free,” however thi...

The niche, grassroots sport has a global presence, but it was born in the Rust Belt
In 2015, I was sitting in the bleachers somewhere in North Carolina as I watched a driver, low to the ground, rip around a dirt track with a checkered flag. The crowd roared and wiped the sweat from our brows. I remember my thick straight bangs sticking to my forehead thanks to the relentless Carolina humidity. It was the dirt, it was the mud, it was the grit: it was the niche, rowdy sport of lawn mower racing...

While living alone in the woods of northern California at the start of 2020, Lilli Carré started learning chess. Like many folks deep into the pandemic, she took up a new hobby. While trying to draw inspiration for her work, she incorporated her new vehicle for communication when all touch and connection were lost.
Carré’s fourth solo show at Western Exhibitions, “Arrangement in the Steps of a Horse,” opened March 12. The show’s title comes from a classic move in chess where the knight touche...

Your guide to the best lesbian sex toys — from vibrators to dildos and non-anatomical pleasure aids — plus tips from a sex and relationship coach to help you find the right sex toy for you
Sex toys are no longer something that you hide in the back of your underwear drawer. In fact, statistics published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Theory show that 52.5% of women in the United States now use some kind of vibrator — and for good reason.
Sex toys can enhance intimacy between you and a partn...

The long-running porn festival HUMP! Fest (organized by Chicago Reader sex columnist Dan Savage) made its way to the Music Box last weekend after being canceled last year.
Crammed into the theater, kinksters, queers, and film buffs once again had a rip-roaring raunchy time while fisting, needle play, and clown sex was unveiled onscreen through genres of comedy, horror, and animation.
What makes HUMP—which kicked off its 17th year—so thrilling is, of course, watching porn on the big screen, bu...

Recently, I was propped up on a beach somewhere in the South. It was my friend's bachelorette party weekend, and I had taken a few days off work and was bathing in the sun before heading back to Chicago, where the cold would whip my face.
I was reading a book, content with the empty shore surrounding me. "Not a soul in sight," I texted my friends in our group chat. Behind me was a small wooded area and in front of me was the ocean. I was there for a little more than an hour, eyes sluggish and...

There’s a young person smiling, posing—hand on their hip—in front of a lit-up sign that reads: “EMPOWER WOMEN.” It intermittently flashes to include ED, making it “EMPOWERED.” The photo is snapped, the couple walks on. I’ve just entered Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Since the 90s, Bowers has been making work that nods at activism, joint action, and change on the west coast. In the exhibition catalog, curators Michael Darling (former chief curator at ...

Skin and stone, organic and sterile, hard and soft: juxtapositions aren’t new in art. This push-and-pull tactic has been done, and done again, but it’s not always executed well. New York-based artist Hannah Levy manages to push and pull her viewers in the right direction for her new solo exhibition, “Hannah Levy: Surplus Tension,” now on view at the Arts Club of Chicago. Levy exaggerates form—into curves and lumps—as well as challenges our ideas of modern design. The large-scale sculptural wo...

There’s more to fellatio than just a climax. It’s absolutely frightening, holding something that fragile in between your teeth, and hoping, wishing, praying that you’re perfecting the act— the duty of the illustrious blow job.
Comedian and author Jacqueline Novak dives right into those anxieties in her one-woman show, Get on Your Knees. The salaciousness, the stress, and the humor are all wrapped up in the award-winning show that Novak will be performing for four nights at the Den Theatre.
No...

About a month ago, I saw a magnet being hurled over the 18th Street Bridge. Initially, I brushed it off and I continued to stroll along the Chicago River bank with my friends. But the sound of the splash carried some weight, like an anchor or rock colliding with the water. I expected the line to be empty, but then I saw that the two magnet throwers on the bridge were pulling up what appeared to be a barrier gate (the kind you see at large concerts). This is when I was first introduced to magn...

Lying on my bed, bedsheets ruffled, legs up and pantless, I wait for the moment of insertion. I fumble with the smooth silicone device—this one is a dark purple, the last one was a light blue. The lights are dimmed, the flicker of the TV illuminates my hands and suddenly I gasp—it's in!
Vaginal dilator therapy is a type of treatment suggested by specialists to help train the pelvic floor muscles to accept objects the vagina would previously reject or clamp down on due to involuntary muscle sp...

"You're putting what on where?" I thought after I first heard of a silver nitrate treatment—an intense-sounding solution to some minimal bleeding on my cervix seen during a regular Pap screening. My doctor gave me a half-assed explanation of why I was receiving the treatment and left me in the dark as to what was going on below the belt. I wouldn't find out until later that it was because of lesions from HPV.
When the treatment was applied to my cervix, a sudden warm sensation began to wash o...

When Rebecca Baruc was 11 years old, she began to show her drawings from her journal to a teacher, Barbara Herzberg. For eight years, Baruc would study alongside Herzberg where she would focus on still lifes and draw from reality. It wouldn't be until college—at Skidmore in New York—that she would begin to dive into abstraction, sculpture, conceptual art, and performance art. Growing from this exploration, she began to draw the people she loves.
But the pandemic halted that.
"I had just left ...

Chelsea Ross wants us to talk about death. This inevitable thing that comes for us all shouldn’t (and can’t) be avoided. Ross tells me over email, “I believe [death] can be beautiful when the shame and secrecy is removed. And it’s the one thing, other than birth, that we all have in common.” For a society obsessed with youth and living forever, death is something that will ultimately take us all—and to ignore that is to miss out on a discussion on life.
Life is made up of a series of losses. ...