Sadie Dingfelder has this week’s cover with her look at Sweetgreen, the local chain that’s gone from selling $9 salads to booking The Strokes. Ally Schweitzer leads the arts section with an essay about another group packaging music and hospitality: Thievery Corporation, which has remade D.C. nightlife but still sounds homeless on its albums. Bob Mondello mostly admires a Shakespeare Theatre Company production of The Merchant of Venice in which not only Shylock gets an ugly portrayal. Tricia Olszewski, to her amazement, does not think the new Transformers movie sucks; she also reviews the Norwegian import Trollhunter. Benjamin R. Freed thinks that Page One, the new documentary about The New York Times, is all lede, no nut graf. Jazz critic Michael J. West listens to Ben Williams‘ new record and concludes that the D.C. bass star still has some growing to do. Eve Ottenberg reviews a collection of stories by Miroslav Penkov that weds Eastern European literary currents to sparse American prose. And in One Track Mind, Marcus K. Dowling chats with Outputmessage about the local producer’s new album of self-remixes.