In the last four decades, leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union have been at war with one another more often than not. But now they say they’ve decided to come together to fight for their jobs. The first is Marilyn Stewart, the two-term incumbent. She’s the latest in a long line of union accommodationists. “You don’t have to be aggressive with people—you don’t have to call them names,” she says. “You need to know how to be a professional....

Conceivably the most neglected of James Whale’s better works, this hilarious period farce (1937, 91 min.) imagines a hoax perpetrated by the Comedie-Francaise to teach the conceited English actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne) “a lesson in acting.” The only problem is, Garrick is in on the gag, which leads to a variety of comic complications at a country inn. This boisterous movie helps to justify critic Tom Milne’s claims that Whale was a kind of premodernist Jean-Luc Godard....

My favorite tidbit to emerge so far about the backroom scheming in the race to be Chicago’s next mayor came at the bottom of a recent Sun-Times account of private talks between White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Congressman Mike Quigley. I’m just assuming Emanuel’s confused. I’ve been interviewing politicians—including plenty of mayoral wannabes—for years about Mayor Daley’s favorite slush fund, and most of them are. Most have absolutely no idea how it works, even if their positions would seem to require it....

Noon | Claudia Cassidy Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Deolinda Though this remarkable Portuguese quartet plays fado, the national style of its homeland, it breaks with tradition in several ways. Most groups with a singer as powerful as Ana Bacalhau would simply travel under her name, but Deolinda maintain a band identity, emphasizing their collective approach. They play original material composed by guitarist Pedro da Silva Martins, not standards, and instead of focusing on songs that convey saudade—the sense of melancholy longing that’s one of fado’s defining characteristics—they take on a wide range of topics, from the distractions of contemporary life to the euphoric sense of promise that a smile from a passing man can inspire....

How come if you dig a well far down enough, you hit water? Where does that water come from, and how did it get so far underground? How did people first figure out that digging in the ground would get you water? –Will, Washington, D.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever hear of gravity, nudnik? Water in the form of rain, snowmelt, and seepage from lakes and rivers soaks into the ground until it hits an impermeable layer, typically rock or consolidated soil called hardpan, whereupon it collects in what’s known as an aquifer....

the informers s Directed by gregor jordan written by bret easton ellis and nicholas jarecki Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Informers is adapted from a 1994 story collection by Bret Easton Ellis, whose three fin-de-siecle novels about the go-go 80s—Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho—have all been turned into profitable movies. Ellis wrote most of the stories while he was an undergraduate at Bennington College in Vermont, and they share enough characters that he was able to number the stories and pass them off as a narrative of sorts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been over a year since the end of the world, or the events of season one (I’ve done some mixed-media math using Robert Kirkman’s guesstimate for the time line of the comics series). The cast have gone from scraping by on the open road to hiding out on a farm to holing up in a Georgia prison, which is where the current season opens....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I do most of the embalming. My gloves go all the way up to my forearms. A lot of people are donating their organs nowadays, so they basically look like Jell-O when they come in, ’cause there’s no bones, no organs, no lungs. We have to put them back together....

Bree Housley, author of We Hope You Like This Song: An Overly Honest Story About Friendship, Death, and Mix Tapes, downloads: How Was Your Week? I wake up every Friday with one goal: download Julie Klausner’s podcast, How Was Your Week? Perhaps this makes me sound a bit lazy, but oh man, does she make me laugh. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether she’s crooning along to Brian McKnight’s “Ready to Learn” (look it up, people, so ridiculous) or getting to the bottom of important things with her guests, like why Mrs....

Mike Sula Wrigley BBQ’s three-meat combo Jack Jones wasn’t happy. “What a piece of shit,” he said in full view and earshot of a handful of customers. “Look at that.” He was standing over a hotel pan full of baby back ribs that had emerged from the gleaming Ole Hickory smoker in the open kitchen of his new barbecue joint. I couldn’t overhear precisely what went wrong, but Jones, a part owner and onetime chef at Jack’s on Halsted, declared that the offending slabs would have to be trashed....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year’s winner, Sweetnorthernsaint, was the Kentucky Derby favorite. This year Todd Pletcher, one of the top trainers in America, split up his best three-year-olds to give himself two chances at a Derby starter. Any Given Saturday ran in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct (a race once won by Secretariat). Cowtown Cat was sent to Stickney. Saturday’s crowd at Hawthorne Race Course was the biggest I’ve ever seen there, but I’ll bet three quarters of them couldn’t tell you who won the Illinois Derby....

As summer reading goes, nobody’s going to mistake the inspector general’s recent audit of TIF spending in the Loop for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The money’s supposed to go toward eradicating blight in low-income, investment-starved communities. But the law concerning oversight is so loosely written that Daley’s basically free to create TIF districts wherever he wants. Hence, some of the city’s wealthiest communities are the program’s biggest beneficiaries while truly poor and blighted communities like Englewood and Roseland get the shaft....

Julia Thiel After three weeks, the eggnog had mellowed out quite a bit: it was no longer unpleasant, but still pretty intense. I tried a little of it straight—probably only an ounce or two—and enjoyed the first few sips, but after that I didn’t have much desire to drink any more. It still tasted pretty boozy (though the aging had eliminated the alcoholic burn), and was incredibly rich. According to Alton Brown, eggnog is technically stirred custard—like ice cream, except with too much alcohol to freeze....

In the mid-1920s, Vera Stark, a beautiful, talented vaudeville actress, left New York for Hollywood, land of dreams, where anything was possible, even decent parts for black women. In 1933, after several years working as a maid for the movie star Gloria Mitchell, aka “America’s Little Sweetie Pie,” she landed her first screen role . . . as Mitchell’s maid. Nottage began thinking about Vera Stark after seeing the 1933 film Baby Face on TV....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this point, many movie theater chains in the U.S. have abandoned film projection for DCP, or digital cinema package—perhaps the biggest overhaul in movie exhibition since the introduction of sound. This conversion is an expensive process (as I learned recently from Patio Theater owner Demetri Kouvalis, a DCP projection system costs about $70,000) as well as a controversial one....

There are basically two schools of thought on this matter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the one hand, there are those who say the mayor bulldozed La Casita just to let everyone know that he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants to do it. So fuck you, Pilsen activists—and all your little teacher-hugging, library-loving, voted-for-Miguel del Valle north-side allies. That’ll teach you to say bad things about the Man....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Rachid Taha On his latest album, Bonjour (Knitting Factory), husky-voiced French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha downplays his roots in Algerian rai and chaabi in order to adopt an amalgam of international pop flavors. “He’s a kinetic performer with an old-school rock-star attitude, and if he delivers tonight like he did eight years ago, when he made his Chicago debut at the Empty Bottle, this will be a show you’ll still remember eight years from now,” writes Peter Margasak....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lately Saturday Night Live has been investing pretty heavily in hipsters, social-currency-wise, especially in terms of its music bookings—if the show’s past overreliance on proven hit makers and irrelevant legacy bands promoting unexciting new albums was reminiscent of Rolling Stone, then recent appearances by virtual unknowns (at least to mainstream audiences) like Lana Del Rey and Sleigh Bells have been positively Pitchforkian....

Though African and African-American women have the highest rates of new HIV infection worldwide, you don’t often see their plight dramatized. This play by writer-performers Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter puts it center stage: two black women–one a teenager in South Central Los Angeles, the other a married broadcast journalist in Zimbabwe–both discover that they’re pregnant and HIV positive. Composed of interlocking dialogues, reminiscent at times of Anna Deavere Smith’s work, this off-Broadway hit, deftly restaged by original director Robert O’Hara, delivers home truths and big laughs as it attacks the Holy Grail of matrimony....

I had taken a job in music, and it was really not for me. It was a good lesson in the way things are typically done, but I found the system was so cumbersome that it stifled creativity and free and forward thinking. So I dropped the nice paycheck to follow people that inspired me: key among them [the creative forces at] Touch and Go, Sub Pop, and Dischord. I had no idea how much work it would be....