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You can hear almost all of African-American history in the music of the Staple Singers: slave-era folk songs and hymns; the Delta blues, considered the “devil’s music” by the hymn singers; gospel from the northern churches that formed the backbone of black social life after the Great Migration; and protest songs from the civil rights movement. I’ll Take You There,Greg Kot’s new biography of the Staples (family and singers), is at its best when it shows how they lived that history....

As a counterpoint to the last four years of school cuts, closings, testing, and privatization, I urge you to watch a recent speech—which you can find here—by Elizabeth Heurtefeu, a former public school principal. In 2007—again on a whim—she applied for the job as LaSalle’s principal. “We received an e-mail on the Fourth of July from the CEO telling us that [in a few days] we had to report for mandatory five-day training,” Heurtefeu says....

Along with other Democrats throughout the area, I recently got my marching orders for the November elections. Let’s start with the flyer’s featured photo. It’s of Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. That’s the same Toni Preckwinkle who decided not to challenge Rahm Emanuel for mayor, even though she commanded a 20-something point lead in the polls. Like other Chicago voters, I don’t ask for much....

uptonsnaturals.com Runner-Up Co-op Hot Sauce

Black Breath are currently one of the best bands in the genre of hateful, atheistic music. A mix of D-beat rhythms and filthy metal riffs, the Seattle-based fivesome have released a pair of blistering full-lengths during their short history together (2010’s Heavy Breathing and 2012’s Sentenced to Life), and they’ve been prepping the new Kurt Ballou-produced assault for a while—the leg surgery drummer Jamie Byrum had to undergo when he was hit by a car last year likely didn’t help in expediting the album....

JumpStock/Photos.com The Internet remembers everything. Many years ago—I’m being gallantly vague about how many—a young writer broke into journalism in the worst possible way. One of America’s largest newspapers published a story she’d submitted about her exciting adventure in a far-away land. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t true. Nothing of the sort had happened to her—it had happened to someone else and she’d written it up in the first person because it was a lot more exciting that way....

Thanks to the subversive power of YouTube, you can now watch New Trier: Tip of the Spear—the documentary the North Shore radical right tried to shut down—on your computer. Director and narrator Paul Traynor gallops deep into the weeds in his hurriedly produced, rapid-fire account of how a battle over Seminar Day, a one-day program on racial civil rights at elite New Trier High School, opened a window on what he sees as a national conspiracy to destroy public schools and take control of local government....

At 8 PM on Friday, August 25, the Goose Island design studio Lost Arts will host a new screening project called Destroy Your Art, in which five local filmmakers will present new short films, then destroy the hard drives on which they were recorded immediately after screening them. Organized by the husband-and-wife team of local filmmaker Jack Newell and entrepreneur Rebecca Fons, Destroy Your Art represents a rebuke to the individualized nature through which people regard films today....

1747 N. Damen 773-489-1747 hotchocolatechicago.com Runner-Up Bang Bang Pie Shop

Natalie Moore WBEZ

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Unassuming Chicago musical wunderkind Seth Engel has his hand in too many musical projects to print in a short concert preview; even listed on his website, the titles of albums he’s produced, engineered, or played on take up a great deal of real estate­. Suffice to say, if you’ve spent any time at this year at Subterranean (where he and his bands are frequent performers), a punk house show, or Pitchfork Music Festival, you’ve probably seen Engel bringing some unfathomably complicated music to life....

Alex Wroblewski courtesy Chicago Sun-Times Common at Aahh! Fest During Common’s headlining performance at yesterday’s Aahh! Fest the Chicago hip-hop icon called the daylong bash “a breath of fresh air.” Yes, the rapper’s biased—he helped organize the affair, and the phrase “by Common” appeared on festival banners—but he had a point. After three months jammed with multiday events featuring more acts than one person could reasonably expect to see Aahh!...

Embedded amid Union Park’s sea of pasty flesh, tank tops, and reality TV villains (namely Nick Viall, The Bachelorette‘s bad boy du jour), Reader photographers Logan Javage and Rosario Zavala bravely documented the midwest urban festgoer in its natural habitat during the muggy Friday kickoff of the 2015 Pitchfork Music Festival. They managed to snap shots of some fine examples of the species: a dude spinning poi balls, a baby wearing protective headphones, and—a rare breed, indeed!...

When Eliza Ramirez’s eighth-grade students at Emiliano Zapata Academy in Little Village learned that they’d be spending the fall and winter corresponding with a class of tenth graders at Amundsen High School in Ravenswood and that the letters would be collected into a book published by 826CHI, a nonprofit writing center, they were skeptical. What was the point of writing letters, they wondered, in this marvelous age of text messages and Snapchat?...

It’s about damn time Julie Klausner got her own show. Since 2011, the writer, comedian, and cocreator/costar of the new Hulu sitcom Difficult People has—among other things—hosted the very funny podcast How Was Your Week, an interview show that always begins with a meandering account of what Klausner read, watched, or thought about that week, from beagles to Andrew McCarthy to the virtues of pasta topped with cottage cheese. She doesn’t necessarily attempt to relate to an audience’s shared experience of the world—she just invites the audience to listen as she shares hers....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Botanist Camille Rodriguez sported a thrifted denim ensemble to run her errands, proving that a casual outfit can be both comfortable and fashionable. She’s also wearing a pair of Horween leather sneakers and a hemp cotton white T-shirt, true to her “little weird brother decked in your mom’s turquoise” style. See more street style in the Chicago Looks blog....

Maureen Muldoon is a captivating storyteller. From the opening moments of her one-woman show, the inaugural production in Madison Street Theatre’s Power of One solo series, she captures our attention and keeps it with an hour’s worth of rambling autobiographical musings, mixed in with bits of song and some performance poetry. Muldoon, a contemporary suburban mom, broods on how to respond to her daughter’s announcement, via a sign on the bedroom door, that she identifies as pansexual and transgender and prefers the pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his....

Aaron Dexter Automatic Recordings sampler If you end up hanging out at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival’s north stage Sunday afternoon chances are you’ll see a burly man passing out copies of a red cassette housed in a black-and-white paper sleeve—it’s the sampler for a new local label called Automatic Recordings. Label founder Aaron Dexter, the talent buyer at the Owl, will be the guy giving away the tapes. Dexter’s plan for Automatic Recordings is to release music by local rock acts that regularly play in DIY spaces in Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and Pilsen....