The feature in this week’s issue is our annual Hyde Park housing guide, an invaluable resource for anyone looking for an apartment in Hyde Park. For more advice, see our guides from previous years. Elsewhere in this issue, I wrote about the current controversy at Shimer College, the tiny Great Books school on IIT’s campus, where the student body, faculty, and staff are up in arms against new president Thomas Lindsay, who is threatening the school’s tradition of communal governance. Weekly editor Harry Backlund writes an essay, “Report from Obamaland,” about the Secret Service-patrolled space surrounding our President’s house. A chain of barbecue joints along I-57 aren’t just good spots to grab a meal while headed out of town, but destinations in their own right. This weekend at Mandel Hall, a festival of Spanish music shows there’s a lot more to Spain than flamenco. On Saturday, the Hyde Park Art Center puts on a multimedia music and puppet show inside its exhibition “Notes to Nonself.” Author Michelle Alexander spoke last week at the Experimental Station about systematic racial discrimination in the criminal justice system and her book “The New Jim Crow.” And a Queer Intercollegiate Alliance-planned flash mob at the Art Institute last Thursday didn’t really get the whole “f lash mob” thing right.