INRIX just released the 2009 edition of its National Traffic Scorecard, and unsurprisingly the news isn’t good for Chicago. For the fourth year in a row, Chicagoland is the third most congested metropolitan area in the country, behind only New York City and Los Angeles. INRIX also found that five of the country’s 25 worst traffic bottlenecks are located on the Dan Ryan Expressway between the Cermak and Taylor exits—a distance of about a mile and a half. No wonder traffic tends to back up there at all hours of the day.

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.

This week’s cover story is a must-read: a profile of Alderman Toni Preckwinkle (4th), Hyde Park’s independent alderman and a candidate for Cook County Board President. Also in this issue: Gloria Henderson opens a popcorn shop under the Metra tracks in Hyde Park after years of setbacks. Abundance Bakery on 47th Street offers a wealth of baked goods. Experimental music collective the Exponential plays at the Chicago Art Department in Pilsen this Saturday night. John Paro, a student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, has recorded an album, “Med School Rock,” to help medical students learn their material. And Katherine de Shazer is teaching a weekend class at St. Mary of Perpetual Help on Byzantine Russian icon painting.

This week’s feature is about the Chicago Arts District’s recent decline. Is Bridgeport the new Pilsen? Read and find out. Elsewhere in Pilsen, Ciao Amore serves up exceptional Italian food and photographer Xavier Nuez displays his eerie long-exposure shots of urban decay. Court Theatre’s new play “The Mystery of Irma Vep” is a satire of Victorian gothic horror and much more. The University of Chicago’s Objectivist Club had an outing to the Art Institute last weekend to discuss aesthetics and the failings of modern art. Meanwhile, Cornel West gave a fiery speech at St. Sabina Catholic Church.

The feature in this week’s issue is on Chicago Community and Workers Rights (CCWR), a new immigrants rights organization based in Little Village that’s trying to fight the use of E-Verify by employers. A photo essay reveals the range of Woodlawn’s churches, from the beautiful to the historic to the typical. Tomorrow the Chicago Storytelling Guild is holding a festival at the Experimental Station, part of the annual worldwide Tellabration. Weekly writer Keith Jamieson, who liveblogged Raymond Lotta’s talk last week, explains what’s wrong with Communism. Lagniappe brings delicious Cajun food and jazz to Auburn Gresham. The theme for this year’s installment of Lumpen’s annual Select Media Festival is “Super Bad Ass.” Mash-up magician Girl Talk performs at the University of Chicago tomorrow night. And the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic’s new chamber ensemble debuted at the International House last Saturday.

Newcity’s annual Best of Chicago issue came out yesterday, and among the winners are several South Side stalwarts that have previously appeared in our pages. Abuelo’s won Newcity’s Best reason to avoid the long lines at Xoco award. For Best Amerindian-African food, Newcity chose Garifuna Flava, a family restaurant in Marquette Park serving food from Honduras and Belize. Nightwood, a trendy new Pilsen eatery, was the audience’s choice for Best new restaurant. For Best new bar or club, Newcity’s pick was the Shrine, Joe Russo’s African-themed venue in the South Loop, which we covered just last week. And in the only non-food-and-drink pick,  the Smart Museum’s “Heartland” exhibit won Newcity’s Best art exhibit award.

Update: The Chicago Reader’s Food Issue also came out last Thursday, and it named several South Side restaurants as Best New Restaurants of 2009, including Han 202, Nightwood, and, in an Honorable Mention, Abuelo’s Mexican Grill.

This week’s cover story is on a new hip-hop opera that premieres tonight at the DuSable Museum of African American History. The Creative Reuse Warehouse, a project of the Resource Center, collects surplus materials from businesses and sells it for cheap to teachers, the city, and anyone intrepid enough to trek down to its Riverdale warehouse. Han 202 in Bridgeport offers a five-course prix fixe menu, combining the ambience of an upscale restaurant with the taste of Chinese takeout. We cover the Renaissance Society’s current exhibit on Poland and the Polish diaspora, the Smart Museum’s new show of prints and other works from artists in eighteenth-century Rome, and Logsdon 1909’s latest round of dreamy, ethereal paintings and sculptures. And last weekend brought both a StarCraft tournament and a brunch for art students from all over the city on the University of Chicago’s campus.

Hankering to wear your dandy all-tweed outfit? On a bike? We’ve got just the event for you. The Bonfire Night Tweed Ride is tomorrow, Saturday, November 7 to celebrate Guy “Guido” Fawkes for the traditional celebration of Bonfire Night! The Tweed Ride meets at 1 PM at the Chicago Ale House, located at 2200 W. Lawrence Ave, and will follow a 17-mile route through the North and South sides to end at Bubbly Dynamics in Bridgeport for a traditional effigy bonfire. Stops include Duke of Perth, Weeds, English, Grace O’ Malley’s and Skylark. The ride does require at least one article of tweed, though, and feel free to bring clothing for the effigy or other combustibles!

[Tweed Ride]

[Route Map]

This week’s issue features our second annual guide to 24-hour dining on the South Side. Last year’s guide is also worth checking out, in particular Austin Gross’s review of Kevin’s Hamburger Heaven. This issue we also reported on the Shrine, an African-themed club/music venue in the South Loop run by nightlife impresario Joe Russo. New Pilsen restaurant Abuelo’s serves some of the best Mexican food I personally have ever had. Japanese-Czech puppeteer Nori Sawa comes to Hyde Park this weekend for a performance and two shadow puppetry workshops. Famed jazz musician Joe McPhee stops by the University of Chicago campus for a performance at Bond Chapel before appearing at the Umbrella Music Festival. And Hyde Park’s Sacred Harp singers performed their style of shape-note music last Saturday.

This week’s issue is now out online and in print, and here are some of the highlights: last week a University of Chicago student was shot in the eye with a paintball during a cross country run, and his vision may never fully recover. The Chicago Scholars Foundation helps kids pay for college, but more importantly it helps them apply to, work through, and graduate from college. Ray Elementary School, like many Chicago public schools, doesn’t have an art program, but now thanks to a University of Chicago student group it does have art tutors. The Yes Men, a group of performance artists and political pranksters who have successfully impersonated representatives from government agencies and major corporations, will be at the Co-Prosperity Sphere tonight. And a Halloween costume parade for dogs last Sunday may have been the cutest thing Hyde Park has ever seen.

The Tribune reported today on a new study that shows South Siders are more “extroverted and agreeable,” while North Siders are more neurotic—what the Tribune calls a “Bill Veeck versus Woody Allen divide.” The study’s author, Kevin Stolarick, is a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, where he works under “Creative Class” theoretician Richard Florida. It’s notoriously difficult to make accurate and reliable personality tests, so Stolarick relied on self-categorization: the study was conducted online and participants rated themselves from 1 to 5 on 45 traits like carelessness, imagination, and efficiency. Stolarick explained the South Side’s high levels of cheerfulness as being due to historical African-American migration from the friendly Deep South, and he reassured North Siders that “neurotic” doesn’t mean crazy.

In other news from the Tribune, some are suggesting the University of Chicago as the future site of Barack Obama’s presidential library, but Obama isn’t one of them.

This week’s issue is now available in print and online, and here are some of the highlights: an agricultural high school on the far Southwest Side teaches kids subjects like hydroponics, horticulture, and animal science alongside more traditional classes like art and chemistry. The South Shore Opera Company of Chicago, founded almost a year ago to bring opera to the South Side, is holding a fundraiser concert with pieces from popular musicals. Nightwood brings chic organic dining to Pilsen. antena’s Halloween exhibition, “Zombies: A Mindless Affair,” focuses on the literal and metaphorical living dead. And jazz piano legend Chuchito Valdés plays Mandel Hall tomorrow night.

Fenger High School

The death of Fenger High School honors student Darrion Albert has ignited much discussion of youth violence and even brought U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education (and former CPS head) Arne Duncan to Chicago to address the issue. Despite the attention, it’s been hard to really grasp the reasons for the fight leading to Albert’s death. News reports have been lacking in detail and politicians seem interested mostly in dodging blame.

Salon.com recently published a letter from an anonymous seventeen-year-old Fenger High Student that gives more insight into the situation than anything I’ve read or heard previously.

This week’s issue is out in print and online now, and here are some of the highlights: we found out the story behind the Great American Cheese Collection (mentioned here a few posts ago). Dream Theatre Company’s new play, “The Black Duckling,” opens tonight. Pianist Amy Briggs performs a work written for two hands and a nose this Saturday as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Hyde Park kick-off this Saturday. Three University of Chicago seniors and one alumna have founded an online magazine to give Chicago the New Yorker it currently lacks. In this week’s Perspectives, Helenmary Sheridan argues that urban agriculture isn’t just a faux-rustic pastime; in the food deserts of the South Side, it can mean “a well-tended and organically-grown ‘fuck you’ to those who would keep even bread from the people. And the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts is collaborating with the Hyde Park Jazz Society and others to bring back the jazz that once made the neighborhood a musical destination.

If you have a taste for unpredictable music yet aren’t brave enough to face this past week’s clarion call for a brutal Chicago winter, let WHPK’s Pure Hype challenge your ears while your body sits comfortably in your favorite armchair. This Friday at nine, California’s seasoned multi-instrumental experimental improviser Gino Robair brings his bag of squeals, creeks, and drones for an in-studio performance, supported by Andrew Royal on violin and Aaron Zartzutzki on electronics. If you do feel like venturing out, the Trio WAZ’s show Saturday at the Velvet Lounge should provide more surprises, as it pairs three respected Chicago musicians from disparate corners of jazz. Sax and clarinet player Edward Wilkerson has deep ties to the tradition of Chicago jazz as the former president of the AACM, while WAZ band mate Tatsu Aoki, on double bass, simultaneously investigates American jazz and traditional Asian music. Free improv master Michael Zerang, however, is known for his abstract use of the drum, which does away with nearly everything but the physical instrument itself. When it comes to rock, check out Alabama’s glammy goth punks Wizzard Sleeve, performing at the Mortville loft in Pilsen.

Well, it’s all over.

Chicago was the first city to be eliminated as a candidate to host the 2016 Olympics by the International Olympic Committee this morning in Copenhagen. Tokyo was eliminated minutes later, and the contest is down to Madrid and Rio de Janeiro has gone to Rio de Janeiro. The result is a disappointment to many, but a relief to many others. People gathered in Daley Plaza to watch the announcement were so shocked that some began blaming Michael Jordan’s lack of enthusiasm. Whatever the IOC’s motives for their decision were (and there are quite a few possibilities), it seems unlikely that all they needed was more star power.

The Chicago Weekly’s fourth annual Best of the South Side issue just went online, featuring our picks for the best restaurants, art galleries, theaters, taquerías, cafes, bakeries, cathedrals, venues, and much more in neighborhoods around the South Side. Here are some highlights: Indian-soul food fusion in Hyde Park, the city’s best corned beef in South Shore, midnight drunk food in the South Loop, spicy Sichuanese in Chinatown, a comedy club in Bronzeville, vegan soul food in Grand Crossing, a boutique whose current collection is inspired by Victorian mourning clothes in Pilsen, authentic spiritual goods in Bridgeport, Mexican brunch and exotic ice cream in Gage Park, and the city’s only meadery down in Beverly. Use it as your guide and you’ll never run out of places to go.

Those of you who picked up copies of the paper today may have noticed it seemed a little short and didn’t include all these neighborhoods. Due to a printer’s error, the paper came out with only 12 out of 24 pages. These half-copies will be replaced with complete ones tomorrow morning, so if you want the full 24 pages make sure to check back then.