Kenny Rasmussen started hosting free, all-ages, daytime punk shows at the Bridgeport Library back in January for people who typically can’t make it out to bars and clubs to see great, local live music. Since then, his library gigs have picked up steam and have started popping up at other branches around town. This weekend his series will make its first appearance at the West Town Branch Library, and will feature the harshest lineup yet: noise-rockers Den headline, with support from hardcore band Rumores and crusty screamo trio Cracked Vessel, whose “Effigy Vessel,” off of last year’s Path IV cassette, is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Philadelphia five-piece Sheer Mag’s glammy, lo-fi garage rock has been taking the world by storm since they released their first single in 2014. Fueled by a handful of blown-out 45s, a megahyped Coachella slot, and a raucous live show, Sheer Mag have become one of the most beloved independent bands in America. In July they released their long-awaited debut full-length, Need to Feel Your Love (Wilsuns), and for the first time in Sheer Mag’s brief life, it sounds like they’re allowing themselves to get a little indulgent, trading in no-nonsense, feel-good power-pop jams for a range of dad-rock homages....

Celebrity chef Stephanie Izard will try her hand at Chinese at her Boka group collaboration Duck Duck Goat, slated to open in November in the West Loop. For Izard it’s home cooking, conjuring early aromatic memories of making moo shu pork with her late mother. Brave ingredients and bold flavors have been Izard’s calling card at Girl & the Goat and Little Goat, and her sense of culinary adventure fits the cuisine....

The term “beach read” doesn’t exactly convey smart, substantive narratives. Rather, the term suggests fluffier fare: mass-market mysteries, flimsy celebrity memoirs, “chick lit” novels with beach scenes or city skylines on their covers, and anything by Danielle Steele. Fortunately for those hoping to add some heft to their summer reading list, plenty of quality new books by Chicago-based or Chicago-adjacent authors are hitting shelves this season (beachy cover art not included)....

In Gwyneth Jones’s sci-fi novel Phoenix Cafe, set in a distant future, the protagonists visit a museum in which remnants of 20th-century advertising, including a Coke bottle, are displayed for aesthetic contemplation. The difference between advertising and art has been reduced to a matter of context—a function of how you look at it as much as what it is. Likewise “Sportin’ Waves,” an exhibit of hand-painted Ghanaian barbershop and salon signage from the 90s to the present organized by collector Brian Chankin, is hung in the Strange Beauty Show hair salon, reminding us how arbitrary the category of art can be....

In early June 2013, two journalists—columnist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras—arrived in Hong Kong to meet with a disgruntled techie named Edward Snowden. Remember him? A million news cycles ago Snowden became famous for using his top-secret government security clearance to download a cache of documents proving that the National Security Agency surveilled Americans on a vast and indiscriminate scale, dropping into our digital lives to collect as many as three billion pieces of information in a single month....

AP Photo/Seth Wenig New York Mayor Bill De Blasio kisses his wife, Chirlane McCray, at his inauguration last week, as their children, Chiara and Dante, look on. De Blasio has vowed to target income inequality. There’s a growing consensus about fighting income inequality, but Ross Douthat is not part of it. The New York Times columnist yesterday questioned whether such a campaign ought to even be attempted. The evidence for pre-K is not yet quite as compelling as the evidence that human activity is a key cause of climate change—but it’s getting there....

On Monday the largest hotel workers’ strike in Chicago history entered its second week with negotiations still under way and many hotel beds still left unmade. Thousands of members of Unite Here Local One, which represents more than 15,000 area hospitality workers, are picketing around the clock at 25 local hotels (a full list is here). The union is calling for year-round health care for workers as part of its new contract....

Connie Vaughn In the event of the apocalypse, keep an eye out for these guys. A few Sundays ago I took a break from sorting and labeling canned goods under the floorboards of my Rogers Park condo, watering a variety of heirloom seeds in my urban window garden, and killing and gutting park squirrels to attend the C.U.M.A. Urban Survival Training Course at Dan Ryan Woods-South. On this particular day, class is about “bugging out....

“Four sweaty boys with guitars tell me nothing about my life,” smirks vocalist Gareth David, aka Gareth Campesinos! of Los Campesinos!, on “ . . . And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison,” from the band’s 2008 debut, Hold on Now, Youngster. The song was a straight shot at the stereotypes of indie-music fans at the time. While other MySpace-era acts have since devolved into self-parody, LC! actually started off that way but evolved into a more serious seven-piece band....

On a visual level, Interstellar is an exceptionally well-crafted Hollywood entertainment. Director Christopher Nolan, art director Dean Wolcott, and their effects artists render the imaginary settings in stunning detail. The film is rife with brilliant imagery: a horizon of frozen clouds, an ocean wave as tall as a skyscraper, the flashing interior of a wormhole through which the principal characters fly their spacecraft. The most striking thing about these images is that we’re rarely encouraged to ooh and aah over them; unlike most ambitious space operas since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Interstellar inspires not wonder but a cool contemplation....

I have friends who say they can drink mezcal all night and never get hungover. Over the last couple months I’ve spent a bit of time testing that theory. Just as there’s something different about the buzz—tranquil, dreamy, and obliging—there’s something different about the morning after. There’s no question the spirit, distilled from any number of varieties of the agave plant, gives me fitful, restless sleep—but the tradeoff is vivid and absorbing dreams....

More than 100 years ago, Hungarian immigrant Joe Hussli brought the seeds for a medium-hot pepper from his homeland and planted them in his new hometown of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. The pepper was popular enough to be named after the town where it arrived, but like many other heirloom vegetable varieties, it fell out of favor after hybrids (plants created by cross-pollinating two closely related species, usually to select for certain characteristics) were introduced in the 1950s, and the pepper was all but forgotten—even in Beaver Dam—until recently....

More people of consequence have passed through Yellow Springs, Ohio, than you might imagine. The home of liberal-leaning Antioch College, the town hosted Coretta Scott King as a student in the 40s; punk vocalist Mia Zapata founded the Gits there in 1986; and comedian Dave Chappelle currently calls the place home. In 1972, the Pyramids, a jazz band made up of Antioch students and led by Chicago-born saxophonist Idris Ackamoor, began performing while studying abroad in Europe, Ghana, and Kenya....

Ab-Soul, These Days . . . (Top Dawg Entertainment) Backed by a squealing jazz saxophone, Herbert Anthony “Ab-Soul” Stevens throws out a quick line on “Kendrick Lamar’s Interlude” about his most famous labelmate and fellow Black Hippy crew member: “If I ain’t better than Kendrick, then no one is then.” This California MC is hardly the only rapper eager to knock Lamar off his throne, but on his guest-jammed album These Days ....

Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard, is the winner of this year’s Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction for her most recent book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, a discussion of how the Declaration was intended as a guarantee of equality as well as liberty and its continuing importance for all Americans. The Heartland Prize is an annual award for books that reinforce and perpetuate the values of heartland America; previous nonfiction winners include Isabel Wilkerson, Rebecca Skloot, and Studs Terkel....

Advertising is a dark art. After all, subterfuge is usually required to convince someone to become a customer. But commerce can be a source of amusement. Think of the Super Bowl, for instance: a sizable chunk of the audience tunes in each year to see new ads rather than the game itself. A couple of the artists on display tried to subvert the ad-poster medium. Théophile Alexandre Steinlen was able to insert social commentary into his work and occasionally irritate the constraints of polite society....

“It was beautiful to live there. There were trees all over the place, rabbits were running all over the place, every now and then you’d see a raccoon or something coming through,” Miguel Suarez recalls as he sifts through memories of his neighborhood. “African-Americans, Latinos, whites—there was no real differences in whom we were as a class, as a people. We were just totally happy living amongst each other.” It wasn’t just the unique architecture and unprecedented integration that made Lathrop unique among public housing projects in the city....

It’s understandable that when someone hears the name “The Floating Museum” they might think it’s a museum that floats on water, or in midair. Instead it floats from place to place, moving across communities and manifesting itself in programs that take place in various Chicago neighborhoods. But for its summer exhibition, “River Assembly,” the Floating Museum will be literally seabound, occupying a 100-square-foot shipping barge for a three-week voyage up the Chicago River....

Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, The Hundred-Year House, is a mystery that takes an unusual form: the Chicago author begins with a happy ending, then progresses backward in time, simultaneously revealing the origins of various deceptions that got the narrative so tangled in the first place and laying down the clues that have already been uncovered in part one. It’s one of those books that improves on a rereading, so you can see how all the pieces fall into place....