January Brings the Big Guns to the Lectern
Sorry to burst any bubbles, but if you don't have tickets to Michael Pollan's appearance at Benaroya tonight, as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures, you're out of luck: it sold out weeks ago. The author of Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food apparently has no shortage of admirers.
That said, for all you who are missing out, there's a pair of equally (if not more) exciting lectures coming up later this month that you can still get in to.
This Saturday night, Jan. 16, at 7:30, Malcolm Gladwell--of fro and tipping points fame--stops by Town Hall in support of his new book, Outliers. Outliers is essentially the anti-Gladwell book; after achieving hype far out of proportion to his intellectual and literary abilities for hits like The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell has turned his nevertheless considerable talents to the subject of success itself. His big point here is essentially that the staggering success of iconic geniuses (like The Beatles and Bill Gates) has less to do with their innate abilities than it does with a confluence of factors: practice in their chosen field (apparently 10,000 hours is the magic number), access from an early age (Gates was apparently singularly lucky to get to use computers from middle-school on), and social, economic, and historical factors (in other words, you're less like to have become a wealth industrialist in 1625 than 1875). Tickets are $5 and the last of them are only available at the door night-of, so if you're dead set on it, head over to Town Hall by 6:30 for your first (and last) shot.
But let's say you're not a corporate hack or neocon who isn't so much interested in seeing a fuzzy-headed geek from The New Yorker regale you with his popularizations of decade-old scientific research. Let's say you're more interested in hating on the departing Bush administration. Well, you're in luck, because on Wed., Jan. 28, Town Hall is also sponsoring New York Times columnist, and now Nobel Laureate, Princeton economist Paul Krugman.
Like Gladwell, Krugman actually gets a little more credit than he's due. The Nobel Prize feels more like a statement about his politics than his economic research, which is sort of ironic, since Krugman's major work in the 1990s was free trade, deregulatory neoliberal economics of the sort promoted by Clinton, loved by Republicans, and which has been repudiated in the wake of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Still, Krugman's used his platform as a columnist at the Times to move substantially to the left, and hopefully move some of the country along with him. In the last couple weeks, he's applied his Nobel-worthy talents to chastising the incoming Obama administration for not thinking big enough with their economic stimulus package, and has been a tireless advocate for the third rail of American politics: universal health care. If Obama manages to pull that off, he--and the rest of us--will owe Krugman at least a bit of thanks for help making the case.
Krugman appears in support of his new book, The Return of Depression Economics (a copy is included with ticket). Tickets are a bit steep at $55 ($35 for students and members of WAC). Pre-register online here.
