BOOKS: Novelist Richard Powers reads tonight at Benaroya Hall for Seattle Arts and Lectures. The former computer programmer's latest book, The Echo Maker, is "a haunting novel about memory, identity, and the boundaries of neuroscience," (Booklist), and won the National Book Award and all sorts of "Best Book of the Year" awards in 2006. He's a novelist of "ideas"; David Foster Wallace is a big fan. Here's an interview in the P-I. 7:30pm //......

Every once in a while at a Town Hall reading, we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're awake. Is this really true? Did over 150 people just pay $5 to hear a lecture on behavioral economics? Obviously it helps to be interviewed on NPR. Or maybe it was the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert. Whatever the reason, there are 117 holds (and climbing) on Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational at the Seattle......

Image Courtesy of the dualy talented, Jay Cox of The Sea Navy and Our Seattlest Flickr Pool Long spoken of and rarely acted upon, the renovation and remodeling of The Seattle Center was again on the docket for Monday's City Council meeting. Center officials presented a number of new design ideas for the redevelopment of the Center. Central to these are the demolishing of Memorial Stadium and The Fun Forest. Proposed uses for the......

No, Seattlest is not just a fan of alliteration and 80's slang, as the headline might suggest. Burying the beef, is the current plan of the Seattle Public School District to rid itself of 230 cases of possibly contaminated beef. The beef, provided to school districts through a USDA lunch program, came from a California slaughterhouse in the center of the largest beef recall in USDA history. Nearly two-thirds of the school districts in......

The Irish writer whom we hadn't heard of until writing this, Anne Enright, is in town flogging her fourth book, The Gathering, a Booker Prize winner. (Which reminds us that Eavan Boland is visiting this March 3.) Her book, says the NY Times:...inhabits the restless, angry consciousness of Veronica Hegarty, one of a dozen children of a “vague” mother — a “piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room” — and a mannerly,......

Tonight you have two options; you can either watch Super Tuesday results on the TV, or head down to Pioneer Square with Dax, T-Bone, and a handfull of beads. Since you're reading this, we can only assume which event you’ll be choosing. Yet, it’s never a good idea to completely ignore a holiday as delicious as Mardi Gras. Especially because it’s also Shrove Tuesday, which means pancakes. We’ll let Professor Wikipedia explain: "Shrove Tuesday is......

Back in 1981, Mike Nichols directed a famous version of Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Center in NYC, starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams. We recall that at some point in college, we saw an interview with Steve Martin about that production, and Martin said something memorably apt: "We decided to serve the comedy of the play, because the ideas would serve themselves." Steve Martin's intuition was on our minds Saturday, while sitting......

The Friends of the Seattle Public Library are trying to get people to write to members of the City Council in support of funding collections before the council meets to discuss the budget Tuesday, October, 30. Seriously, a $2.5 million shortfall this year, and a shortfall every year since 2000 when Libraries For All funded a bunch of building upgrades (including the Central Library)? That's really lame, particularly here where we get all proud......

Well-known alterna-librarian Jessamyn West came to town recently, and finally had a chance to check out our flagship library. Her verdict? I saw a real disconnect beween the lovely outside and grand entry spaces to the library, plus a few other very design-y areas, and the rest of the building. Materials were hard to find. VERY hard to find. Signage was abysmal, often just laserprinted pieces of paper, sometimes laminated and sometimes not. Doors to......

You may recall that Seattlest recently moved to Rainier Beach. The house we're renting came complete with a mystery: a newspaper box posted next to our mailbox. We haven't subscribed to a newspaper for over a decade but, we know what a newspaper box is for. What we don't know is anything about the newspaper advertising on our delivery receptacle: the Western Sun. Google? Nothing. Wikipedia? Nothing, unless it's an unmentioned alternate name for......

Oh, snap! That should read "The Big Harry and the Potters News This Week." The authors of songs such as "Save Ginny Weasley" and "Gryffindor Rocks" are touring the Northwest, and Friday they end up in Seattle for a performance we hear will be "AMAZING!" Hear more of their indie-HP geek stylings MySpace, then make plans to catch them live. Seriously. A friend of our says they really do rock. July 11th, Wednesday Tacoma Armory......

There's a kind of folktale Polish wedding tradition that Seattlest has always thought was cool. It says that when your daughter is born you fire up the still and produce a barrel of vodka which you then bury somewhere on your farm. Twelve years later when that daughter is getting married you dig up the barrel and drink it at the wedding, the vodka having been infused with the flavors, and, more ephemerally, the spirit......

Tonight at the Central Seattle Public Library, Tim Westergren, founder of music software company/massive audio archive/internet radio service Pandora, hosts a public forum on his business model and the state of digital music as a whole. This get-together is a free event, open to everyone. It's a chance for me to share our story with you and hear what you have to say. I'll tell you about the Music Genome Project's beginnings, living through......

It's not only the anniversary of Mt. St. Helens exploding, it's also the event of a much more unexpected event: On May 18, 1992, for the very first time, a girl allowed 15-year-old Seattlest Seth to kiss her. If that isn't a shameless excuse for a Seattlest roundtable, what is? And so we present...Seattlest's first kiss: Seattlest Seth It was a high school bike trip to Lopez Island. The girl and I and some of......

Monday SHERMAN FREAKING ALEXIE: The best-selling author returns with his first novel in ten years. Flight tells the story of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a violent search for his true identity. Real Change-published poets (that would actually include Alexie, too) read as part of the program. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 LOCAL AUTHOR: Maya Sonenberg, the Creative Writing Program Director at the UW, presents a......

The Friends of The Seattle Public Library Book Sale The Library Book Sale is going on at Magnuson Park this weekend. If you haven't been you should go. If you've been there you know you should have been throwing elbows against the heavy bag for weeks--little old ladies don't move themselves when you're trying to get to those diamonds in the rough, but what a rough! We're talking about a few acres of loose, unsorted......

Monday PREQUEL TO MCARTNEY'S WINGS: Richie Unterberger, the author of several books on the history of rock, shows some film footage and plays some music recordings of unreleased Beatles material. He´s promoting his latest book, The Unreleased Beatles -- Music and Film. We had no idea they were in jail! (Ha! Because of the "unreleased" -- see how...oh...sure, we can move on.) 7pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE GARDENING AT......

Seattlest's former elementary school, Madrona, is the leading edge of a terrifying movement in Seattle Public Schools. No matter how many Microsoft stock options you have, no matter how many Jonathan Kozol books you've read, you can't stop it. Put your child in private school now or they'll be consigned to a life of stupidity...and blackness. Nine white families withdrew their kids from Madrona Elementary this year after a series of shocking indignities. But none......

It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess. That's kind of what Lawrence Cheek says in the PI today, where he dares to say what a lot of Seattleites are thinking: our new central library building isn't all that. This library, incredibly, is an uncomfortable place to read. The third-level "Living Room," which has the feel of a vast indoor park, is not conducive to......

    Seattle Public Library by Seattlest Flickrest inzenity. Seattlest loves the Seattle Public Library; sometimes we go downtown just to take pictures, people-watch, and just feel the library's vibe and the people using it in a variety of ways. We also love photographs taken there from great angles and of compelling subjects. All of this makes our cold, snarky heart warm up a few degrees and shed a few happy tears. Thank you......

THIS RECYCLED OLD HOUSE: Learn the secrets to using reclaimed and recycled materials in home building. Sustainable Ballard presents a panel and discussion on topics including material salvage and green remodeling. Take a tour of an eco-renovated house in the neighborhood. 6:30-7:45pm // Seattle Public Library Ballard Branch // FREE *FRIDAY* MOVIES: See the first movie about 9/11 we're actually excited for. Reign Over Me opens Friday and finally offers a human story about how......

Monday WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 AGORAPHOBES TAKE HEART: Everything you’ve been told about dating is wrong. Love Will Find You is a new approach to love from dating expert Kathryn Alice. It may be the first dating......

Monday LESS IS MORE: In Trance of Scarcity: Stop Holding Your Breath and Start Living Your Life, Victoria Castle asks why we feel that nothing is ever enough. Castle's book shows us how to escape this malaise and become more relaxed and alive. Hopefully it doesn't involve crisscrossing the U.S. on a book tour. 7pm // Third Place Books // FREE NATURE WRITING: Robert Michael Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps......

Monday SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // Tickets:......

The American Institute of Architects asked 1800 Americans to name their favorite buildings in the US. After further refinement and surveying, the AIA compiled a list of the top 150 and released it on Wednesday. A grand total of two Seattle buildings made the list: at #108, the gorgeous but metroartificial Seattle Public Library; and at #135, Safeco Field. Nowhere to be found: the viaduct, the EMP, Smith Tower, Washington Mutual Tower, Rainier Tower, Qwest......

By now we don’t have to tell you that both Seattle Public School (what-what) levies are passing, it’s what everyone is talking about. The levies will continue an existing property tax that will pay for new buildings and renovations on existing schools, as well as basic educational programs. We did our part last night, and may have been the only ones. Our polling place happens to be a school, and we always feel that these......

THEATER: The Brown Derby Series, which debilitated audiences last year with their staged production of Trapped in the Closet, is back, this time they're doing Total Recall. With Seattlest favorite Dusty Warren! Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm // Re-bar [1114 Howell] // $12, 21 and over only, runs through Thursday. No reservations, you may want to line up early. SPORTS: #1 O'Dea hosts #4 Chief Sealth. You've gotta see a game at O'Dea's gym......

Turns out it's not so easy to outfox young and dedicated junk food consumers, such as students at Cleveland High School: Chips and cookies were replaced in vending machines with granola bars and trail mix; sugary drinks are no longer sold in schools. Cleveland fell into line with other schools, offering healthier foods in its cafeteria and vending machines. Teens such as Tikisha fell into line, too -- out the door to find their junk......

The Seattle Public Library hosted 'A Salute to Tim Egan' last night at the inconvenient hour of 5:30 PM. Tim Egan is a Seattle native who won the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 2001. He's most well known for writing about the Pacific Northwest. A couple of weeks ago he was awarded the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Stories of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Seattle is......

Wednesday, December 13 >>>Hugo House, 7:30pm. Screenwriters Salon: Geoff Miller and Mark Handley invite you to bring your questions about format, technique, structure, dialogue, writing characters, and how to use your catering gig to hand your script to celebs. $5 general/$2 students. Free to members. >>>Seattle Public Central Library, 5:30-7:00pm. Mayor Greg Nickels and City Council President Nick Licata rochambeau to see who gets to salute Seattle author Tim Egan. His book, The Worst......