The Northwest Flower and Garden Home Show -- hey, wait! Look, the gardening people already know about this. We're talking to you, non-flower-growing-people. If the winter is kicking your ass a bit and you're not especially allergic, head on down to the flower show and get some virtual spring on. We did this one year, and it really works wonders. You walk in, and it smells just like spring threw a dirt clod at......

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,......

On Presidents Day, it's time to pause for some quiet reflection on our drug use. Too much? Too little? Just right? Tonight Yale's Charles Barber drops in on the Elliott Bay Book Co. to report that in 2006 the U.S. accounted for 66% of the global antidepressant market. We know, it's exciting to be number one! There's a lot more in his book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Over at Slate,......