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......

Love her, hate her, or wish she'd stop looking down her nose at the people she's writing about, Barbara Ehrenreich knows how lance the zeitgeist and get conversations flowing. She's the oil to Ann Coulter's vinegar. And she's got a new book out: Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, in which she pretends to be someone else and searches for a white-collar corporate job. She fails, and damns the white-collar world......