Results tagged “townhallseattle”

GREEN PORNO: Daughter of Ingrid Bergman, former Mrs. Scorsese, ex-Lancome model, and creator of a series of short films about the sex lives of animals, Isabella Rossellini makes an appearance as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures series. The Blue Velvet songstress even designs her own costumes for the show.

WORLD SERIES GAME 1: It's the defending World Series champs against the reigning payroll champs. We're cheering on Ibañez with the hope that he will someday return to Seattle where we spell his name right.

It ain't easy being Scott McClellan. He's considered a traitor, snitch, and turncoat by the right, while the left decries him for not blowing the whistle sooner—either way, he's not getting many Christmas cards this year.

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.

His studies show that people clearly make irrational mistakes, thus thwarting the expectations of standard economists and turning them into crabby people with shriveled souls. Yet, because we make them over and over again, we are, as his book title has it, Predictably Irrational. Our irrational behaviors have structural origins, Ariely says, comparing the situation to our eyesight. We may know that a change in color is an optical illusion, but we can't think our way out of seeing the mistake. Same with our regularly-programmed screw-ups.

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long."

True confessions time: We've never set foot in 826 Seattle. We think we might have seen the building once, at night, while driving somewhere else.

NETWORKING: Seattle ContentNext Mixer: "the concept is simple: you come, you meet people, you talk. You do deals, too, of course (and then you tell us about them)."

PUBLIC TALK: Do you get guns? We don't, not really, but Wazzu's own Joan Burbank, professor of English and American Studies, thinks she does. She wrote a book on the subject, and she's going to talk about Gun Culture and American Democracy tonight at Town Hall.

That's one thing we learned from The Moth Story Tour on Sunday night at Town Hall. Actually, we learned that from the brochure, which explained what local voices were going to appear in which cities. Cho in LA, Savage in SEA.

If this were the Marvel Universe, John Gottman would be an X-Man. He's the marriage researcher who can, famously, watch a couple talk to each other for an hour and then predict with 95% accuracy whether or not their marriage is going to last.

The holidays are over (except for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, of course), so authors are starting to make their way to Seattle again, ready to read excerpts and sign autographs so that you'll be tempted to buy their latest title. Here's a cheat sheet for the week in book tours.

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 as one of "economic cruelty." (We hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler.)