One open mic, one poetry slam, and a total non-fiction-a-rama going on today all over town.

Up at Third Place Books, Gene Baur is reading from Farm Sanctuary, which is against corporate agribusiness. I don’t know if he’s bringing his cow or not, but I hope so.

Chris Hedges is at Town Hall with I Don’t Believe In Atheists, which is a response to Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. He lost me with the title, which I think is too cute by half, but it’s nice to see someone contending with Hitchens who isn’t a totally right-wing holy-rolling freaknut. If you’re an atheist spoiling for an intellectual fight tonight, this could be the reading for you.

Michio Kaku is reading from Physics of the Impossible at the Pacific Science Center. This is one of those books that looks at science fiction ideas—teleporters and death rays and so on—and tries to reverse-engineer whether they’d be possible, and how. There were a whole bunch of these books a while ago—The Science of Star Trek, The Science of Superheroes, titles like that—and they really started scraping the bottom of the barrel. Kako, though, looks like he might know what he’s talking about, and he’s a good writer on the topic of physics, which is very hard to do. Mad scientists are encouraged to attend.

Lastly, at Elliott Bay Book Company, Loretta Napoleoni reads from Rogue Economics, which is about what happens when economic systems take precedence over governments in unstable nations. It could be a depressing reading, but it should be a good one.

Full (and shiny-new) readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.