Holy crap, there's a lot going on tonight, including a book about polar bears, a mystery starring Scott Joplin, and a novel about knitters who form a deep bond of friendship. Plus more!

There are two lectures going on tonight. Up in the University District, there's a talk named "Religions as Promoters of Human Rights and Peace?" To which I would like to reply: please see the piece in The Morning News about the couple who hammered their one-year-old daughter to death because they thought she was possessed by demons. At the Northwest African-American Heritage Museum, there's a talk titled "Afro-Mexico," which is about being black in Mexico.

Two events at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight, too: Jane Margolis reads from Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, which is about how education is still segregated. Hopefully, she'll be able to discuss how the upcoming Seattle school closings will affect minorities, and what we can do to lessen the impact. And then, Philip Gourevitch, who is the author of the amazing We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, reads tonight from a book about the Iraq War called Standard Operating Procedure. This is the reading of the night, clearly.

And then, at the University Book Store, Randy Jackson, who is the American Idol judge who always calls people "dawg" and is super-uncomfortably "street" for a guy who is richer than Croesus, signs his new cookbook, which is about eating healthily with diabetes. Dawg.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.