Today's pick:

1. British physicians Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have their own String Theory, a Universal Theory of Everything, and while it doesn’t take the quarks and quantum physics approach to the riddle of the universe, it does attempt to explain the material world. Above all else, they say, the gap between rich and poor is what ultimately determines well-being worldwide.

Looking at data compiled and recently released by the World Bank, Wilkinson and Pickett’s new book, The Spirit Level, says that social inequality—the gap between the richest and poorest in a given country—is the root of all the world’s problems. It accounts, they say, for everything from higher rates of infant mortality and drug use to incidence of teen pregnancy.

Tonight’s event is part of “The Good Life” series—authors are interviewed by Warren Report creator Warren Etheridge, and the ticket price includes a copy of the book and free appetizers.

Tonight at the Palace Ballroom. Tickets are $35.

On Tomorrow's Calendar:

1. "14/48" is supposed to be "the world's quickest theater festival"—14 plays are conceived, written, directed, and performed within a 48-hour period (the writing, for example, is to take place between 8 pm on Thursday and 8 am on Friday, when scripts are due) by 80 writers and thespians.

There's also a band there to accompany the production. The result, as I imagine it, is something quite far away from conventional theater, but the potential for pockets of spontaneous greatness is high.

Plays are performed Friday and Saturday nights at 8 pm, at the ACT Theater, 700 Union Street. At 8 pm and 10:30 pm.

2. Christopher DeLaurenti is performing at the Henry Auditorium Friday night, doing what he does best—setting up landscapes of "found sounds," field recordings and cassette tape clicking. For example, in 2007, DeLaurenti released an entire CD of orchestras warming up and background noise he secretly recorded at classical music performances (audience chatter, warm up exercises on a clarinet) called “Favorite Intermissions”

Friday, DeLaurenti's performing some new found soundscapes.

The Henry Art Museum, at 7 pm. Admission is $5.

3. Shabazz Palaces invaded Seattle's brain in no time flat. That's mostly due to the fact that someone let their big secret out of the bag—that the group is the new project of Digable Planets rapper Ishmael Butler. The intention was to let the music speak for itself, though, and that definitely happened.

Shabazz is out-there music that is easy to grasp. Their horn samples, buried under deep creepiness, the friction of plinking "thumb pianos" and gunshot thuds, and, above all, their somewhere-orbiting-the-Central-District flows, are inciting a fresh jolt of hometown pride.

Their mixtape/video "Belhaven Meridian" is as strange and great as its title.

For all that, Shabazz Palaces haven't played a single hometown show—but that's changing on Friday night. True to form, they've been mum on details, but it definitely looks to be the best $10 you'll spend so far in 2010.



Tomorrow night, at Neumo's. $10.