Unless you’ve been to see any creepy soothsayers recently, you probably don’t need to beware the Ides of March. Nonetheless, these events should inspire you to avoid the idleness of March. So get out there!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears... cause I'm reading at Porter Square!

Also make sure to mosey down to the Howard Yezerski Gallery, 460 Harrison Avenue, to see a fantastic “Combat Zone” photography exhibition (documenting the Emerson neighborhood’s gritty former life–read Anne Gray Fischer’s brief-but-thorough history here). See the exquisite prints for free until March 16.

After the jump, you’ll find a nice and organized list of events that you’re going to dig, all taking place this month. But first, one more thing, real quick.

If you happen to have $30-55 dollars burning a hole in your pocket (don’t we all in these fair times?), and no plans on April 11, David Sedaris will be sharing his satirical southern charm with Beantown at Boston Symphony Hall. But we suggest you hop on it and get tickets now. People up here can be ruthless.

March 3
Brookline Booksmith, 7pm
DR. LEWIS M. COHEN, No Good Deed
“In 2001, two Massachusetts nurses were investigated for murder when their patient – whom they had been helping with debilitating pain – died. Guggenheim Fellow Dr. Lewis Cohen examines this case as part of a larger ideological debate raging in hospitals everywhere: how should the dying and suffering be treated?”

March 4
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
KATHARINE WEBER, True Confections
“A novel about the daughter of a repressed New England family who tries to mold herself into the model Jewish wife when she marries into the Ziplinskys, owners of Zip’s Candies.”
FREE CANDY AT EVENT!

Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
TED CONOVER, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
“In The Routes of Man, Ted Conover explores six key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America.

“In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS.

“In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides.

“He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh.

“From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity.”

March 6
Brookline Booksmith, 5 pm
New York Times columnist JUDITH WARNER, We’ve Got Issues: Parents and Children in the Age of Medication
“Warner spoke with a cross section of parents, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, researchers, and therapists over the course of five years to find out how meds are affecting our children. The enlightening result is a wake-up call.”

March 9
Porter Square Books, 7 pm
SUSAN DWORKIN, Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest
ROWAN JACOBSEN, Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis
PETER PRINGLE, Food Inc.

Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
JEROME CHARYN, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

Temple Kehillath Israel, 7:30 pm
Nun and psychology clinician NANCY KEHOE, Wrestling with Our Inner Angels

March 11
Coolidge Corner Theatre, 6 pm
“A discussion with the co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles, the person behind The Mortal Instruments and the author of Pretty Monsters? Don’t mind if we do! The Booksmith presents a YA extravaganza to benefit Franciscan Hospital for Children. Email your questions for the authors to hollycassandrakelly@gmail.com.”

Boston Athenæum, 6 p.m.
Panel Discussion: Adult Literacy in the Digital Age

March 17
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
ELIF BATUMAN, The Possessed
“Follow Stanford professor Elif Batuman as she visits Tolstoy’s estate to investigate a possible murder and loses Isaac Babel’s family at the airport. Batuman (Harper’s, The New Yorker, LRB and n+1) has literally walked a mile in the footsteps of her heroes in a sharp, funny, personal literary history that takes us from California to the Caucasus.”

First Parish Church in Cambridge, 6:30 pm
Cambridge Forum radio program: Criticizing Creativity, with literary and cultural critic DANIEL MENDELSOHN and former editor of The New York Times Book Review CHARLES McGRATH, on “the ways in which criticism itself becomes a creative act.”

March 18
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
An Evening with UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE, a nonprofit art and publishing collective celebrating the release of Ten Walks/Two Talks

March 22
Suffolk University’s C. Walsh Theatre, 6 p.m.
Teaching Literacy in Senegal
Founder and Executive Director of Women’s Health Education and Prevention Strategies Alliance, VIOLA M. VAUGHN

March 23
Temple Israel, 7:30 pm
The Great God Debate, in which CHRISTOPHER “Women Aren’t Funny And Neither is God” HITCHENS faces off with RABBI DAVID J. WOLPE.
Moderated by TOM ASHBROOK of NPR’s “On Point.”
Ticketed event.

March 24
Brattle Theater, 6 pm
Celebrated Mystery writer WALTER MOSLEY, Known to Evil
$5

Brookline Booksmith, 7pm
SONYA CHUNG, Long for This World

March 25
First Parish Church Meetinghouse, 7 pm
TIM O’BRIEN celebrates the 20th anniversary of The Things They Carried

March 26
Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
Professor of law and philosophy MARTHA NUSSBAUM “discusses the status of gay rights in the context of constitutional law and her new book”, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.

March 28
ICA, 2 p.m.
Reporting War
“Dan Murphy was a reporter for the Bloomberg News Bureau in Jakarta and Far Eastern Economic Review, covering Indonesia/East Timor in the 1990s. In 2000, he joined The Christian Science Monitor as a staff writer, reporting from numerous continents and countries including Southeast Asia and Iraq. Hear about his experience reporting from nations in conflict and addresses the emotions he felt upon his return to the U.S.”

March 29
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
DAVID SHIELDS, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
NELL IRVIN PAINTER, The History of White People
“In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is ‘white’ and who is ‘American’ have evolved over time.”

April 8
Boston Athenæum, 6 pm
Panel Discussion: Prison Literacy

April 15
ICA, 7 pm
On Pins & Needles: Tattooing in Massachusetts
“Although tattooing was first introduced to Bostonians in the 1840s, it was just 10 years ago that a Massachusetts ban on tattooing (except by medical physicians) was deemed unconstitutional by a Suffolk Superior Court judge. Helping to overthrow this ban was Sarah Wunsch, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Join Wunsch and exhibition curator Pedro Alonzo for a look back at the commonwealth’s long and complicated history with this art form.”
Tickets: $8 members, students and seniors; $10 general admission.

Through June 4
Boston Public Library, Copley Square
Man in the Street: Jules Aarons Photographs Boston, 1947-1976
“Black and white photography of Jules Aarons (1921-2008): The North End, West End, and South Boston neighborhoods from the 1950s and 1960s are on display in photographs of young girls sharing a story, teenagers hanging on a street corner, and women talking to their neighbors. Some are gripping images of Boston’s past like the long-gone penny ferry from East Boston, or sites that remain familiar today like a game of pick-up basketball in the South End.”

Remember to get tickets to David Sedaris. That's not even smoke; it's wit!