MUSIC—This month’s installment of Ear Candy (your best ticket to free local music, brought to you by the Merc and Mississippi Studios!) features bands with women that bring the volume: Palo Verde plays heavy deconstructed-reconstructed post-rock, Polst wields ferocious hardcore like a chainsaw, and Sei Hexe delivers crust-punk metal that sounds like it’s emitting from the underworld itself. NED LANNAMANN
Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi, 9 pm, FREE
BOOKS—Fascinating Welsh journalist Jon Ronson has tagged along with conspiracy theorists for Them, dug into the minds of psychopaths for The Psychopath Test, and revealed the new age-y experiments of the military for The Men Who Stare at Goats. Tonight, he visits Powell’s to talk about So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which delves into one of modern society’s less admirable hobbies. I will shame you if you don’t go. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside 7:30 pm, FREE