Comedy podcasts are a penny a dozen on the internet, but amid the clutter, one stands out: Professor Blastoff with Tig Notaro. Every week, Notaro and her cohosts, comedians Kyle Dunnigan and David Huntsberger, invite friends, comedians, field experts, and musicians to chat on topics like how math stats can be manipulated in sports and politics, how astrobiology relates to tuberculosis, and how your mother’s attempt to make you talk to girls the moment your testicles dropped can traumatize you for life. Notaro describes the podcast as if “a teacher never quieted down the class clowns.” That is an accurate description. (Vera Project, Seattle Center, theveraproject.org, 7:30 pm, $19, all ages)

Former Stranger news writer Cienna Madrid has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House, a local literary nonprofit. There, she taught fiction classes and wrote 4/5 of a book about a death-row...