Book Worms

This is Tobias "Toby" Wacker, co-owner of lab, a hip new coffee shop on Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor. The business is successful in only its first few months, despite the fact that I see Toby outside with his nose buried in a book more than I see him actually working. Here he's reading the 1999 book "Development as Freedom," what seems to be a pretty dense exploration on international development by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, an Indian-born Cambridge economist. Toby's friend is reading Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth," a copy still soggy from the rain she found it in, yet still with the Oprah seal of approval intact.