The Wirecutter is a new website designed to do one thing: to tell you what the best particular product in a category is at any given moment. It is a project of Brian Lam, late of Gizmodo. Do you want to buy a TV? Great: here are the three TVs we endorse right now. Here's what Brian has to say about the site; here's the best way to use it.

What it is not is a "gadget blog." There's really plenty of those, and they're great! They cover every rollout, every product, every bit of rumor and whatnot in the tech world. The rest [...]

The American Music Awards are simultaneously the silliest and the most honest music-related gala. Nominees are based on things like Soundscan numbers and online streams instead of trifles like artistic intent or legend status, and the winners are dubbed "favorites," not "bests." Yet there's an air of seriousness about it that you'd never see at, say, MTV's Video Music Awards, one that will be ever more present this year as the Black Eyed Peas bring us their latest wedding-floor-filler "The Time (Dirty Bit)" live for the first time on TV and Train play That Train Song You Hear Everywhere one more time. Which is to say, come [...]

The Awl is pleased to announce the hiring of John Shankman as publisher of The Awl, The Hairpin and Splitsider.

Shankman will begin next week. He is departing his position as account director at the Huffington Post. Prior, from 2007 to early 2010, he was a regional sales manager at Federated Media.

He can be reached at John@theawl.com.

Please join us here at, oh, Oscar-time, on Sunday, when our very own Choire Sicha and you will be discussing the Academy Awards with various and sundry as they happen. (This is sometimes referred to as "liveblogging.") Warning: we have a premonition this is going to be a horrifying Oscars! See you then! Or not!