Map from 270 To Win.

There's been so much betting this election season. Mitt Romney bet that Texas mannequin $10,000 he'd never even heard of health care while Governor of Massachusetts. Donald Trump bet Barack Obama $5 million that the President got mediocre grades from an online terrorist college. And Nate Silver just bet Joe Scarborough $1,000 that math and statistics are more powerful than sorcery. Why should you be left out of this hot electoral action? Join us for The Awl's first quadrennial electoral college pool!

Here's how it works. Go over to 270 To Win and color the map according to how you [...]

The video for the new song from the National features Jonathan Franzen walking around the remote Chilean Island of Alejandro Selkirk, mourning the loss of David Foster Wallace with the hand puppet from the classic video for LCD Soundsystem's "New York, I love You But You're Bringing Me Down." Oh, wait. I should watch it again. That might not actually be Jonathan Franzen.

Six months ago, BP's stock price had been halved from its January high. It seems that pumping 50-odd thousand barrels of oil per day into an open ocean is not a profitable use of oil? (Though, as we'll soon demonstrate, it can be.) With its stock under $30 and Congress sending out hearings e-vites to oil executives, we wondered where BP's stock would be six months later.

At the time, it was already two months after the April 20th rig explosion. Who knew how long it would be until BP could stop the open flow of oil? (Remember when setting the Gulf of Mexico on fire was [...]

Local gay cat (pictured, above) somehow loses gay blog gay animal gay holiday gay outfit contest. (NB That is not our Cat, it is merely a local cat heretofore unknown to us but decidedly a highly enjoyable one.)

Did you enter the competition to design the AIDS Memorial Park in the "upper West Village," at what they call "St. Vincent's Triangle"? Did you pay that $50 entry fee, in the hopes to win the big $5000 prize (and, you know, design a park)? Well, you did not win. And neither did anyone else who entered, because Rudin Management, the developers, hated them all, even the rather lovely design chosen by the jury. They will be sticking with their extremely dull own plans. (The memorial has a classic New York history, with lots of angry community board meetings; if you want to dive [...]

This competition, The Ultimate Pop Song Tournament, fills me with terror-rage just looking at its

This has already been declared the best music promotion of the year, and with good reason. "Enter the unique code from your CD or LP in the field below to proceed. One very lucky winner will win the prize of a lifetime: Stuart Murdoch will come to your town, hang out with you for an afternoon and write a song about you, to be released on a special Belle and Sebastian 7" next year." The problem is you don't get editorial control over the song and the legalisms seem nonexistent. Scary stuff, for a band with songs like "Judy is a Dick Slap" and also that [...]

They may have some slight security issues, but Grindr, the infamous gay "social" app that's expanding to straight-town, is finding… some ways to make money.

“So the female wants to say no but he puts it in big bright letters 'new and improved.’ He’s basically finding loopholes in her sensory system.” —University of British Columbia zoologist Wayne Madison explains the increasingly complex mating dance of the male jumping spider to The Last Word On Nothing's Anne Casselman. Madison discovered a whole new species of jumping spider in Ecuador, and you can help name it!

Love letters to punctuation: Is this the best contest ever? Yes. Join in! So far Gene Weingarten is succeeding admirably with his letter addressed to "Dear at-the-price-of."