Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies won the Booker Prize last night. It’s the sequel to Wolf Hall, which also won the Booker Prize, so clearly both books are pretty good. Kidding! Awards mean nothing. Both books are in fact quite excellent, and it’s been pretty obvious that Mantel is one of our Greatest Living Writers for years now. If you’re intimidated by the heft of the Thomas More books (you shouldn’t be; they really do carry you along) start with The Giant, O’Brien. But if you’ve never read her, do start, she’s terrific.

The Hairpin’s Edith Zimmerman and NY1’s Pat Kiernan face off in a bloody match of questions and answers at Housing Works tonight. PLUS: Daniel Mendelsohn, David Mitchell and the 80s. It’s all on our events calendar, and you can subscribe to this on iTunes.

You can join us here! And by join us, we mean actually join in this time! (There’s a button! It says “Ask to Join.”) Here we are, it’s America’s COUNTDOWN TO DEMOCRACY.

(Sorry we had some issues accepting chat requests at first! Um it was my fault, I’m dumb, it wasn’t obvious!)

“A sperm donor service aimed at matching women with anonymous celebrity dads — such as rock stars and famous athletes — will launch next year, its owners have claimed.”

“Underwear designed to jolt the buttocks with electricity may be able to prevent dangerous open wounds called pressure sores, claim researchers… Doctors at the University of Calgary tested underwear which placed two pads of electrodes on each cheek. Patients who were unable to move because of a spinal cord injury were zapped with 10 seconds of stimulation every 10 minutes for 12 hours a day.”
 — Sometimes experiments that sound really terrible and cruel on paper end up being totally worth it. Cattle-prod underpants: a good thing for the world.

Albino kangaroo! Photos? And how.

“Preparing a meal — not just the eating that follows — is a multisensory experience that can expose many behaviors, from creativity and generosity to control issues and messiness. Cooking with someone who knows his or her way around the kitchen can be a kind of foreplay — or, on the flip side, it could send up deadly red flags. Pay attention to everything: not just kitchen skills but how he or she reacts in preliminary discussions about the meal, shops, handles the food and the bill and more. There may not be clinical evidence, but as a professional chef who has shared my kitchen with countless friends and partners over the decades, I can assure you this exercise is as informative as any Myers-Briggs–type assessment tool.” [Via]

★★ A simple, manageable proposition: some rain was on its way. Pack an umbrella, head out into the mild, gray morning, and wait for it to keep getting grayer. A whitening sky at noon created a moment, and only a moment, of doubt, before the dimmer switch resumed its inexorable progress toward the given. The first drops fell at the moment of exiting the office, and a shine began to cover the street. Out came the umbrella, flinging away its silver plastic end cap as it unfurled, at no cost to the underlying mechanism. It worked, and it was enough.

The new El-P video is good. His album Cancer 4 Cure is one of the two best rap albums released so far this year, I think. The other one is Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music, which El-P produced. And since El-P has said, wittily and correctly, “I swear to God I could make a beat with a banjo and a church organ only and someone will call it ‘dystopian sci-fi’,” I will take this opportunity to tell you that scientists have discovered a planet with four suns. (That’s not “fi,” I guess, but is is “sci.”) But FOUR suns! I hope they have really, really awesome blackout shades on that planet. Otherwise, no one’s getting any sleep there and everyone will be so tired all the time like Al Pacino in Insomnia.

Are you tired of gimmicky livebloggers who care more about their gimmicks than the substance of the presidential debates? Tonight, at The Awl, put all that cheap trash aside and join your night typists Choire Sicha and Ken Layne for basically a deadly earnest typewritten version of “Talk of the Nation.” JK, it will be a lot of outrage about Romney’s sideburns and Obama’s inner sadness and Candy Crowley’s journamalism. DO NOT MISS IT, and please join our “Countdown To Democracy” beginning at 7 p.m., with actual debate liveblogging commencing with the actual debate, at 9 p.m.