When Travis Helwig and his girlfriend lost power in the West Village during Sandy, Twitter and Facebook went dark, too. His laptop lost charge, and cell service was down. So they turned on a rechargeable radio and listened by candlelight. When he went to “the Light Zone” to recharge the next day, he prioritized the radio before his phone.

Are you watching (or listening) to the election results come in tonight? Well we are too, so join Brooke Gladstone, and On the Media producers Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt, along with It's a Free Country's Caitlin Thompson and Stephen Reader while we play interactive election night bingo! Get a fresh card, fill in your tiles as the pundits and reporters hit all of our favorite election night coverage cliches, and then tweet out when you've got a winner. Got beef with what constitutes a tile? Come chat it out or hash it out at #mediabingo.

A list of our second most important selections today.

A few weeks back, producer PJ Vogt and I did a story about how campaigns work these days. In it, I talked about direct mail that campaigns use to, subtly or not subtly, guilt you into voting. It's very effective in getting more people to vote. The examples came from Sasha Issenberg's book The Victory Lab. One particular experiment, Don Green (who we spoke with) and two other researchers sent out a series of letters, each of which turned the screws tighter and tighter on voters.

This week's "our week in tweets" is kind of special. We have spent a week in a city that is essentially immobilized - no public transportation, intermittent internet in large parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and a lower Manhattan that was completely without power. WNYC, On the Media's parent station continued broadcasting for the duration of the outage on generator power. So this week's version of Our Week in Tweets contains a lot of photos we took of the damage as we saw it, and a lot of stories about the storm. They may not be as media-centric as they usually are, but we hope you find it interesting.

A few of our favorite things.  Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.

Halloween wouldn’t be much fun if it didn’t end. Like a roller coaster, the knowledge that Halloween can only last a short while affords a wonderfully perverse opportunity to indulge in what would otherwise be a pretty depressing confrontation with death and raw mortality. Fortunately, after only a few hours the juxtaposition of happy and healthy children with decaying skeletons ends, the ghosts retreat, the masks come off, and everything goes back to normal.

But the funny thing about living in an age of pervasive reruns, “classic” movies, and nostalgic retrospectives is that – like Haley Joel Osment – we see dead people all the time, all year round, and each year we’re haunted by more and more of them. 

A few of our favorite things:

Last Wednesday, Quazi Nafis, 21, was arrested in an FBI sting while trying to blow up the New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank with what he thought was 1000 pounds of explosives.

Presented for your approval, things the staff here at OTM approve of.

As an experiment, I decided to watch yesterday's vice presidential debate on my video game console. This year, Xbox Live's new Election 2012 Hub is broadcasting the debates to subscribers of their $50-a-year online gaming service. Along with the live stream, the Xbox Live group teamed up with YouGov, an internet market research firm, to conduct polls during the debate, because why not? Anyone watching on Xbox already has a video game controller in front of them; instead of annihilating pixilated zombies, those controllers can help you voice your political opinions. 

INTERNSHIP GUIDELINES

On the Media is accepting applications from people interested in helping out with the production of the program. Internships generally last three months, are unpaid, and are part-time. They take place at WNYC Radio in New York City, where OTM is produced.

Last week’s episode of OTM featured an interview with Nate Silver discussing some of the central themes and ideas in his new book,The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don't. Silver suggests in the book’s introduction that the problem of discerning signal from noise is one of particular importance in an age of “Big Data,” an era of increasingly powerful publishing and communications technologies. “[If] the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day,” he writes, “the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal.”

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. This week we're shooting for something more like the Coltrane version of 'My Favorite Things" than the Julie Andrews version. Not that there's anything wrong with Julie Andrews.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

On last week's show, Bob spoke to Jose Antonio Vargas about the way that news outlets talk about immigrants and immigration. Since an article in the New York Times last year, Vargas has been working to spark discussion around immigration issues, and at the Online News Association conference last month, he announced his plan to track, and hopefully influence news organizations to move away from the terms "Illegal alien" or "illegal immigrant" to terms like "undocumented" or "unauthorized" immigrant. 

Chief among his focus were two of the world's largest news outlets - the Associated Press and the New York Times. Today, the Times' public editor Margaret Sullivan commented (for the third time) on Vargas' request:

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. If you're interested in what OTM producers like, this is the post for you.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. It's getting colder in New York, but that won't stop us from having favorite things.