[tmoertel]

But the first of your examples is cleaner not because of any inherent advantage of list-comprehension syntax but because in Python the syntactic cost of turning an expression into an anonymous function is so high. In other words, you're comparing (cognitive cost of comprehension + low cost of expression) against (cognitive cost of map + high cost of promoting an expression to an anonymous function).

Don't blame map for Python's tax on expression-promotion. ;-)