"Boy Scouts can now earn a merit badge for designing smartphone games"

What's nice about this headline is grandparents can tell their grandchildren what "Chubby Checker" is, while grandchildren can explain "penis app."

There's a whole bunch of ways to read now, and we'd like you to indulge in all of them, as you wish, even in the ways that don't particularly help us publish writing. One thing we've often heard from folks is that they would like a quiet thing to sit down with for reading—away from the laptop and the desktop, away from the IMs and Twitter and email and noise.

With the help of 29th Street Publishing, we've made The Weekend Companion. It's a weekly Awl magazine, and it comes out every Friday, for iPhone and iPad, through Apple's Newsstand. Each issue has just five or [...]

We know they're making you stupid, but are apps also making you lazy?

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.

"French mothers can download an app which claims to tell them if their son is gay. For just one euro 99 centimes they receive a questionnaire that aims to give them pointers about their son’s sexuality." Telltale signs, according to some of the app's questions, include a love of musicals and spending a long time in the bathroom. "No app to establish whether one's daughter is a lesbian is on the market," notes RFI, but you have to imagine that will change fairly quickly.

The fine folks at Arc90, the people who brought you Readability, are thinking about some new products. I'm partial to their scheme for Appathy, which delivers the non-fuzzy side of the social network. I also enjoy the perspective-giving livestream app Getagrip, which can inform you how many of your childhood friends are dead. Enjoy!

The first time you hear a very clear Chinese woman's voice say "Sou Sou!" in your living room while you are supposedly alone, it is natural to brush it off. There are so many things making noises all the time! The second time, weeks later, when you're sitting alone by the fireplace reading at midnight, is terrifying. At this point, it is natural to wonder if this is how Moses or Allah or Jesus or Neale Donald Walsch or Oral Roberts or Ted Nugent or Charles Manson felt, when they first heard voices telling them what to do. But what did "Sou Sou!" even mean? It seemed less like [...]

Everybody loves apps, experts say—you can tell because there is an app for everything, including the monitoring of your personal health. The problem is that once you're thinking about monitoring your personal health, you're well on the way to the grave. This depressing fact may be the reason why few Americans use such phone and tablet programs to keep track of what's all too evident from the creaking, coughing, groaning and "weird discharge" most people notice just fine without the danged smart phone beeping and whirring, from wherever it's hiding.

Nearly seven in 10 U.S. adults say they are tracking weight, diet, exercise routines or some medical [...]

"Kiernan Shipka helps me make waffles; Mark Bittman of the New York Times yaps vegetarianism; J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr wrote us a theme song!; James Beard Award winner Christina Tosi of Momofuku/Milk Bar shares a pie recipe and Brooks Headley of 4-star-earner Del Posto offers a crostata recipe; There’s a remix of the David Lebovitz donuts vid that is excellent!; there are babies baking; the premiere of BabyCakes Pretzels and Sandwich Bread! There’s just so much… most everything on video!" —Awl pal Erin McKenna, proprietor of BabyCakes, has a new app with a bunch of recipes and other fun stuff. There's a trailer here, and you can [...]