Are we in danger of overusing the word “trolling” to the point where it loses all meaning? Oh no, how will we ever express the sentiment of “I am irritated enough about this to point it out but not willing to engage any further with it” if that happens?

“If your favorite flavor is Vanilla, you’re more likely to be impulsive and an idealist. Chocoholics are dramatic and flirtatious, while Rocky Road lovers are good listeners. Praline ‘n Cream fans are loving and supportive. Don’t say anything bad about Mint Chocolate Chip to those fans, because they tend to be argumentative.”

Basically This Post Is A Subtweet About “Rolling Stone” Except I Guess I Just Messed Up The “Sub” Part

healthy pic.twitter.com/j4cTtZX1fq

— Alec Jacobs (@alecjacobs) July 19, 2013

This is such a very sad story about this guy!

But also, that’s a lot of nerve of all these magazines, to put out such pretty pictures of a man who died from heroin. It’s almost like… they’re representing… who he was.

“Takeesha was particularly excited, especially about the rings of saturn. Honestly was not much different from anybody else who I have shown who is smart and curious. I found the reaction of the johns more interesting. They would slow down and just stare out their cars. Takeesha would shout at them, ‘Hey, you want your dick sucked or you want to look at Saturn?’ She has a great sense of humor that way.”

Don’t do any of these things, honestly! Just immerse yourself in water and return on Monday!

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Audible. From this link right here you may obtain a 30-day free trial of Audible and a free audiobook of your choosing. Did you know that there is a good-looking fellow who narrates the New Yorker for you every week? It’s true, his name is Todd Mundt! That is so great.

by Victoria Johnson and John Wenz

Tunisia, why are you turning your nose up like that at poor Sicily? Who can you possibly think you’re better than? You’re where George Lucas was allowed to have a camera.

You remember that picture where if you looked at it one way it was a haggard old lady and if you looked at it the other way it was a beautiful woman? I just looked at the old lady face in Alaska upside down and it looked like an upside-down old lady.

Armenia looks just like the protagonist of The Paperboy.

Pictured: India, left, cracking open a cold one and drinking Sri Lanka right up. I bet there’s a metaphor here somewhere. Let me read my Economist back issues and get back to you.

Does anyone remember The Mask, with pre-penguin movies Jim Carrey? Pre-fame Cameron Diaz. Also pre-taste 12-year-old me lapping it up out of a trough because it was a comic book movie. Korea, you remind me of the most horrible moments.

Everybody likes to think of the “I am not a crook” as the first time that Richard Nixon had to assert that he was not a crook. In fact, he made a lifelong career out of it. Just look up his Checkers speech. You have to admire someone who made a career out of bald-faced lying for his fuck-ups in public. It was like the Bill Clinton prototype. It was such a controversy when Ford pardoned him, and Nixon basically sulked out of the public life until he died, also creating the prototype for presidents who go into hiding after their presidencies.

I hear Montana is a beautiful place.

I wonder if there’s a border that looks like Gerald Ford.

I’ve been really tryin’, baby / Tryin’ to hold back these feeling for so long / And if you feel, like I feel baby / Then come on, oh come on. (I would like to think that Morocco is the secret freak who kisses on Spain.)

I keep looking for the mouth of Pakistan. In one place, it’s whistling a tune. In another, it’s keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. In still another, there are robotic planes hovering above.

Victoria Johnson and John Wenz see nothing in the borders of Missouri. In fact, they don’t acknowledge Missouri at all.

★ The palest of the linen-cotton shirts was looking more battered and wrinkled than usual. How many times had it been grabbed and worn and washed again? The hot-weather finery of earlier in the week was gone, people’s options exhausted. It was no longer a special occasion to dress for — maybe still for the aggressively dapper man, bearded, pedaling down Prince Street in striped sport coat and terra-cotta shorts, but the heat was not his sartorial muse. Or maybe it was for the woman posing for a photographer’s big-lensed camera, later, also on Prince, stretching her arms up till the hem of her trapeze dress was at her hip joint. Middle-aged men at the crosswalk stopped to contribute their own gazes to the camera’s. By the taxi-clogged gas station, the heat was squeezing the ears. At the 59th Street station, prudent passengers hung back as a 1 train stood there, overstuffed, the conductor trying to close the doors. An express passed behind it, a piston in a chamber, sending coils of furnace-hot air to batter the holdouts on the platform.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Perfect Pitcher

for David

The invaders used a non-vegetarian method
of emptying the town of its populace.

What we see is a kind of attributed trembling, as
with stars, or pebbles in the streambed of a brook.

He led us a dance, which ended in closed-mouth laughter.
A brimming fountain in the middle distance spilled a willow.

The poem misses, and only by a
hairsbreadth, being nothing but itself.

Windowframe. Branch of a red maple
bowing the breeze, seventeen times.

Don’t call that cerise shirt loud. Colors, too, have
feelings, they can hurt and be hurt, same as words.

Over a tall glass J. and I babbled
of green tables and W.C. Fields.

Travel time backwards far enough, and you’ll see
sweetness is as tough as poured milk. Concentric

echoes in the pond console the lost beloved’s image.

Alfred Corn is the author of numerous books of poems including, most recently, Tables (Press 53, 2013).

Oh, the poems you’ll read! You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“In the late 1920s, the Julian Petroleum Corporation, though scarcely remembered today, defrauded some 40,000 investors of $150 million in one of the nation’s earliest Ponzi schemes, driving Southern Californians to the brink of revolution as they witnessed their most trusted leaders and institutions caught in the meshes of the scandal’s net.”

App updates seem to come in waves. One minute you’ve obsessively completed updates, the next minute, your folder or app store icon on your phone has a big red “22” badge on it. Around half of all updates are minor but useful bug fixes. Sometimes they’re incredibly undersold security updates, a little trick Tumblr pulled this week when they realized that they were sending passwords in plain text. (No one really went crazy about this, surprisingly, because we live in password denial: “Some company that you exchange information with is going to reveal your password to someone else.”) This week’s app updates cluster revealed something more interesting: lots of what look like developer’s pet projects, lots of weird iteration, and lots of things that most users just don’t care about. But underlying these updates is an industry-wide desperation to scale, to be beloved. The apps want you to live in them. They want you to get your friends to live there with you. They want you to spend all the time with them. That’s why the only real update for a game app is “hello, we just added 100 new levels to Candy Crush” or the like. That’s what users want, and that’s what they should get.

Developers and the companies they work for live in a funny box. They get user feedback from superusers and from loud users, and they get raw data, but they’re also subject to internal roadmap obsessions. When that happens, they roll out crap that no one wants. At larger companies, like Google, mistakes get made when other products inside the company have to get shoved inside a perfectly good standalone product. This is becoming a hallmark of Google’s greatest failing. (See also: making “chats” into “hangouts” and pretty much literally everything involving Google Plus.) Of course, Google’s real greatest failing is that maybe it is becoming a cult?

In any event: There’s two ways to get users to live in your app. You can give users a surprise they might like — or you can give people something they really did want. Sometimes people don’t actually like doing the latter: it’s like asking your kids what they want for Christmas. But surprises, as with gifts, often looks like flailing. It’s iteration as “throwing shit at the wall” to see how users respond.

Let’s start with some of the good app updates of the last ten days, from some of the largest companies in the market, and work our way down to some of the most horrible things ever seen in the history of mobile.

American Airlines

American Airlines has suffered on the web for a long time, and finally made their way through a web redesign that was mostly good (and desperately needed); likewise, their app has come a long way. That they actually managed to wrangle the systems to show flights’ upgrade lists and TSA pre-check boarding status in the app is an huge achievement. This is amazingly impressive. They gave us all a thing we want but didn’t even believe we could ask for.

Vine

A solid update, that promises to deliver better performance. This gives a soothing feeling: an update that says “we will end your frustrations with using our product” is wonderful.

Twitter

This is basically an interface change, which, eh. No one likes constant change. One of the hallmarks with our frustration with web and mobile products is constant shuffling and changing of features. Their search result changes aren’t actually an improvement, but, again, eh!

Pocket

Reliability and reliably! Plus the servicing of a language-specific problem. Sweet.

GroupMe

This is where things start to get hairy. GroupMe, owned by Skype which then went under the Microsoft umbrella, is a funny critter. This update services a younger segment of its audience, presumably. It’s pretty daring to issue an iOS-only non-necessary feature though!

Google Maps

Possibly one of the shittiest app updates so far in human history. What do people want from Google Maps? They want to be able to get places, and also to get there well. Google Maps is an extremely crucial invention, and unlike many apps, it services a diverse user base: rural people, city people, public transportation users, drivers alike. What they’re doing now is PILING GARBAGE INTO IT. Zagat is a useless database of crap. “Great deals from my favorite brands” is a heap of shit, and it’s actually a lie: I highly doubt I will hear from my favorite brands through Google Maps. “Indoor maps” could be intriguing. All I really want though is for Maps to learn where the subway entrances actually are. Not so hard. Finally, everyone is pushing “discovery” and “exploration,” and mostly everyone is failing at it.

Facebook

Almost as bad, though not as undermining: Facebook rolls out verification. They just couldn’t help stealing this from Twitter. This rolled out in late May online; weird that it took them until July 10th to get to mobile.

Cinemagram

I’ve felt a lot of time feeling bad for Cinemagram in the age of Vine. It’s a great product, particularly with the updates it’s received in the last year! In many ways it’s better than Vine. It is, I think, also far more global. Focusing on delivering updates like sound effects (talk like a chipmunk??? Or… a manly man?) seem… off-base.

Path

The most beloved-by-indielectuals app of them all, Path, got a freakishly weird and almost unintelligible update on July 9th. Use… a QR code to friend people IRL? Friend Progress Bar? New… Stickers? Exactly what the fuck is going on here? Honestly, I get the love for Path, and it’s a delightful creation, but this sounds like The Sims ate Facebook and barfed out MySpace.