The reviews are in for Face with Tears of Joy

Cover for "Face with Tears of Joy", showing the face with tears of joy emoji throughout emoji history
Cover of Face with Tears of Joy. (W. W. Norton, 2025.)

The reviews for Face with Tears of Joy have started to come in, and I am happy (and relieved) to say that reviewers seem to be enjoying the book quite a bit! Here are a few quotes:

Houston chronicles the rise of the emoji in this fun romp through the evolution of digital language…equal parts informative and delightful.

An excellent read for those interested in history, technology, and the global scale of digital communication…Houston writes with humor and an easy-going tone, plus a pace that is smooth and seems effortless, keeping readers engaged.

A pleasurable and well-researched journey into pop iconography…Houston knows that any language whose mascot is a smiling poop pile can be treated only so seriously, so the text is charmingly filled with emoji as illustrations and within sentences, making it both a product of a new way of communicating as well as a study of it.

Face with Tears of Joy on 99% Invisible

I’ve always really enjoyed 99% Invisible, Roman Mars’ long-running podcast about design, which makes it all the more special to have appeared on three different episode in the past — on the octothorpe (#), the interrobang (‽), and pocket calculators respectively. Now, to mark the publication of Face with Tears of Joy, I’m pleased to say that I’m on it again!

This time round, for episode 626, Talon Stradley takes a look at the legal ramifications of emoji, and specifically a case in Saskatchewan, Canada, in which a farmer who responded to a text message about a contract with a thumbs-up emoji was found to have agreed to that contract despite denying having done so. The 99PI crew talk to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, who specialises in technology law. I cited Goldman’s work in the book, and his blog is an excellent introduction to the subject of emoji in the courtroom.

I pop up at around 17 minutes into the episode for a chat with Roman not about the legality or otherwise of emoji, but instead about this: the poop emoji (💩). For ten glorious minutes, we shoot the shit about this most egregious of emoji. And honestly, I really enjoyed it. The poop emoji is only a supporting actor in Face with Tears of Joy, really, and it was fun to dive into the evocative history of this one particular symbol. Have a listen to the episode here! I hope you enjoy it.

Face with Tears of Joy, revealed!

Cover for "Face with Tears of Joy", showing the face with tears of joy emoji throughout emoji history
Cover of Face with Tears of Joy. (W. W. Norton, 2025.)

Please allow me to introduce the cover of my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji!

‘😂’ will be published in July this year, and you can pre-order the paperback in the USA from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, Powell’s, or Walmart. In the rest of the world, order from Amazon.co.uk, Bookshop.org or Waterstones.

If e-books are more your style, you can pre-order for your Nook at Barnes & Noble; for your Kobo at Kobo.com; for your iPhone or iPad at Apple Books; or for your Kindle at Amazon (USA) or Amazon (UK).

I’ve said it before, but I really enojyed writing this one. It’s a sequel, almost, to Shady Characters, focusing as it does on an intriguing collection of symbols which dance around the written word without ever really becoming part of it. Emoji carry echoes of cuneiform, kanji, manga, and even the interrobang, and if any of those subjects pique your interest — or even just emoji themselves! — then please consider pre-ordering a copy.*

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On a side note, I never used to understand why my agent, Laurie Abkemeier, always encouraged me to encourage you to pre-order my books. Isn’t a pre-order just the same as a order placed after publication? Well, it turns out not. Pre-orders make the publishing world go round: they inform print run sizes, they help bookshops make sure they have the right stock, and they can influence bestseller charts. (Okay, that last one is more a “me” thing than a “you” thing.) They can even make sure that you will actually be able to read the book, since pre-orders are fulfilled before normal orders.

All this is to say, if you have even a passing interest in emoji, please pre-order the book! It would mean a lot to me, personally, and my editor will thank you too. 

Miscellany № 108: emoji, for all the wrong reasons

Emoji have been in the news recently for a host of reasons, most of them bad — but all of them, I would submit, worthy of our attention.


First up is a Netflix series called Adolescence that has been garnering plaudits in the UK and elsewhere since it went on air last month. I won’t spoil the plot, but I note that Emojipedia has joined the clamour with a blog post titled “Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’, Emoji Codes & Emoji Repurposing”. In it, Keith Broni explores the programme’s use of an “emoji code” by so-called incels — a misogynistic online culture of men who blame women for their lack of sexual success — in which, for instance, ‘💯’ refers to the belief that 20% of men attract 80% of women. Adolescence moots other codes too, such as ‘🔵’ and ‘🔴’ to represent the blue and red pills made famous by The Matrix, the Wachowski sisters’ dystopian action film, and which in turn relate to being “blue pilled” or “red pilled” — either accepting of mainstream views or “seeing through” them to some alleged hidden truth.

Despite the mild moral panic that has accompanied this use of emoji, Broni makes the point (echoed in Face with Tears of Joy) that in-groups often create temporary codes, or vocabularies, which take everyday words or symbols and give them new meanings. Emoji happen to be particularly ripe for this sort of jargon because they can have multiple interpretations based on the object or action being depicted, the name of that object or action, or metaphorical interpretations of either one.

I haven’t watched Adolescence yet (and to be honest, it does not seem like it will be an easy watch), but when I do I’ll be interested to see how this creative yet dispiriting use of emoji is handled.


Emoji only work because of the efforts of the Unicode Consortium, the body which governs text on the web and beyond. One of Unicode’s responsibilities is to define the technical mechanisms by which computerised text is encoded — that is, turned into bits and bytes — for storage or transmission. This has inevitably given rise to many special rules that address one nuance or another of written language.

Emoji have a number of such nuances. One in particular is the use of what are called “variation selectors”, which are invisible characters that can be used to choose between monochrome and colour versions of a given emoji. (For example, ‘😄︎’ versus ‘😄’.) There are lots of variation selectors in Unicode, but most are unused and computer programs generally ignore them unless they can do something useful with them.

So far, so innocuous. However, a software engineer named Paul Butler has found that it is possible to “smuggle” hidden meanings in emoji using long strings of unused variation selectors. Such hidden messages are not necessarily bad for one’s computer (and as Paul discovers, you don’t even need emoji to create them), but his blog post on the subject makes fascinating reading for anyone even tangentially interested in how computers process text.


A week is a long time in politics, as they say, and this week has been especially long. If you can, though, cast your mind back to the scandal that erupted barely a fortnight ago in which US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, shared what appeared to be extremely sensitive military secrets in a group chat to which the editor of The Atlantic magazine had been unwittingly added.

If this wasn’t enough to be grappling with, it emerged that Hegseth’s correspondents cheered his news of attacks on Houthi insurgents with strings of emoji: Michael Waltz, an advisor to the Trump administration, posted “👊🇺🇸🔥”, while others expressed their gratitude with “prayer hands”, or ‘🙏’.

Honestly, I can’t even. I like emoji — I wrote a book about them! — yet even I can see that using them to celebrate a series of airstrikes is beyond the pale. It is emoji’s world now; we just live in it.

Miscellany № 107: old books (and a new Book)

Paperback cover of "The Book", showing the title on a cream band against a dark green background.
The Book paperback. (W. W. Norton, 2025.)

Some big news today: The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of our Time will be published soon in paperback!

The paperback edition is updated from the hardback, with all of the various errata fixed and a number of changes made to account for the book’s paperback rather than hardcover construction.* If you remember, the hardback edition had a number of references to its own physical form (“Tip the book towards you and look at the spine”, and so on) which have now been modified accordingly. Of course, the paperback edition provides a new and different set of reference points, so if some passages now ask you to find a hardback on your bookshelf, others can now tell you to look again at the paperback in your hands.

The paperback is currently available to pre-order from all the usual places.
Read more

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I may have spooked the printer just a little by hunting down their contact info and emailing to ask for details of the paperback’s construction. Their email to W. W. Norton with the requisite information had a slightly hunted air about it. Leave us alone, rogue author!