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.
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.
I came across a post last July on Emojipedia, in which Keith Broni noted that Twitter, or X, had redesigned its PISTOL emoji. PISTOL had always been controversial: most online platforms started off with PISTOLs drawn as realistic firearms, but, over the course of the mid-2010s, most of them moved to toylike renderings of water pistols instead. Twitter had followed suit.
In October 2023, the UK government passed into law the Online Safety Act, a set of regulations intended to make online services more responsible for the content they carry. It is a laudable aim, but unfortunately the distinctions the Act draws between large sites such as Facebook and Google and smaller sites such as this one are insufficiently well defined. The upshot is that complying with the Act places a much larger burden on the owners of sites such as Shady Characters than it does on the owners of those larger sites.
I’ve had nuclear energy on the mind recently — a product of watching Oppenheimer, perhaps, and also the UK government’s newfound interest in nuclear power in the interest of combatting climate change. Apropos of all that, then, I was happy to appear on a recent episode of AMSEcast, the podcast of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The episode was hosted by the museum’s director, the genial Alan Lowe, who was kind enough to let me rabbit on at length on the subjects of counting, calculators, and computers. I really enjoyed talking to Alan, and I hope you enjoy listening too!