Daniel Dae Kim, the Lost and Hawaii Five-O star, returns in a new action series about a father-daughter spy duo making a do-or-die stand. Kim plays an agent who reappears in his daughter’s life long after she’d thought him dead. But she’s a highly trained asset now, too, and together they know too much about the game to be left alive by those pulling the levers. Kim and Reina Hardesty portray the hunted; Piper Perabo commands the hunters. Wednesday. Aug. 13, Prime.

by Keith Houston

“Emoji blew up right around 2011,” said Laura Miller in Slate, and we’re lucky they did. So many more of our online text interactions would have led to misunderstandings and arguments without the hearts, smiley faces, and scores of other pictographs we can now call up instantly on our phones. Keith Houston’s “breezy, witty” new “natural history” of emoji doesn’t oversell their significance. He pushes back against the claim that emoji comprise a language all their own, preferring to call them “insurgents within language.” But “his assertion that these little images have become an inextricable part of our culture feels credible,” and he makes the most of the subject’s entertainment value. In fact, “one of the primary pleasures of Face With Tears of Joy is the opportunity it offers to revisit the online culture of the 2010s, when the internet still felt fun.”

The journey of emoji to ubiquity is “more complicated than you might think,” said Megan Garber in The Atlantic. Yes, emoji fever took hold in 2011, the year Apple added an emoji keyboard to its iPhones, and the set of emoji we’ve known since then can be traced back to images created by Japanese engineer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. But Houston shows that Kurita has been wrongly credited as the inventor of emoji—a word derived from the Japanese for “picture” and “written character”— because even pagers and typewriters sold in Japan in the 1980s gave users access to pictorial characters. When the explosion arrived decades later, things moved fast. By 2015, the world’s most popular emoji, the titular “face with tears of joy,” was selected by the Oxford English Dictionary as the word of the year, and the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit charged with maintaining a unified roster of emoji, was clearly scrambling to manage the task. Was adding a choice of skin tones to a thumbs-up emoji more or less racist than providing no choice? And why was there no emoji for a female police officer, or doctor, or lawyer? 

“As Houston’s fascinatingly geeky history shows, emoji have always been political,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. Fortunately, he also appreciates that people are too creative to get locked in by the intended meaning of any particular emoji. The human skull emoji is now Gen Z’s “face with tears of joy,” connoting dying of laughter. The upturned thumb is the same cohort’s “OK, Boomer.” And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Houston, after reviewing the history of hieroglyphs and other pictographic characters, “makes the intriguing argument that the age of the mechanical typewriter represented an unusual historical interlude of expressive poverty. Once humans were freed from the unnatural restrictions it imposed, there was bound to be a new flourishing of symbolic play.”

The actress who transcended the ‘dumb blonde’

Loni Anderson defied stereotypes for half a century, playing buxom blondes whose smarts were often underestimated. As receptionist Jennifer Marlowe on CBS’s WKRP in Cincinnati from 1978 to 1982, she reaped two Emmy nominations and three Golden Globe nominations—and her dyed platinum hair and dimpled smile earned her the status of a sex symbol. She portrayed other famous blondes, including in 1980’s The Jayne Mansfield Story. But it was her 1993 divorce from actor Burt Reynolds that made her a tabloid fixture. She and Reynolds spent decades insulting each other publicly, their barbs splattered across headlines at grocery stores. Yet her beef with the media wasn’t the gossip but its misrepresentation of her as less than intelligent. “Being a brunette my entire life and being taken seriously as an actress, you think, ‘What happened?’” she said. “My brain dissolved with the bleach?” 

Born in St. Paul, Minn., the daughter of a model, Loni Kaye Anderson studied art at the University of Minnesota and placed second in the 1964 Miss Minnesota pageant. She taught briefly at a local high school but quit because of sexual harassment, taking instead to the stage to do community theater. By 1975, she’d moved to Hollywood and dyed her hair a striking platinum that quickly became her calling card. She got her big break at age 33 with WKRP, a show in which her “seemingly ditsy, bombshell character was anything but,” said The New York Times, and many jokes revolved around her character being underestimated. She began dating Reynolds while the two were filming Stroker Ace in 1982 and eventually made him her third husband; the marriage lasted five years.

The Burt and Loni split was “one of the nastiest divorces in Hollywood history,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Reynolds accused Anderson of cheating, while she said he was abusive and addicted to painkillers. Their saga stayed in the headlines for years both because of “its bitterness and the length of time it took to reach a settlement,” said The Washington Post. Anderson remarried in 2008, yet Reynolds didn’t pay off his settlement to her until 2015. They eventually made up before he died in 2018. Anderson kept working well into her 70s, guest-starring in TV and web series. “I never thought I would be Loni Anderson, sex symbol,” she said in 2021. “I took whatever my career threw at me. So I embrace it. And my granddaughters think it’s a hoot!”