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Only 31 new emoji are going to be encoded this year

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

A moose, a blackbird, a goose and a jellyfish are just a few of the new emoji you can expect to find on your phone later this year.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Juana, don’t forget the shaking face.

SUMMERS: (Laughter).

JENNIFER DANIEL: You really could not express being shook until shake face. It also is fairly apt for those situations when you are experiencing either a literal earthquake or a metaphorical one, or perhaps you’re just shaking your head back and forth.

SHAPIRO: Jennifer Daniel chairs the Emoji Subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that approves new emojis. Daniel says another new entry bound to set texters hearts aflutter is the plain pink heart.

DANIEL: The pink heart is one of those kinds of emojis that you think has already been there, surely. Surely there has been a pink heart all this time. But no, there has not until today.

SUMMERS: Really? In total, the Unicode Consortium proposed just 31 new emoji this year, 10 times fewer than the number approved just a few years ago. And Daniel says there’s a reason why.

DANIEL: When Unicode first started to encode emoji, there were only about 700 concepts in your keyboard. And if you flash-forward to today, there’s way over 3,000 of these tiny glyphs at your fingertips. What this means is it requires us to review proposals in a way that maybe we didn’t have to do in the earlier days. The criteria for inclusion is much higher.

SHAPIRO: So how many emojis are too many, we asked?

DANIEL: When is a garden done growing?

SHAPIRO: Well, there is a tulip emoji.

SUMMERS: A rose.

SHAPIRO: A sunflower.

SUMMERS: A seedling.

SHAPIRO: We might almost be there. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Ari Shapiro has been one of the hosts of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine, since 2015. During his first two years on the program, listenership to All Things Considered grew at an unprecedented rate, with more people tuning in during a typical quarter-hour than any other program on the radio.

Shapiro has reported from above the Arctic Circle and aboard Air Force One. He has covered wars in Iraq, Ukraine, and Israel, and he has filed stories from dozens of countries and most of the 50 states.

Shapiro spent two years as NPR's International Correspondent based in London, traveling the world to cover a wide range of topics for NPR's news programs. His overseas move came after four years as NPR's White House Correspondent during President Barack Obama's first and second terms. Shapiro also embedded with the campaign of Republican Mitt Romney for the duration of the 2012 presidential race. He was NPR's Justice Correspondent for five years during the George W. Bush Administration, covering debates over surveillance, detention and interrogation in the years after Sept. 11.

Shapiro's reporting has been consistently recognized by his peers. He has won two national Edward R. Murrow awards; one for his reporting on the life and death of Breonna Taylor, and another for his coverage of the Trump Administration's asylum policies on the US-Mexico border. The Columbia Journalism Review honored him with a laurel for his investigation into disability benefits for injured American veterans. The American Bar Association awarded him the Silver Gavel for exposing the failures of Louisiana's detention system after Hurricane Katrina. He was the first recipient of the American Judges' Association American Gavel Award for his work on U.S. courts and the American justice system. And at age 25, Shapiro won the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for an investigation of methamphetamine use and HIV transmission.

An occasional singer, Shapiro makes frequent guest appearances with the "little orchestra" Pink Martini, whose recent albums feature several of his contributions, in multiple languages. Since his debut at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009, Shapiro has performed live at many of the world's most storied venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York, The Royal Albert Hall in London and L'Olympia in Paris. In 2019 he created the show "Och and Oy" with Tony Award winner Alan Cumming, and they continue to tour the country with it.

Shapiro was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale. He began his journalism career as an intern for NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, who has also occasionally been known to sing in public.

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