BuzzFeed's Internet Explorer

This week we're asking one of the fundamental questions of our time. Ryan is away, but Katie sits down with future emoji-Pulitzer winner and Senior Tech Writer Charlie Warzel to mine the shadowy depths of the Unicode Consortium.

The Unicode Consortium is the organization that decides which emojis make it into rotation, and the backstory is very :thinking face emoji:

Julia also goes out on the street to ask people which of their recently used emojis symbolizes their love life and Katie presents this week's most delightful tweet.

Read more from Charlie here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/inside-emojigeddon-the-fight-over-the-future-of-the-unicode

And here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/thanks-to-apples-influence-youre-not-getting-a-rifle-emoji

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A stan is a superfan who defends a celeb at all costs. Myleeza Mingo has been obsessed with Kim Kardashian for over a decade, but she's about to retire.

What happens when a person whose identity is intertwined with their celebrity has to collect their gold (Apple) watch and give up the life of being a Twitter bouncer? Katie talks to Myleeza and to Senior BuzzFeed Editor (and Kim K. expert) Kevin Smith about the stan life.

And guess what's back? LETTUCE CLUB IS BACK, people, and it's a miraculous thing. Ryan talks to an early member of the whole shebang, Luke Peterson.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Congrats! You've been fooled into the biggest hoax of all time: this podcast. On week's episode, we find out why fake news is irresistible with help from Craig Silverman, founding editor of BuzzFeed Canada.

Test your own skills at identifying fake news here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/test-your-bullshit-detector?utm_term=.hg1rRG7jn4#.gqpDzmZpGX

Ryan talks to BuzzFeed France reporter Jules Darmanin about his obsession with the French sodomy horse picture ("it really looks like the horse is fucking that guy.")

Producer Julia gets on the mic to guess what the hell a "lettuce club" is, but the real reason to stick around is because Katie gets irrevocably owned this week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katie and Ryan talk to Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith about the punctuation mark that antisemites are using on Twitter and other platforms to target their harassment. It's weird, but that goes without saying as far as the internet is concerned.

Read Cooper and Anthony's pieces for Mic.com here:

https://m.mic.com/articles/145459/the-neo-nazi-echoes-symbol-is-officially-hate-speech#.ir1KQfuHg

And here:

https://m.mic.com/articles/145105/coincidence-detector-the-google-extension-white-supremacists-use-to-track-jews#.QhSqA6qlb

And if you need to clear your mind, you will not regret looking at Katie's insane Russian horse photo:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/the-prettiest-horse-in-the-world?utm_term=.wvXOzdn2w#.ko0MEmk3y

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He's a 13-year-old kid who is forging his path to stardom by using a lip-syncing app called musical.ly. Welcome to the Teen Industrial Complex in 2016.

Katie and Ryan talk through teen topics, then switch gears to call Tamia Thompson, a mod/curator of the very popular Facebook page Post Aesthetics. The group was nearly shut down because of a discussion about whether or not Pepe and Dat Boi are racist, and everybody has opinions about it. Leviticus the Safety Frog highly recommends listening this week!

Jacob Sartorius' single "Sweatshirt": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HArDjsUEok

Tamia Thompson's group Post Aesthetics: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1563505997307839/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Slack bills itself as a messaging app for teams, but Katie and Ryan aspire to live in a world where it's a messaging app for... memes.

This week we tried an experiment where we made a Slack that anyone can join. That's right, you too can now scream the lyrics to All Star with like-minded weirdos.

Katie and Ryan also talk to Adrienne Jeffries, of Vice's Motherboard about her experience quitting Slack for a week. And of course, we talk about Chewbacca mask lady who had the most viewed Facebook livestream ever.

Grab a Bud Light Lime and join our superfun, surprisingly international (??) Slack by submitting your email address here: bzfd.it/ie420memelords

(There's also new music being discussed, podcasts to recommend and photos of dogs from a senior dog sanctuary.)

Read Adrienne's piece here: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-oral-history-of-our-week-without-slack

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's no thirst quite like that of a male ally looking for a cookie, and this week we go deep into the world of performative male feminism. Michael Blackmon, a BuzzFeed writer whose post about Matt McGorry unleashed a storm of woke & bae onto the internet comes on to talk about how weird it is to take on performative male feminism in 2016.

Ryan also takes off his shirt in the name of being a #malefeminist and lives to tell the tale.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's time to talk memes. Friend of the show Brian Feldman, of the NY Magazine blog Select All, stops in to share his talents as memeologist with Katie and Ryan. We learn what loss.jpg is, how apologetic Daily Dot writer Miles Klee is to have killed dat boi and why exactly people take memes so seriously.

Feldman on dat boi: http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/05/the-strange-journey-of-dat-boi-the-years-best-meme-so-far.html

Feldman on loss.jpg: http://nymag.com/selectall/2015/11/longest-running-miscarriage-meme-on-the-web.html

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katie and Ryan are joined by Doreen St. Felix and Niela Orr to talk about how race and cultural appropriation play out as memes spread.

And our favorite scammer, Joanne, aka Branden Miller was scammed himself and Katie has an update.

Read up on Doreen and Niela's great pieces:

Doreen St. Felix, at The Fader: http://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee-meechie-viral-vines

Niela Orr, on BuzzFeed: https://www.buzzfeed.com/nielaorr/black-trauma-remixed-for-your-clicks

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Queen of Youtube Grace Helbig stops in to chat with Katie and Ryan about her latest project, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl this week guyssss!! Ryan also tells the world about an insane conspiracy theory about Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/mexicos-possible-photoshopping-president

And if you want to know more about politics but don't have a way of forming your own opinions, download BuzzFeed's first-ever politics podcast, No One Knows Anything!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/good-surrogate-is-hard-to/id1106215850?i=367678127&mt=2

Ok byeeeee, don't forget to subscribe to our channel and leave us some comments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices