Lately, I've been thinking a lot about stars. 

In early November, Twitter replaced its ★ button with a ♥ button. Many Twitter users reacted negatively to the change, lamenting the loss of the ★'s neutrality, on the one hand, and its multi-valence, on the other. Clicking ★ underneath a tweet never automatically signaled agreement, but it is hard not to feel you're agreeing with a tweet when you click ♥ (especially when Twitter itself explicitly equates ♥-ing something with liking it). 

The other day, I was writing about the use of asterisks in seventeenth-century English playbooks...