Over the Easter weekend, the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company–based in the heart of London’s principal jewelery quarter–was raided. The circumstances of the case have yet to be established, but initial reports speculate that the perpetrators may have abseiled down an elevator shaft and broken through the wall of the vault with heavy-duty cutting equipment, before finally using drills to get into the deposit boxes.

India, China, Russia, Spain and the United States all have deposits of jet, the pitch-black gem that actually is a form of coal. But the jet found along a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of rugged coastland around Whitby, a remote Yorkshire fishing town, is considered the world’s best. Jacqueline Cullen, a London designer credited with some of the renewed interest in jet jewelry, gets her supplies from a Whitby resident who abseils down the cliffs to search abandoned Victorian mines, really just small holes chiseled into the rock face.

[Naomi] Cain is part of nine Indigenous sailors, descendants of Indigenous Australians, on the 11-person crew sailing the Beneteau 47.7 Marguerite. She’s worked alongside boats as a stevedore for nearly 18 years, moving cargo on and off container ships with a forklift. Sailing, however, is uncharted waters.

Around that time in Arles, on the Rhône River in what is now southern France, the stevedores did things a bit differently: They threw their empties into the river. Arles in the first century was the thriving gateway to Roman Gaul. Freight from all over the Mediterranean was transferred there to riverboats, then hauled up the Rhône by teams of men to supply the northern reaches of the empire, including the legions manning the German frontier.

Of course, emoji weren’t the first attempt to add an emotional layer. Before emoji there were kaomoji–those looked kinda like this: ╮(￣～￣)╭, (o_O), and (=｀ω´  =). And before that there were emoticons :-). Both were created to add emotional context. Cute and creative, but those older forms require a lot of typing, which on phones means tapping, which in the 1990s meant pecking at numeral buttons.

Unlike better-known emoticons like :) or ;), ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ borrows characters from the Japanese syllabary called katakana. That makes it a kaomoji, a Japanese emoticon; it also makes it, on Western alphabetical keyboards at least, very hard to type. But then I found a solution, and it saves me having to google “smiley sideways shrug” every time I want to quickly rail at the world’s inherent lack of meaning.