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LIFESTYLE
Current Trends Explained: ‘Le Snack Demon,’ Educational Brainrot Videos
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This week, a meme-based generational civil war is breaking out on TikTok, and only one side knows it’s even happening; a throwaway tweet from rapper Young Thug has me looking into why so many rappers put “ASAP” in front of their names, and we’re going back in time to 2012, when prank videos ruled the internet. TikTok’s Le Snack Demon and why it signals a generational riftTikTok has been around since 2016; Instagram, since 2010. Both have lived long enough to see long-time users butting heads with newcomers, and generational battle lines are being drawn around a little AI cartoon character called Snack Demon. It started on (older-coded) Instagram, where this video from an AI slop account went viral:

You don’t have to be 17 years old to see that this meme is dumb and bad. It speaks to something most younger people don’t care about: wanting to avoid eating snacks because you’re on a diet. It is exactly the kind of meme someone’s mom would post. This fact was not lost on TikTok, as illustrated by @nataliethebrownie in this video:

So the stage was set for Snack Demon to operate on both a sincere level and an ironic one. TikTok moms and the mom-adjacent are taking the meme at face value and posting videos like these.

The younger generation are responding with similar videos meant to mock how lame the original posts are. The ironic versions of Snack Demon videos tend to feature a different AI-generated main character—a gray Snack Demon—and often mention current meme-target Arby’s, but the dance, annoying song, and cutesy-slop vibe remain the same. I especially love that they refer to it as “Le Snack Demon,” an ironic dig at the way older generations of online people used to dunk on lame internet “rage comics” headed “le me.” That’s a double dose of irony!

Ultimately, younger generations don’t understand that they can’t actually win this war. First, because the number of people who appreciate irony has never been huge and it seems to shrinking rapidly in 2026, and secondly, because it doesn’t matter how cool you are when you’re young. Everyone who lives long enough will be eventually be mocked online for posting their own version of Snack Demon. Why rappers are using “ASAP” in their namesRapper Young Thug recently tweeted that he was changing his name. His real first name is “Jeffery” and he doesn’t want a connection to Epstein. I’m only writing about this because the tweet says “I’m changing my f**king name asap bro,” and at first I thought he said he was changing his name to “ASAP Bro,” joining A$AP Rocky, ASAP Lou, A$AP Ferg, ASAP Twelvyy, A$AP NAST, and about a hundred other rappers and producers who have chosen “ASAP” or “A$AP” as part of their stage name. Classically, “ASAP” means “as soon as possible,” and that’s how Young Thug meant it in his tweet. As much as I’d like it to be, A$AP Rocky’s stage name is not “As Soon As Possible, Rocky.” “A$AP” or “ASAP” indicates an affiliation with the ASAP Mob, a New York hip-hop collective started by ASAP Yams, ASAP Bari, and ASAP Illz way back in 2006. As for what the letters actually stand for in terms of rap names, it depends on who you ask. Some say ASAP is short for “Always Strive And Prosper.” Some say it means, “Assassinating Snitches and Police.” If you work at NASA, ASAP means “Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel,” and it’s “Always Say a Prayer” if you’re religious, but I like A$AP Rocky’s preferred definition best: “Acronym Symbolizing Any Purpose.”

What do you think so far?

Viral video of the week: yelling food ordersOver 50 million people have watched the video below, in which TikToker @pablopyee pretends to be hearing-impaired so they can yell their orders at the beleaguered worker behind the counter at a fast food place.

There’s more where that came from. This TikToker has a little cottage industry of prank-style videos in which he bellows at fast food workers, pronounces words incorrectly, aggressively compliments strangers, and otherwise causes mild mayhem. Yeah, it sucks to make people uncomfortable in public, especially if they’re working, but most of his subjects seem like they’re at least amused, and no one is getting hurt—unlike past generations of prank videos that were sometimes as simple as “walk up to a stranger and slap them across the face” or “drive a car while blindfolded.” And I like that this TikToker is bucking the trend of his peers, whose generation-defining trait is being afraid to do anything (socialize, have a drink, take risks, have sex, make friends) for fear of appearing “cringe” on social media. And at least it isn’t AI. He’s out there being loud and embarrassing in the flesh. Educational brainrot videos take over TikTokIf the young person in your life is watching AI-generated slop videos on TikTok all day, don’t assume that they’re watching mindless content. Sure, most AI-made videos online richly deserve the “brainrot” name, but there’s a growing, oxymoronic trend online of educational brainrot videos. The format seems to have begun with the Skeleton and Socrates videos I discussed a few weeks ago, and has since expanded beyond Greek history. Here are a few channels that are making (semi) worthwhile brainrot. MoggyBoi: This channel features videos explaining hygiene and grooming, with skeletons.Law by Skele: This channel uses skeletons to explain basic legal concepts. jessicaer45: There are no skeletons here. This channel is a weird combination of sea shanties and grotesque scientific and medical situations that answers questions like, “what would happen if you were trapped inside a giant oyseter?”

These videos all seem wholly AI-generated, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the facts contained within them, but they seem to be at least aiming at truth, which beats most brainrot.



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LIFESTYLE
Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness – The Marginalian
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Few are those whose contribution to humanity — be it art, or music, or literature, or some other enchantment — fills the heart with uncontainable gratitude for their very existence. Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) — one of the greatest poets of all time, and perhaps the greatest of our time — is one such blessing of a writer. She, the patron saint of paying compassionate attention, has made a supreme art of bearing witness to our world — be it in her exquisite poems, or in the prose of that moving remembrance of her soul mate, or in her meditations on the craft of poetry itself.
In her immensely rewarding recent On Being conversation with Krista Tippett — triply magical because Oliver rarely gives interviews, and never ones this dimensional and revealing — she read several of her most beloved poems. While “Wild Geese” remains a favorite, I was especially taken with a four-part poem titled “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” found in Oliver’s sublime 2014 collection Blue Horses: Poems (public library). It is partly a bow to her recent triumph over cancer, and partly a score to the larger tango of life and death which we all, wittingly or not, are summoned to dance daily.
Like so much of her work, it is an uncommonly direct yet beguiling love letter to vitality itself, poured from the soul of someone utterly besotted with this world which we too are invited to embrace.

THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3)
I know, you never intended to be in this world.But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.Bless the eyes and the listening ears.Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.Or not.I am speaking from the fortunate platformof many years,none of which, I think, I ever wasted.Do you need a prod?Do you need a little darkness to get you going?Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,and remind you of Keats,so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,he had a lifetime.
Complement the immeasurably wonderful Blue Horses with Oliver on what attention really means and what dogs teach us about the meaning of our human lives, then treat yourself to the full On Being conversation below and be sure to subscribe to Tippett’s consistently ennobling gift to the world.

Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?



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LIFESTYLE
A Tender Modern Fable about the Difficult Art of Resting at the Still Point of Enough – The Marginalian
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Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.
An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.

The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.
And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.

This inflicts no small identity crisis:
What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.
But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.

Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.
A little note of misery sounded in his mind.
What could possibly be wrong?
It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.
Suddenly, he wants the stream itself, shimmering so seductively in the sunlight that it has to be had.
As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with the stream’s water, Mr. Bishop perches to peek over the fence and begins “to twitch and prickle and hop around” with the restless desire for a pool of his own.
So goes the cascade of envy, that handmaiden of wanting, until pool by pool the streams begins to run dry.

Soon it was only a trickle.
The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped away, and the reeds withered and died.

Triumphant and drunk on its own power, the Wanting Monster now wonders how much more damage it can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who is gathering flowers in the field for her dear friend Maria, and whispers into her ear.

Mrs. Walton began to frown and fret.
She was irritated. Why was she picking flowers for Maria when it was really she herself who deserved them?
She should fill her own house with flowers.
Yes, she should have the most fragrant, the most colorful, the most stylish house in the whole village.
Everyone would admire it. Everyone would envy her.
The other women watch Mrs. Walton pick all the flowers she can carry, and suddenly they too are aflame with the mania for owning the flowers. Soon, no flowers are left and the bees are bereft of pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and finches have nowhere to nest.

The Wanting Monster stomps across the flowerless fields, gloating.
That night, it visits Mr. Newton — the town’s most passionate stargazer — and whispers into Mr. Newton’s ear.

Suddenly possessed with the desire to own the stars, he heads to the forest and cuts down a great old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes a star.

I am reminded here of this miniature etching by William Blake, which I suspect might have inspired Read’s art:
I Want! I Want! by William Blake, 1793. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Ms. Grimehart watches Mr. Newton and, unable to bear possessing no stars herself, she cuts down not one tree but two to make an even bigger ladder and snatches not one star but five.

More and more ladders rise up and the sky soon grows starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, with the birds silent and the bees still, this tranquil little world finds itself unworlded.

The village was quiet and colorless and gloomy. The children wept. They had loved their forest and their little stream. They missed the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.
People, unable to console the children, begin to leave. The Wanting Monster roars with self-congratulation.

This time, everyone hears the roar and begins to wonder about the menacing presence. It is Billie Ray who first sees it and, pointing, tells the townsfolk that there is a monster in their midst. Naming a hurt has a way of opening up the space for healing — as soon as the little girl names the menace, everyone sees it clear as daylight. Suddenly, the Wanting Monster grows “no bigger than a beetle.” It is only those things of which we are not fully conscious that have the power to possess us.
But when the grownups lurch to stomp the tiny monster, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the suddenly helpless creature if it needs a cuddle.

The Wanting Monster climbed into the palm of her hand. It was tired, after all, and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray cupped her other hand to make a roof, and then she wandered toward the dry river bed, where she sat on its banks and began to rock her hand and sing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her.
No one had ever sung to the Wanting Monster before. Nor had it ever been cared for. And the Wanting Monster didn’t know quite how those things felt — not really.
Listening to the lullaby, the Wanting Monster begins to weep. “There, there,” Billie Ray comforts it, “Oh, dearest heart.” The Wanting Monster doesn’t know how to bear all this tenderness — how many of us really do — and so it goes on weeping “sorrowful, endless tears” that begin replenishing the stream.
Everyone else, listening and watching, begins to weep too.

A great mournful lament filled the valley.
Tears swelled the little stream, and it rushed like a river…
What had been withheld was released; what had dried up, flowed.
What had hardened was becoming soft again.
People unpack their suitcases, take the stars out of their pockets, and set about collecting seeds, tilling the ground, and filling watering cans to replant the trees and flowers.

As the birds return and the night reconstellates, the Wanting Monster finally stops weeping and, looking up wonder-smitten at the stars lavishing the world with all that abundant beauty, feels, finally, slaked of want.

Couple The Wanting Monster with The Fate of Fausto — Oliver Jeffers’s kindred fable inspired by Vonnegut’s poem — then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova



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