IF YOU FEEL YOUR KIDS ARE SPEAKING A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE FROM YOURS THESE DAYS, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. SOCIAL MEDIA, BRAIN ROT, MEMES AND PHRASES ARE TAKING OVER AND SHAPING HOW KIDS ENGAGE AND INTERACT.

When I first heard about TikTok's new meme trend, Italian brain rot, it reminded me of Sukumar Ray's Abol Tabol, a collection of Bengali nonsense verse. Only that was literature; this is actually ...

A TikTok scroll at 3 a.m. A surrealist AI crocodile in a bomber jacket narrates absurd Italian-accented nonsense about existential dread. It cuts to dancing potatoes declaring war on productivity. The ...

The moment the SheKnows Teen Council settled around the table during one of our focus groups, the chaos began. “Wait, you don’t know Mango Funk?” one girl gasped, half-laughing, half-scandalized.

In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and four million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an artificial intelligence-generated cartoon ...

While attending Atlanta’s pop culture and sci-fi convention Dragon Con, my younger brother’s friend looked at me and said, “Hey, I’m going aura farming,” before sprinting off into the crowd. By the ...

The term brain rot was voted Oxford University Press’ word of the year in 2024, an unusual honor for a phrase that started as online slang. OUP defines it as the supposed deterioration of a person’s ...

This is the seventh installment in a series of articles about the science of various aspects of college life. In a matter of weeks, “6 7” has transformed from two sequential numbers to a phrase so ...