At a moment when the internet feels like a constant stream of bad news alerts, many people online have found a surprisingly gentle escape: Pokémon Pokopia. Even if you're not a gamer, it's hard to miss. I don't own a Nintendo Switch - let alone the new $500 Switch 2 - and yet cute clips from Pokopia keep appearing on my feeds anyway.
Mogging is Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang for dominating or outshining others-usually in terms of appearance, fitness, or straight-out cockiness. It comes from the acronym for Alpha Male of the Group, namely AMOG. And you'll see it all over TikTok.
As a political statement, it is very much A Deliberate Choice and a sign that Spencer is plugged into the taste of the high street and younger voters. A brief moment in popular culture that informs a political campaign? We've been here before. Someone on Kamala Harris's campaign team adopted the Brat aesthetic on social media and she caught the attention of the younger voter by successfully meme-ing a colour into a political symbol.
Recently, the culprit has often been the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security is putting out white-nationalist dog whistles on X. President Trump posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The subtext of every egregious shitpost from the administration is the same: These people are in charge now, and the old rules don't matter. A great deal of what I find myself scrolling past exudes a threatening, almost anarchical aura.
What a baffling documentary this is. It offers a surface-level explanation of the story (a young man severing ties with his apparently controlling family), which would have been handy for a mainstream novice audience, but the entire thing is fully geared towards the sort of terminally online person who already knows the drama in forensic detail, and those aren't people who are likely to watch Channel 4 on a midweek evening.
In that case, maybe the spiritual instruction you need emerges in the famous final lines of George Eliot's 1871 novel Middlemarch: the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.