“You need to write an article about this!” is something I heard a million times from my best friend and previous Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of Her Campus’ Temple chapter. I’m someone who is plagued by thoughts day in and day out. Since giving in to her pleas and becoming a staff writer, I’ve had to learn that not everything is an article.
Some ideas are fully formed. Others are just Twitter rabbit holes left open too long. Some would’ve been exhausting to write, or trite, or dated, but some were just bad, and that’s okay! At the same time, I feel some kind of maternal love for the desks I’ve come up with, so this is my way of giving them a home without burning myself out by trying to flesh them out. These are the stale five that never made it past the Google Doc.
1. Dubai Chocolate is Nothing New: What Art History Can Tell Us About Classism & Matcha
This was the first article I ever wanted to write as a staff writer. While trying to understand TikTok’s obsession with Dubai chocolate, I realized it felt eerily familiar. My argument was simple: Dubai chocolate followed a similar trajectory to Art Nouveau. It began as a high-end luxury from Fix Dessert Chocolatier in Dubai, then TikTok turned it into brain rot DIY, and suddenly we decided it was tacky, not gastronomy.
I wanted to parallel this with Toulouse-Lautrec, once dismissed for making lowbrow poster ads and now canonized in museums. Dubai chocolate was just a rebrand class signaling. I loved the idea. It felt smart, and it made me feel like I had a moral high ground in the TikTok discourse, but it risked me coming off as snobbish, and needed footnotes, images, and 9,000 words. I had 600-word patience.
2. In Defense of Benson Boone
Watching Twitter dogpile culture prematurely mock a young, rising artist really moved me. So much so that when I heard Benson Boone was coming to Philly, I got on Pinterest and started looking at concert outfits. In doing this, I found a blossoming fandom on a far side of the internet known as “Booners”. My plan was coming together until Ticketmaster humbled me.
The thesis was simple: the internet ritualistically humiliates emerging male pop stars as a hazing process. No one hates potential more than a bored timeline. He has a great voice, a sweet, self-aware persona, can backflip like a mofo, and after watching this interview clip, I’ve decided he’s cute. I loved the cultural angle, but defending a man publicly and arguing against irony culture sounded exhausting.
3. Pedro Pascal… A Smear Campaign on Queerness, Gaza, and Empathy
In case you missed it, around Sept. 2025, the straight men of Instagram reels decided that Pedro Pascal had been acting overly inappropiate. Every post regarding him was filled with comments about how he is always groping someone or fighting the urge to do so. Conveniently, this coincided with his vocal support for Gaza, opposition to Trump, and advocacy for the trans community. The accounts pushing it were generic, faceless, and suspicious.
My thesis was that male softness is threatening to an industry that thrives on hegemonic masculinity. Add politics and empathy turns into paranoia. If he’s warm, he must be hiding something. I loved the urgency of it—queerness, masculinity, politics—but it was too combustible. One wrong sentence and I’m in conspiracy territory without receipts.
4. Gen Z is Unc: An Exploration of The Millennial and Gen Z Rivalry
This idea started with a realization: most of what Gen Z cringes at millennials are things we did too, just younger. We grew up online in a millennial-dominated internet, so web culture was millennial culture. They coined “doggo,” “adulting,” “YOLO,” “salty,” and “fleek” in their prime, but we learned them as tweens, which makes them embarrassing in hindsight. Really, we have more in common than TikTok admits.
I loved this concept because it was funny, sociological, and self-critical. But writing it meant admitting I’m afraid of aging, too—and it’s hard to roast your own generation without sounding like a millennial undercover.
5. The Death of Middle School-ness: Why Don’t Today’s Tweens Look Like Tweens Anymore?
While doing student-teaching observations, I had a jarring realization: no one looks awkward anymore. At that age, I feel that we were hideous in a developmental way. Justice chaos and Claire’s overload were a visual artifact of trial and error. Middle school used to be a transitional stage you could see. Now the outfits look like TikTok Shop ads.
Algorithmic fashion collapses adolescence into a mini-adult aesthetic. We dressed like we were figuring it out. Now, with the rise of social media, they have infinite resources to plan outfits instead of winging them. Essentially, they’re not dressing like tweens because they’re dressing like For You pages. I loved this idea because it’s rooted in my classroom experience and my interest in the relationship between pedagogy and identity formation. But I didn’t want to sound like “kids these days.” The line between critique and shaming felt thin, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around Gen Alpha.
Looking at these five together, I’m realizing I clearly have a thing for internet spectacle. I keep trying to figure out who decides what’s embarrassing, what’s threatening, what’s tacky, and when. Half of these ideas were just me spiraling with a cultural theory hat on. Maybe that’s my style. I like noticing patterns. I like connecting things that probably don’t need connecting. But I’m also learning that not every thought needs to become a 1,200-word dissertation.