I haven’t really set forth a bunch of goals for 2025, knowing that, with the return of President Trump, things are likely to be weird (at best). But let’s pretend that one of the tasks I would have set myself on January 1 under “normal circumstances” would be to blog here more regularly -- to write about the things that don’t quite fit under the Second Breakfast umbrella, which now seems to be almost exclusively about artificial intelligence and the automation of thinking (and, unfortunately, how this is intertwined with the rise in fascism).

Writing is a practice after all; one needs to actually do it to maintain the skill, let alone improve at it. So despite my grave concern that anything I put here on my own blog will get vacuumed up by the very industry I’m working hard to dismantle, here I am: still writing on the Web.

I realized, after hitting “publish” on one of my year-end posts -- the one on eating -- that I hadn’t quite finished my thoughts about Blackbird, the new app from the founder of Resy -- a restaurant reservation app that, arguably, has helped make it increasingly difficult to actually secure a restaurant reservation in NYC. As I noted in that post, we’re part of the Burger League, which sponsored by Blackbird -- truly the only reason I signed up for the app in the first place, even though, I see now, I’m helping to further the very problematic “exclusivity” that’s become a part of eating out here. Add to that is Blackbird’s embrace of cryptocurrency -- and honestly, if I’d noticed this financialization-of-dining piece, I would have skipped out on the Burger League entirely, as fun as it’s been to eat a burger at a different restaurant almost every week.

See? I guess when I say “I hadn’t finished my thoughts,” I really meant “I’m not sure what to say, other than this seems significant.” And that goes for a lot of little observations I make throughout the week. I had been tossing some of these into a little notebook, hoping to flesh them out in Second Breakfast (sometimes including them in a newsletter, despite their being decidedly half-baked).

Like, I wanted to say something about all the drones that people were seeing over New Jersey. I mean, I could connect this to robots and education, I suppose -- something about our collective embrace of conspiracy theories, our fears of surveillance, our ignorance of astronomy, our utter disconnection with the night sky. There’s something really interesting going on with this phenomenon -- something that isn’t entirely new, of course, as we’ve always “seen things” when we looked out in the dark. Last year, one of the audiobooks that Kin and I listened to was The Paranormal Ranger: A Navajo Investigator's Search for the Unexplained by Stanley Milford Jr., which certainly failed to convince me that “UFOs are real,” but that I appreciated with its earnest (police!) investigation into the unknown. My cousin and I have talked too about whether my grandfather, in his work with aviation and radar, had had any experiences with aliens and reports of aliens. But again, all of this is just a jumble of connected ideas that I haven’t taken the time to organize.

Maybe this year I’ll get better at that. I mean, last week, I finished my last PTSD treatment. “I’m healed!” I announced to Kin afterwards. I have so many complicated thoughts about mental health -- mine, obviously, but the ways in which diagnoses and drugs are wielded (and unwieldy) these days. Hopefully I can write through all of this; it’s tempting -- always so tempting -- to give up.