Audrey Watters

Week 9 of 2025 It’s March already? My god. I’m 13 days out from my spring “A” race -- the NYC Half -- and we can see the first glimmers of a weather forecast. Currently: cold and wet. I think I’d prefer that to hot and humid, but it’s certainly...

Week 8 of 2025 My friend and yoga teacher Margarita often has to remind me, “put your shoulders down.” Certainly when I’m feeling stressed, they lift higher and higher until it feels like they’re up to my ears. After this week, my shoulders are so tight, and they might as...

Week 7 of 2025 I’m not sure if this is a New York thing or 2025 thing, but there are two online influencers -- one with 359K followers and the other with 668K followers on Instagram -- who appear regularly in my offline world: the first at my gym, the...

Week 6 of 2025 I’m very late to writing this today. I’m not sure where the day has gone. The same could be said, I think, for the year thus far. It’s already mid-February? Well, at this pace, the apocalypse will be here and done with very shortly. So that's...

Week 5 of 2025. And what is this, the second week of Trump? It’s all too much already, but here we are. Still “free,” still alive, for the time being at least. I sent out two Second Breakfast newsletters: “AI Foreclosure,” a response to Reid Hoffman’s op-ed on the promise...

Week 4 of 2025. Week 1 of the second Trump circus. I’m fine. I’m a wreck. I can’t write. All I can do is write. On his way out of the White House, Joe Biden freed Leonard Peltier from prison. It wasn’t a pardon, but still an act of clemency....

Well, here we are: January 20. Inauguration Day. I will mostly avoid the Internet today -- writing this blog post and posting it to my website without actually looking at anything else online. But I can’t spend the next four years avoiding the Internet, sadly; I make my living writing...

On Mondays, I deadlift. The barbell has gotten very heavy lately -- the wonderful result, no doubt, of regularly deadlifting. It’s daunting, and I think more than any other activity I do each week, it’s the one that I go into with the most self-doubt. Will the barbell move? When...

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...

It’s so hard to disentangle oneself from the culture of optimization, from data-tracking and self-surveillance, which is inevitably -- or at least, easily -- wrapped up in self-policing, ranking, rating, and shame. “The data” might say otherwise, but I’ll say: I had a very good year with my body, hitting...