Audrey Watters

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...

In this new “age of Ozempic,” we’re told that one of the benefits of semiglutides is the elimination of “food noise” -- that is, the constant thinking about food. Obesity, so the story goes, is a result of an obsession with food, and by altering the communication between the gut...

Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park Master the Marathon by Ali Nolan The Woman in Me by Britney Spears Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I by Douglas Brunt A Feast...

It ended up a pretty good year for writing, all things considered. I’ve flailed around a lot, no doubt, with the direction for my newsletter, Second Breakfast -- moving off of the wannabe-conservative-media Substack right before the new year (and no doubt taking a hit with sign-ups by moving away...

I’ve long found the act of going back and reviewing what’s happened over the past year to be incredibly helpful in orienting myself -- intellectually, politically, emotionally. In previous years, I’ve attuned this end-of-the-year practice to the goings-on in my fields of study -- ed-tech, most famously. But this year,...

Cross-posted to Hack Education Week in and week out, there are a litany of stories that, if I were paying attention to education technology, would prompt me to say “I told you so.” Why look, just in the last few days: coding bootcamps, pretty shady; Udemy, very shady. Google Notebook...

Yesterday was gorgeous, with temperatures reaching the 60s. It's cooler today, and a stormfront is moving in. "False spring," I've heard several people call it. You think that winter is over, but it's not. The darkness and gloom and cold will continue. Feels apt as there have been moments when...