Audrey Watters
Writer
The Fifth Element
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...
Fourth Wall
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....
Rule of Thirds
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...
Second the Motion
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...
Weak One
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...
The Year in Motion
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...
The Year in Burgers
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...
The Year in Books
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...
The Year in Writing
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...
The Year in Therapy
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,...