Audrey Watters

The Information has an “exclusive” today about the problems with Waymo’s “big ambitions.” (Sorry. Paywall.) Waymo is the subsidiary of Alphabet (formerly Google) that runs the company’s autonomous vehicle development. The article chronicles the myriad of problems that the cars, currently being tested in Phoenix, are having navigating the city’s...

A couple of years ago, my eye doctor asked me a pretty standard question during my eye exam: “How long have you been wearing this pair of contacts?” I said that I didn’t know, and he frowned. “You have disposable lenses. You throw them out once-a-month and put in new...

Hack Education Hack Education Weekly News Writing Here and Elsewhere HEWN, No. 280 via tinyletter.com Blogging and the Online Review on audreywatters.com Academia and Abuse on audreywatters.com The Yellow Sofa on audreywatters.com Teaching Machines I wrote about the differences in some of my characters’ obituaries, as well as about a...

The IKEA furniture finally arrived last night. When we were moving into this apartment, my niece asked me if we still had our old couch, a giant thing that wrapped around the living room in our old Hermosa Beach apartment. It was red. Red red, not some subtler shade softened...

I have stories. I think most people I know who went to graduate school do. Stories of abuse and predation of grad students by professors. And what’s always been deeply troubling to me – I mean, beyond the pervasiveness of the harassment, of course – is that many of the...

I spend a lot of time reading online reviews. I read reviews thoroughly before we dine out. (Yelp, mostly.) I know exactly what I’m going to order, and I’m ready to make recommendations about what you should order too. I research any major purchase. (I like Wirecutter a lot.) I’ve...

Hack Education Hack Education Weekly News Writing Here and Elsewhere HEWN, No. 279 via tinyletter.com Home Work on audreywatters.com What’s Cooking? on audreywatters.com The Horizon Never Moves on horizon.hackeducation.com Teaching Machines Weekly update: Teaching Machines: An Inventory on teachingmachin.es I also created a permanent page on the Teaching Machines site...

I haven’t cooked regularly in a long, long time. For much of Kin and my relationship, we’ve spent a lot of time traveling, and that has meant a lot of dining out. But even when we were not on the road, we tended to eat at restaurants rather than at...

One of the best books I’ve read so far this year is Alexandra Lange’s The Design of Childhood. In it, Lange talks about the ways in which physical spaces and physical objects have been constructed to both encourage and impede certain kinds of activities and behaviors. The playground and the...

Hack Education Hack Education Weekly News Writing Here and Elsewhere HEWN, No. 278 via tinyletter.com Automating Inequality (and APIs) on apievangelist.com Newsletter to my Patreon subscribers Teaching Machines My weekly update on how the book is progressing: Teaching Machines: An American Story (and the Case for Gordon Pask) Other Projects...