Audrey Watters

Lost the Thread

Mon, 26 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

I've decided to stop blogging. I know, I know. A cardinal sin among the "open Web" crowd. But see, there's no such thing anymore -- not sure there ever really was, to be quite honest. And I'm really not in the mood to have my writing -- particularly the personal writing that I do on this website -- be vacuumed up to train the technofascists' AI systems. Indeed, that's one of the problems with "open" -- it's mostly just been a ruse to extract value from people and to undermine the labor of artists and writers.

Since I'm not blogging and not on social media, I've started a(nother) newsletter (lol, what a cliche) but it's not "open" either. It's designed for friends and family. You are welcome to sign up (the newsletter is called "Personal Day" and the sign-up page is alongside Second Breakfast's) -- I mean, if you're reading this post, you probably are friends and family. Unless you're not, and that will be awkward for you.

My god, I can't believe it's 2025 and I'm so into email. But I am so into email right now.

Nineteen

Mon, 12 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 19 of 2025

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. Tomorrow is Death Day. I hate this time of year.

I’m looking at the list I made of things I did last week, and they’re all fucking irrelevant. Everything feels irrelevant. Everything is irrelevant.

I can’t believe it’s been five years. Five years! I can’t believe I have kept going. But here I am.

I still manage to make plans for the future: I signed up for four races in the coming months: a 12- and an 18-mile training run, the Fifth Avenue Mile, the Bronx Ten Mile. I’ve got the Brooklyn Half on Saturday. I scheduled a mammogram (no appointments available until January. LOL?). I had a meeting about organizing a conference in the fall.

So I guess life goes on... which today makes me mad AF.

Eighteenth Hole

Mon, 05 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 18 of 2025

There are a bunch of work-related updates from the week that I should note: I spoke to Equity Unbound. Vicky Davis published the interview I did with her a month or so ago. I finished the foreword to a book on AI in education. I published two Second Breakfast newsletters. A very famous YA author subscribed. (I never bother to look and see how quickly these folks unsubscribe.)

But here's the thing that's been stuck in my head since I learned it -- a scholar who said that a reviewer left the following comment on an article submission: "Citing Watters shows a distinct lack of respect for the field of educational technology." I'm not sure I've fully sorted through my feelings about this. I mean, on one hand: hahahahaha. But also: WTF? That I can't stop thinking about it definitely means it's upsetting -- not that I need or want to be loved and respected (not entirely, at least). But there's this outsized animosity towards me -- outsized to how I certainly see my influence and impact on the field -- and it just feels weird and unpleasant. I guess that's probably the point.

I'm not in therapy right now, but I am aware enough to know when I'm just burying shit and moving on... Moving on...

Eating updates: Wondee Thai takeout -- very good. Chinatown dumpling crawl: Mei Lai Wah and Fu Zhou Wei Long -- excellent. Sunday morning -- best cinnamon rolls ever?

Running updates: I went to NYRR's Volunteer Night. The heat and humidity are making running pretty hard, and I'm going in to the Brooklyn Half with no expectations. Not even sure, to be honest, that I'll race it, as much as I'd like to be able to use the race to time-qualify for next year's NYC Marathon -- something certainly doable with colder, drier weather conditions.

Lifting updates: I pulled 6 x 135 pounds this morning in deadlifts, which is great considering 1 rep at that weight used to be my max. I won't lift next week as I taper for the race, but will work a bit harder on lifting this summer and see where my 1 rep max can go.

Weak Seventeen

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 17 of 2025

I'm really really really really tired for it being the beginning of the week. Yikes. That doesn't bode well for everything I have to accomplish in the coming days and weeks. But here we are, all of us: exhausted.

I'm not surprised I'm tired. I had to rearrange my workouts last week to accommodate my volunteering at the NYRR Women's Half Marathon yesterday. That meant getting up at 4:45 am so I could eat some breakfast before walking over to the park, to hand out water and Gatorade to thousands of women runners all morning. Thankfully, I was placed at the first water station, which meant that we were the first to see the runners all go by (twice), and that meant I was actually done far earlier than expected. Even so, I had to come home and finish up the Second Breakfast newsletter that went out this morning -- a bunch of not-very-well formulated thoughts.

But the rescheduling meant that yesterday's long day was also ostensibly my rest day -- at least, it was a no-running day. I hit almost 48 miles of running last week, the highest I've ever done, and I think that's about what I'm set to run this week as well. Saturday's long run -- 8 miles easy and then 4 at race pace -- was pretty grueling because of the humidity. It's definitely spring, and it's getting pretty warm. I have no expectations for race day, as the weather will really determine how fast I'm able to go. I'm in great shape physically, but as my performance at the NYC Half demonstrated, it really comes down to the humidity, I reckon.

We ate out a couple of times last week -- we had banh mi delivered from Saiguette on Monday and walked down to EZ Paella on Saturday for a bunch of tapas. We saw a concert on Thursday at Birdland, which meant eating out there too -- the usual cheese plate. Kin ordered tiramisu for dessert but it looked far too gelatinous for me to even want to try a bite.

It was an Emmett Cohen Trio show -- we always try to catch him and/or Ron Carter when they're in the neighborhood. As Kin noted in his newsletter (which I should link to, I guess), Cohen had Joe Farnsworth with him on drums this time around, and I honestly can't think of a better drummer I've ever seen live. I mean, he just handled the whole drum set masterfully with sticks and brushes and hammers, switching hands and covering every surface (including the cymbal stands) with the beat. It was really glorious. His playing sort of reminded me of Buddy Rich. Dad would have loved it, for sure.

On Wednesday, I participated in a Resisting AI roundtable conversation, put on by Liz Losh from the College of William & Mary. I sat and listened to all the different panels and all the different speakers throughout the day -- the talks were great, and I definitely feel less isolated and alone in my criticism of AI. I mean, I'll keep saying what I think. I'll keep speaking out. But damn, so many people right now seem so ready to embrace the end of the world -- certainly the end of public education.

Or maybe I'm just winding up / winding down as the fifth anniversary of Isaiah's passing approaches. Everything is heavy. Everything. My legs, my heart, my brain, my soul.

I keep trying to be generous with my thinking, knowing that not everyone has lost everything yet and some folks are just trying to build a little moat around their privilege, hoping it'll keep them safe from the looming fascism.

We watched a bunch of TV over the weekend. A couple of episodes of the new season of Andor. The latest Captain America movie. I noticed on the Apple TV log in screen that the most popular TV shoes are ALF and Quantum Leap. For fuck's sake, people. No wonder everything is so absurdly stupid if people would rather watch some terrible TV from the Eighties than read a goddamn book.

Sixteenth Candle

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 16 of 2025

Instead of a weekly blog post detailing everything he's been up to, Kin sends out a weekly newsletter. It's a good idea (and a good read), and every Monday I think "oh I should do that too." Of course, Kin uses it to link to all the stories he's written throughout the week, whereas I only update this site on Mondays. Plus I already send out two other emails for Second Breakfast subscribers, which often feels like too much email (Friday's. Today's). So I'm not sure a weekly newsletter makes sense. But then again, neither does blogging here really. One of the reasons I've moved away from blogging on Hack Education -- other than the "fuck ed-tech" stage I went through before returning to the fold/field -- is that I abhor the way in which everything we do online gets vacuumed up to train somebody's stupid fucking AI.

I mean, maybe instead of accurately depicting my week here in this posts, I should just totally invent stuff and give the algorithm some better lies with which to generate banal lies. I don't know.

Kin and I ate at Super Nice Pizza on Saturday. True story. It's up near our old apartment, and it was good to return to the neighborhood. It's changed a lot in the past decade, no surprise. The pizza was great. (The restaurant is new; the owner has operated Super Nice Donuts for a while, but even that's a new place since we last lived on the UWS.) But the dessert -- a chocolate cake the size of my head -- was surely the best slice of chocolate cake I've ever eaten in my life and I have eaten a lot of chocolate cake.

I also acquired tickets for Waiting for Godot this past week, and while it's been over 30 years since I waited outside an event to meet the band after a show -- Faith No More, if I recall. Also a true story -- you can bet your ass I'm going to wait outside the stage door to meet Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.

Also bizarrely true: David Brooks ended an op-ed last week by citing the Communist Manifesto. So hell, maybe AI doesn't have to hallucinate shit for this to be the weirdest world of words possible.

The Fifteenth Week

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 15 of 2025

It's a Monday, for sure. Even though, temperature-wise at least, it feels a bit more like spring today -- the last few days have felt like “third winter” -- the sky is still partly overcast. And the gloom persists regardless of any blue peeking thru, especially when the news informs you of things like, "El Salvador's President refuses to return wrongly deported man." Or "Trump boasts that he'd like to deport US citizens to El Salvador." I was forwarded an email from a friend this morning who was stunned and sickened to see an education reformer -- a pretty well-known and well-connected guy -- articulate full-throated support for the AI- / MAGA- / DOGE- / a16z-vision of "build baby build.” I’m not surprised to see the embrace of techno-fascism in education. I mean, I’ve seen this coming with a lot of the libertarian menfolk who’ve long dismissed democratic voices in their quest for a union of very smart man and very smart machine.

The forecast -- weather-wise etc etc etc -- is pretty dark.

Good news, I guess: I had my annual doctor’s check-up last week, and everything looks good. (Everything that was tested, that is. Mammogram TBD.) My iron’s a wee bit low, but the doctor didn’t seemed concerned. I got several vaccines -- gotta get them, I guess, before RFK Jr. completely undermines our ability to do so.

I spoke to my friend Jose's class too. One of the students gave an excellent presentation before my talk -- inspiration for today’s newsletter, linking intelligence testing, individualization, and racist inequalities. (Friday’s newsletter: “Breaking the Spell.”)

I’m working on a foreword to a book this afternoon, trying to figure out what I want to say and, more broadly what I want to do. Like, should I get my PhD? (Teaching and talking to a class always gets me thinking I should.) Should I cancel all my speaking events so I can buckle down and write this goddamn book? I don’t even fucking know.

A highlight: I have taught Poppy to fall over and play dead when I make a finger-gun and say “bang.” Another highlight: Bradley Cooper opened a cheesesteak joint in the East Village -- Danny and Coop’s -- and despite being totally hyped, it did not disappoint. Kin and I went yesterday -- the oldest people there by far. The line was short; they text you when your sandwich is ready. We ate it in Tompkins Square Park -- lovely day -- then walked over the Veniero’s, where the service was abyssmal, but the Italian pastries (cakes, cheesecakes, whatever) were good.

Fourteenth Amendment

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 14 of 2025

On Monday night, Kin and I walked over to the Rose Theater to see Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. In hindsight, I wish I'd invited my mother, as when we talked later in the week about the concert, her eyes lit up. The records of his that we had in my childhood home, I'd assumed were my dad's -- but they were hers, she insisted. She loved him. Indeed, the theater Monday night -- his 90th birthday! -- was full of baby boomers. The people seated all around us, at least, were overjoyed -- they knew every song, shouting out its title after just a few notes were played. The woman on Kin's left kept grabbing and squeezing his knee, barely able to contain her excitement. The music was superb -- it's a new Tijuana Brass, but it was still Herb Alpert fronting and he can still blow the horn with the best of them. Behind the band was projected a film with old footage of the band, of Herb and his wife (a singer in Sergio Mendes's band). He took questions from the audience. It was such a joyful night.

That evening of joy ran so contrary to everything else that's happening (thanks in no small part to all the boomers who voted for this shit). Trump has crashed the economy. Immigrants are being disappeared right off the streets. People I once respected are bowing down to the end-times god of AI, hoping it will give them salvation as the world crumbles.

I received a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to travel to Dharamsala to attend an event at the Dalai Llama's Mind & Life Institute on the future of the mind and AI. But I declined. I must be out of my mind, I'm sure people think. But there is no way I can travel outside the country right now -- and the conference isn't until October. I cannot even imagine what this country will be like by then. Partially, sure, I worry for my safety crossing borders. But also, it just doesn't feel like the right way for me to spend my limited time on this planet: flying in an airplane halfway around the world to hobnob with powerful people (well known scholars, politicians, business people) about the future. I'm not interested in that kind of networking, truth be told -- particularly now. Do I want my picture taken with His Holiness? Sure. That does seem cool. But I'm not really in this because of what this gets me.

Whatever "this" is, right?

I did record a podcast and I did join a planning meeting and I did send two Second Breakfast newsletters (on Friday and this morning). Not sure what any of it gets me, now that I'm writing this reflection.

More clear cut is what the training gets me: on Saturday morning, I got up extra early, took the ferry over to Governors Island, and ran the Spring Fling 10K, a race sponsored by NYC Runs (not NYRR). I didn't hit my goal of breaking 50 minutes. But I did win my age bracket, so that's pretty cool.

Mom came to town briefly on Friday, taking the train from Stamford on her drive home from Maine. We ordered delivery to the apartment -- Indian food. My favorite. Ah the irony of not traveling there.

We'd ordered Charles Pan Fried Chicken on Thursday and we went out to eat on Saturday too -- another trip to Dirt Candy for their special burger night. Rather than the fixed menu, they had several burger options: smashburger, cheeseburger, hot dog, riblet sandwich, chopped cheese -- all vegetarian, of course. The chopped cheese was so damn good, and certainly has ruined the meat version for me. (I mean, you always kind of have to ignore the ingredients and preparation when you get a chopped cheese and just lean into the flavor of the gut bomb.)

It's another busy week, with the fun fun fun of my annual doctor's visit to look forward to. Still less painful than watching Trump and Silicon Valley destroy the country.

Week 13

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000

The newsletter I sent out this morning felt incredibly disjointed. I wrote a lot of it on Friday, then deleted much of that on Saturday, and then continued to make minor edits through Sunday evening. All these periods of writing and editing felt disjointed too, as my typical weekend schedule was upended a little.

As one is wont to do, I'd over-scheduled myself: I had a 90-minute ballet class on Friday evening, per usual. Then I added a new ballet class on Saturday afternoon -- 90 minutes. We attended a play on Sunday afternoon. I also had a short run on Saturday morning and a long run on Sunday morning -- the latter at least not too terribly long at this stage of the half marathon training block. Just 75 minutes.

I'm exhausted from my weekend, and it's onward with an even busier week this week and a 10K race coming up on Saturday.

As I wrote about in a very early Second Breakfast newsletter, my single ballet class as a little girl was incredibly awful: the teacher humiliated me, and I never went back. For the past seven months, I've been taking ballet classes at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio -- Absolute Beginner Ballet -- confronting some of the earliest ideas about who I am and who I could become. Let's be very clear, that was never ever going to be "ballet dancer."

It wasn't just dance. No physical activity was really available to me, I told myself, mostly because my eyesight and thus my eye-hand coordination are ridiculously bad.

But I'm much braver now than I was when I was 5, more willing to try things, more willing to suck at things, more willing to fail. Every Friday evening, I walk over to the Ailey building -- yes, it does help that it's Ailey -- and try very hard to learn how to hold and move my body in new ways. I am still stiff and awkward and far too often on the wrong foot when we dance across the floor. But I love it anyway, and I've improved a lot. And a couple of weeks ago, I asked my teacher Ron if he thought I was ready to take Beginner Ballet. And he said "oh yes, you're doing great." And I thought my heart would burst right out of my chest.

So, on Saturday afternoon, I took my first Beginner Ballet class. I'm not really sure I was ready. The Instagram influencer is in the class. Some of the "real" Ailey dancers. One or two of the really good dancers from the Friday class. It was a much smaller class, and it felt so obvious that I was the worst by far.

I'll keep trying. I mean, how else can I expect to get better, right?! It's still fresh in my memory how I sucked so bad the first few months in the Absolute Beginner Ballet class. (But this week, I won't go to ballet as I'm going to bruise my ego elsewhere: at a 10K race on Saturday morning.)

I don't know how to help anyone – but for the sake of my "day job," let's say students – get to the place where they have that bravery and tenacity to keep at it when it's hard. That "growth mindset" bullshit only gets you so far when everything else is stacked against you, making it next to impossible – psychologically and structurally – to take the risk.

And I also don't know how to convince anyone – students – of the value and the necessity of practice and training when AI promises a push-button of ease and automaticity.

As I noted in today's newsletter (and maybe in the BlueSky post I made about Friday's too), I took a trip down to Brooklyn on Wednesday, where students at BIHS showed me the AI PSAs they'd created. They were uniformly awesome, and it was really amazing to chat with them about trust, misinformation, and technology. These kids -- all the students at the school are immigrants, having been in the US less than four years -- have been in my head non-stop since then. I signed up to take a class on how to intervene in ICE raids in my neighborhood; sadly it coincides with another school visit I'll be doing.

It's hard right now for me to figure out exactly where or how I want my writing and my activism and my career to focus. (I don't know how to separate them either.) I have received a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to travel this fall for an event where (supposedly -- the speakers aren't confirmed) very important and influential people in my field will be. I'm truly honored to even be considered. But considering the location of this event and my inability to even imagine what the US will be like by then, I'm just not sure I should say "yes."

Also: the timing is pretty bad for marathon training.

Speaking of training, yesterday, Kin and I saw the play Sumo in one of its final performances. As the name suggests, it's about wrestling -- about toxic masculinity and tradition and bodies and love. It was pretty great, I thought (the NYT reviewer did not). Kin and I have also watched the first three episodes of Adolescence, which I might write about for Second Breakfast as I think it relates to some of the narratives not just about toxic masculinity and social media, but about the pushback from those refusing to grant that people's concerns are grounded in "science."

Still speaking of training, this past week's dining out included: a bagel order from Kossars. Halal cart (lamb over rice for me and chicken over rice for Kin) from Mido's. A bunch of empanadas and tostones from Empanada Mama. I'm trying to balance cooking at home with eating out, which works out fine as long as I plan to make super easy meals. I took a trek up to Trader Joe's on Thursday and bought a bunch of pre-packaged meals because the air fryer is some good technology. (The plastic packaging all this comes in, not so much.)

Twelfth Night

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 12 of 2025

I gave myself a couple of days to be super sad about my terrible half marathon, and then I got back at it: I did deadlifts on Tuesdays (usually that happens on Monday; it happened this morning) and I ran as well. I'm adding a sixth day of running -- tentatively. We'll see how my body recovers. I'm really committing to keeping my heart rate very low during most of my runs, for once using my Garmin for this sort of thing: it buzzes at me when I leave Zone 2.

If running was a disaster, then ballet is now a shining star as my teacher Ron says I'm ready to move up from Absolute Beginner Ballet to Beginner Ballet. I'll do both classes this coming week, and I'm very nervous-excited, as I still feel so clumsy and awkward. Not sure if doing both classes -- Absolute Beginner on Fridays and Beginner on Saturdays -- is sustainable, particularly with that sixth day of running. But we'll see.

I'd scheduled a massage -- a gift to myself to help recovery with what I thought would surely be another PR. It was still very very nice to get a massage obviously. But I felt a little guilty, like I didn't really deserve it somehow. Brains are weird.

A friend called me last week, quite upset that their political radicalization -- a response to the lurch this country's taken towards autocracy -- was starting to alienate people. I said that I figured I'd severed ties with most everyone who disagreed with me politically the last time we'd all lived under the Trump Administration. It's easier to do, no doubt, when you're a freelance writer living in a big city. It really just meant unfriending on Facebook a bunch of people I grew up with in Wyoming.

But I admitted that my outspoken stance against AI -- and explicitly linking AI to this rise in techno-fascism -- had cost me some friends too. A lot of my friends work in ed-tech, no surprise, and a lot of people in ed-tech just love ed-tech and have been quite eager to view generative AI as the latest toy to play with. I sent out an email today -- the usual Monday Second Breakfast newsletter -- and I'm sure it's going to upset a lot of people. No one likes being called a racist. No one likes being called a fascist. But somehow, as I note, we have "racism without racists" and "technofascism without technofascists." (Friday's newsletter was similarly harsh on the ears of those who believe that computing and democracy are compatible. I guess I should remind everyone that they cheered when I returned to ed-tech, LOL.)

Speaking of stupidity and AI, I have had to disable the "feature" on all my Apple devices that autocompletes words as I type: the predictive text of generative AI but just in one word increments. It is absolutely the most annoying thing ever as it's rarely what I want to say. And hooray, that means I'm not a machine, churning out utterly predictable sentences. But we're all being bent towards that machinery, in ways that aren't always as overt as having ChatGPT write your 4000 word newsletters on the glory of AI's future. (Phew, dude. You gotta stop that shit.) It's so funny (not funny) isn't it: we're told that computers and AI are going to make us more efficient when in fact, we are spending even more time now clicking and back-spacing and correcting the shit that computers autocomplete and autocorrect for us.

Food updates: coffee and biscotti with Leonie at La Lanterna di Vittorio. Sandwiches from All'Antico Vinaio. Crispy sesame beef and fish in scallion and ginger broth from Chi. Cauliflower hummus, baba ghanouj, and spicy feta with frena bread, along with a roasted veggie salad and an ice cream sundae with halva from Frena.

Reading updates: almost done with On Freedom. In the middle of The Many Lives of Anne Frank. Both are just incredibly powerful and moving.

Viewing updates: season finale of Severance. First episode of Adolescence. Some of the latest Daredevil season. I think some other things must've played in the background, but I sure can't remember.

Eleventh Hour

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Week 11 of 2025

I just hit “send” on today’s Second Breakfast newsletter. I hadn’t intended on doing so. I’d announced in Friday’s newsletter that I was going to take the day off to recover from yesterday’s half marathon. But yesterday’s half marathon was so shitty, I guess I had to write it all out of my system.

You can read all the details of the half over there. Oh, does that mean you need to pay for a subscription? Heh. You should do that.

And I realize now that I’ve sat down to write this blog post that I’ve poured so much energy into that essay that I have very little left for this one. That’s a pity because there are a couple of things I really wanted to explore at length here -- like what the hell is happening in the Matlock reboot. I watched a lot of episodes while I was sick with food poisoning, initially drawn to the show simply because of the casting of Kathy Bates as Matlock. I had no idea that it’s actually a revenge fantasy: her character assuming the name and southern mannerisms of the old Andy Griffith TV character so that she can secretly identify the corporate lawyers who were involved in covering up research about the addictiveness of opiates (her daughter died from an opioid overdose).

I also wanted to say something about the importance of friends right now. I had three meeting with friends last week -- two on Zoom and one in person. It’s the thing that’s truly sustaining me right now: other women.

Regular sustenance, of the food sort: I ordered bagels from Kossar’s to coincide with Kin’s return home. I picked up some cookies from Culture Expresso when I was in the neighborhood picking up my bib for the NYC Half. I had a coffee with Erica at Charlotte Cafe. Kin and I had burgers at Lovely’s Old Fashioned -- consistently great. We got dessert at Oasis Cafe, which sadly has become consistently mediocre. Post-race, we went to Tasty Hand Pulled Noodles II, and I inhaled a massive plate of pan-fried noodles with pan-fried tofu. Nothing hits quite like carbs and fat and MSG after a race. For dessert, we stopped into Huascar & Co and I bought two cupcakes and a panetela. I ate the latter, and the cupcakes are definitely beckoning me for tea.

Not sustainable: I canceled a meeting today with some folks who are making a documentary about AI and education. I think it’s going to be yet another hagiography about Sal Khan, and I’m just not interested in being part of this or even being framed in a simplistic “nay-sayer” sort of way. Also: funded by the Koch Brothers? Hard pass. I’ve passed on a couple of “big opportunities” recently for similar sorts of reasons. I guess, as I try to rethink everything, I feel it's important to not scale. Degrowth. Decompute. New motto, of sorts