Emma Watts

The Stuff About Money You Didn’t Get In School

Whether you’re a real estate agent, a landlord, or a wannabe flipper, you know the name Barbara Corcoran. She’s the shark with the blond pixie haircut and the dazzling red lipstick who made her fortune selling New York City real estate to the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga. But Barbara was a waitress at a West Village diner before she uttered the words, “I’ll have what she’s having.” She used her first commission to buy herself a yellow Mercedes and her second commission to pay back the local mobster she’d borrowed from to buy the Mercedes. What’s my point? My point is, Barbara Corcoran ...

Plants Are Awesome

PLANTS ARE BRILLIANT! What’s the hugest living thing in the world? An elephant? A blue whale? Actually, one of the current record-holders is called Pando, and you wouldn’t know it if you looked at it. It’s a clump of aspen trees in Utah. Except, it’s not really a clump of trees—it’s one tree, which is completely hidden underground. Pando’s roots are more than 100 acres wide. It shoots up stems called suckers, which are what you see above ground. So what looks like a forest is actually a single tree. And it’s more than 80,000 years old! It’s not just trees that have genius surviv...

Dahlias: A Primer

Dahlias get a bad rep for being needy. And it’s true, they’re not as foolproof as zinnias or cosmos, but they’re by no means impossible. Dahlias are stunners—candelabras of sherbet petals, blown-glass jewels, brilliant pompoms in raspberry, coral, and scarlet. People are hooked by their perfection. I understand why you want to grow them. Dahlias offer a counterpoint to all the wild seed-grown flowers tumbling over each other in the border. But yes, they do need more looking after. Dahlias aren’t true perennials in the United States. Like gladioli, they grow from fleshy tubers rather ...

What’s Wrong with Restaurant Food?

It’s not your imagination. The average American restaurant meal really does contain far more calories than you would eat at home. According to a study by Tulane University, the average restaurant entrée in the US contains about 1,200 calories. That’s before sides, sauces, drinks, or dessert. Many of us have a vague sense that the food served in restaurant chains is probably somewhat unhealthy. But did you know that a typical portion of fettuccine Alfredo at the Cheesecake Factory contains 2,350 calories—more than many women should eat in a whole day? Or that a Five Guys regular chee...

How Not to Starve (Yes, You Get Coffee)

At first, intermittent fasting sounds like a cult practice. Don’t eat for sixteen hours? Eat nothing at all for a whole day while everyone else is snacking on muffins and oat milk lattes? But for millions of Americans, intermittent fasting is the secret weapon that’s given them back energy, focus, and their waistline. Let’s get this out of the way: Intermittent fasting is not starving yourself. It’s not even skipping breakfast (though you can if you want). And there’s no mystical ancient sect who lived to 113 just by practicing this one weird trick. There are all sorts of ways to do i...

Blackout Friday

The Three-Day Week enacted by the Conservative government, led by Edward Heath, in the winter of 1974 was not, of course, actually three days long. But it came pretty close. In early January, shops huddled in darkness for four days in a row, then, on the bright and much-anticipated Friday — Blackout Friday, as it would come to be known — shoppers poured into Sutton High Street, one of the busiest in South London. They snapped up loaves of Hovis, packets of Typhoo, White Dresses with Sparkly Belts from Miss Selfridge, Black-Eyed Peas, Corn Flakes, frozen oven chips, tinned borscht — ...

The Real Steps to Teaching Your Kid "Stranger Danger"

As a parent, you'll find the official numbers both comforting and disturbing. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit supported by the US Congress, 99% of missing child cases are not stranger abductions. That was the first jaw-dropper for me — because I, like you, grew up eating my Froot Loops while staring at blurred Polaroids of missing kids on the milk carton and worrying about monstrous bogeymen lurking around every corner. Stranger abductions account for just 1% of cases. The majority of kids are abducted by people known to them. So the...

The Aftershocks of Toxic Parenting

What kind of legacy do toxic parents leave their children? The answers are as varied as the families themselves. Some kids grew up in houses with padlocked doors and heavy silence; others with wine bottles smashed against the wall, constant surveillance, panic alarms. Some had a hand digging into their chest if they reached for seconds at the table. Others lay listening to footsteps on the stairs, terrified their father's belt was coming off. Still others spent their entire childhoods crying into their pillows, convinced that if only they were clever enough, athletic enough, beautiful e...

What Your Dog's Really Saying: Learning to Read Canine Signals

Humans and dogs share an evolutionary history going back at least fifteen thousand years. In that time, dogs have become one of the only species on earth capable of reading complex human social cues. Your dog monitors your eyebrows for micro-movements. He watches your fingers curl a certain way and already knows you're about to pick up the leash. He senses the tiny muscle tension in your neck — the one that says you're bracing for a tough conversation with your spouse — before you're even conscious of it yourself. He's observing you more closely than most people in your life. Don't t...

What Your Dog's Really Saying: Learning to Read Canine Signals

Humans and dogs share an evolutionary history going back at least fifteen thousand years. In that time, dogs have become one of the only species on earth capable of reading complex human social cues. Your dog monitors your eyebrows for micro-movements. He watches your fingers curl a certain way and already knows you're about to pick up the leash. He senses the tiny muscle tension in your neck — the one that says you're bracing for a tough conversation with your spouse — before you're even conscious of it yourself. He's observing you more closely than most people in your life. Don't t...

Ron versus the Zombies

By May 2021, Ron DeSantis had made considerable progress in his war on "woke." The first of his culture war initiatives — the "anti-riot" bill prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 — was now law. It made it a felony to participate in a large gathering that "turned violent," a phrase so elastic that civil liberties groups warned it could chill all peaceful protest. The state's police unions supported it. Legal experts said it was unconstitutional. It was working its way through Florida's courts. Next came the COVID-19 "freedom" bills. One made all public COVID restric...

A New Kind of Spirituality

"I'm spiritual, not religious." American adults say this all the time. According to the PRRI 2023 Census of American Religion, one in five Americans now claim this status. If you're reading this book, you probably count yourself among them. The SBNRs (Spiritual But Not Religious). Once, we danced down the aisles of Methodist churches and ritually murmured Shema Yisrael in our bunk beds at Jewish summer camp. Maybe you grew up celebrating Eid and now you don't know what you are. Or you casually called yourself Buddhist over your second latte of the morning — and then felt the faint, embar...

Burnout is the Disease of Our Time

Burnout is the disease of our time. Pause. Take a breath. Sit with that sentence a moment. Admit how it lands in your gut. Almost certainly, your stomach clenched. Perhaps you wrinkled your nose. Perhaps you flinched. You might even have thought, Well. That's a bit dramatic. But then — admit it — you found yourself thinking: It's kind of true, though. Burnout is the disease of the modern working world. I call it a disease because it's not just an individual illness, like food poisoning or strep throat. You don't recover from it by taking a two-week vacation and a bunch of Advil. Burno...

How Top Sports Stars Think Under Pressure

You're Andy Murray. You're at 5–4 in the final set, serving for your first Grand Slam. You toss that yellow Wilson ball into the smoky blue of the New York night and try to ignore the bass-drum pounding behind your ribs — and you remember all those times you practiced this exact moment, alone at the crack of dawn, the wind slicing across the courts at Dunblane Sports Club, stringy gray clouds streaming overhead. So where is your mind? Running through backhand drills, over and over? Hazily rehashing your missed chances at Wimbledon a few weeks earlier — when you came so close to beating F...

Solo Travel After Heartbreak

I was dumped in November. Six days before Thanksgiving. There's no good timing for a breakup, but late autumn is especially cruel. The twinkly lights are appearing on front porches, work drinks spiral into full-blown boozy parties, the world is in full celebration mode. And the question of what to do for the holidays — normally so straightforward — is suddenly fraught. Stay with my parents in Westfield, New Jersey? I can already hear the dog-walking women of the neighborhood asking in sweet pseudo-concern: "Weren't you with someone last year? That lawyer? Rory, was it?" Join friends i...

Coming Out Later in Life

While it's difficult to estimate exactly how many Americans come out later in life, research shows it's increasingly common. According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, roughly 11 million adults in the United States identify as LGBTQ+ — about 4.5 percent of the total population. Yet a significant number didn't come out, even to themselves, until their 30s, 40s, 50s, or beyond. For many lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, heterosexuality felt like the only possible path. Growing up in Minneapolis in the seventies, I didn't even know bisexuality was a thing. There was no language for someo...

Creative Wellness for Beginners

What if you're not musical or sporty? What if your gym kit is still in its bag? The good news: there are creative wellness hobbies that anyone can learn. And "creative" doesn't mean channeling Picasso. You don't have to be a creative person. I'm about as creative as a leaky faucet. But that's not what creative wellness means. It means anything relaxing, craft-based, and done purely for yourself. Studies show that "creative activities in everyday life increase positive psychological functioning" — in other words, they can make us happier. The goal is flow: that therapeutic trance where yo...

Understanding Your Parent’s Narcissism

If your goal is not just to survive your experience but to come through it and thrive, it helps to begin with a basic understanding of narcissism. I’m going to start by looking at how a narcissistic personality develops, what Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) actually means, and the typical traits and behaviours of the difficult—and, let’s be honest, often abusive—parent. I’ll also explore the impact of narcissistic parenting on children. Laying this groundwork is a bit like putting down solid roots for a tree. You need that root system to support the rest of your recovery. So let’...

A customer · 5.0 · April 2025

Overall, excellent work!!!!

A customer · 5.0 · July 2024

Emma was great to work with and very responsive. She captured the exact tone I was looking for. I would recommend Emma and will definitely be using her again for non-fiction projects.

A customer · 5.0 · June 2024

Overdelivered - my favorite word for a freelancer. Extremely pleased with how she interpreted my outline ideas into a great piece of writing.