Today, New York Magazine’s the Cut launched an expansion of its newsletter offerings with Brooding, by writer and researcher Kathryn Jezer-Morton. The bimonthly newsletter will showcase Jezer-Morton’s analysis and reporting on modern family life, focusing on the way our conceptions of parenthood intersect with online culture. Jezer-Morton will be turning a mirror on those who offer parenting advice, product suggestions, and home hacks. Brooding will be added to the existing roster of newsletters published by New York. You can sign up for the free newsletter here and view a complete list of newsletter offerings here.
“Brooding looks at the cultural phenomena of family life. I like to take a sociological approach, so instead of focusing on advice or solutions to problems, I am interested in understanding why we do what we do. Also, what joy and ease look like for families, which isn’t something that we’ve had much chance to think about since COVID began,” said Jezer-Morton. “To me, family life overlaps with everything else.”
“Kathryn’s incisive writing dissects how motherhood is displayed and performed on social media. Her thought-provoking and fresh approach to the subject makes her the right person to launch the Cut’s first parenting newsletter,” said New York Magazine editor Genevieve Smith. “Kathryn brings sophistication and wit, applying her background as an academic and a researcher to a range of modern parenting and family-life topics.”
Kathryn Jezer-Morton is a researcher and writer whose interests concern the confluence of motherhood and neoliberal selfhood. In particular, she examines how online platforms have created affordances that have allowed for previously untold accounts of motherhood to become socially significant. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Jezebel, and Romper, as well as in her popular Substack, Mothers Under the Influence.