Sign Up for Brooding, a Newsletter About Modern Family Life

Online motherhood offers us a prismatic view of the values and conflicts that define contemporary family life, and that’s why it’s so fascinating. The politics of gender, the social construction of time, bodies, fantasies, fears, the climate crisis, freedom, and control: It’s all in there.

I’m Kathryn Jezer-Morton, and I’ve spent the past three years researching the world of momfluencers as I’ve worked toward a Ph.D. in sociology, parsing the trends of online motherhood with enthusiasm and bewilderment. Starting May 13, I will be bringing my analyses and obsessions to the Cut in a new bimonthly newsletter called Brooding. You can expect close inspections of digital culture’s entanglements with modern family life, reflections on what community means in our times, and reporting on the trends and personalities that manage to invade our minds and influence our ideas about home. To me, family life overlaps with everything else. I’m indiscriminate in my need to understand what the hell is going on in the home.

This is a newsletter for anyone who has thoughts about home life. I won’t tell you how to raise your kids or what products you should use to clean your house, but I will turn the mirror onto those people who do. If you’re eager to hear about any topics in particular, please drop me a note at brooding@nymag.com.