newsletter: march 2026
meet our march guest editor, Brendan Fee
hi, it’s minjae 👋
🌸🌊🐟 happy march, everyone! 🌿🌈🥧
i’m delighted to introduce this month’s guest editor, Brendan Fee!
brendan 🦔 🙇🧨
about me i was born and raised in northern virginia, and now i live in brooklyn. as mentioned above, i love to read. aside from that, i try to make a point of spending as much time out of my apartment as possible, to enjoy all of the wonderful cultural offerings of new york. i love being around other people, even if i am doing something on my own; it at once energizes me and calms me down. i love live music, i often frequent our lovely museums, and i’m always on the subway in search of a good lunch spot or the sunniest patch in a park.
i’m a first year phd student of social psychology at the graduate center at cuny. my interests, while a bit variable, tend to orbit around the contradiction-ridden ideological landscape of late capitalism and its political and psychological consequences. i think about things like palliative ideologies and cognitive dissonance, the meritocracy myth, rules, norms, and state power.
more specifically, i am recently asking questions such as: how do many people in the U.S. go about their daily lives as “normal” in the midst of individual and collective existential threats (e.g., extreme inequality, climate collapse, increasingly brazen fascist state violence)? how do people process and ingest, for example, their social media feeds, where as they scroll they are exposed to these threats in between advertisements, get-ready-with-me TikToks, and incoming Slack messages? might we be able to help each other imagine (and bring about) a world without all of that?
📺 watching 👀
after life (dir. kore-eda). super cool surreal concept from late 90s japan. follows a group of “counselors” who help the recently deceased choose the single memory that they’d like to relive for eternity.
la cérémonie (dir. chabrol). for fans of parasite! a french maid, encouraged by a new friend, works up the courage to stand up to the particularly nasty family who employs her.
📚 reading 🤓
perfection (by vincenzo latronico). a stunningly sharp (and timely) narrative that follows a couple, tom and anna, as they live through (and participate in, as “expats” or “digital nomads”) the early days of 2010s hipsterism as berlin transplants. it touches on everything--the brainworms caused by constant social media exposure, gentrification, “scenes” and culture, digital marketing, and the desperate search for fulfillment of the first internet generation. a slim novel that will shake your foundations!!
👂listening 🎧
i need to start a garden (by haley heynderickx) is what i tell people when pressed to name a favorite album. so grounding and beautiful! always coming back to it.
🖊️ work i’d like to share: my first published paper! 📃
Heteronormative definitions of sex: the roles of androcentrism, phallocentrism, and objectification
Brendan Fee, Kira Means, & Thekla Morgenroth
Psychology & Sexuality (2025)
🗂️ papers i’d like to read this month: 🗂️
The crisis we are not naming: The psychology of capitalism
Karim Bettache
The British Journal of Social Psychology (2026)
👓 OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU 👓
Postdoc with Ashwini Ashokkumar's We-Search lab at the Psychology Department of Harvard University: start date flexible; applications received by March 14 will receive full consideration
Lecturer in Psychology at University of Kent focusing on cognition and neuroscience: review deadline March 19
Postdoc at Villanova University on comparative cognition/animal behavior: review deadline March 16
….feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!