Is Your Social Life Missing Something? This Conversation Is for You.

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode was supposed to be our second of the year. I loved taping it. It was one of my favorite conversations.

But then the news cycle accelerated and never stopped. The Trump administration attacked Venezuela and arrested the country’s president. There were shootings in the streets of Minneapolis. It never felt like the right moment for the discussion.

At the same time, I don’t think this episode, which is about gathering and community and what it means to be more deeply together — within both similarities and alliances and differences and disagreements — is a break from politics. I think this is actually, in some ways, the core of politics.

My motivation for this episode was also more personal. One of my resolutions this year is to spend more time hosting and to make those gatherings more meaningful — to be a better member of my own community. And the person with whom I wanted to talk about that is Priya Parker, the author of the book “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” and the Substack Group Life.

Priya thinks about gathering, hosting and community differently than anyone I’ve met. The way that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign created community, which was one of its most beautiful aspects, was partially built on her work and her advice.

So I wanted to share this episode now because it is both not at all the right time for it — and absolutely the perfect time for it.

These next few years are going to be long. I am tempted to say we’re going to need to take breaks — and that is true. But we’re also just going to need each other.

Thinking about how we pull the people we love closer and how we are more in community rather than less — more together rather than more alone — is as essential as any political, civic or personal discipline could possibly be right now.

Ezra Klein: Priya Parker, welcome to the show.

Priya Parker: Thank you for having me.

I wanted to begin with treating the decision not to gather, not to host, as rational.

What makes gathering hard and intimidating? Why do people choose — because they are choosing — not to do it?

We are busy. Many of us are overworked. We are constantly tethered to our phones. We are suffering from a child care crisis. We no longer live with intergenerational families that also allow us to gather intergenerationally. We have beliefs about what we need to do or be in order to host other people — which, by the way, are very modern beliefs.

Our ancestors, whichever community you come from, if you go back long enough, were gathering. Whether their cave was clean or whether they had a boil on their shoulder or whether they had an overbearing mother-in-law, they were gathering. And so in modern life, there are so many reasons that we choose not to gather or we feel like we can’t gather, and it is keeping us apart from one another.

We also overemphasize the right and the space of the individual and, particularly in this country, the hyper-individualized context of self-care and self-help allows us to first focus on what the needs — or perceived needs — of the self are before we begin to even think about the group.

Say more about that idea of the perceived needs of the self.

Well, we perceive that if I have my [expletive] together, if I have the right step counts over the course of the day, if I have my right sugar intake — if I’m making sure that my hypoglycemic index is on the right count and I walk 20 minutes after I eat — all of these decades of apps and books that help us optimize the self, right?

We literally have a self-help revolution. But self-help doesn’t actually help us answer the questions of our shared life. What we actually need are also tools for group help.

I’ve thought a lot about the rhetoric around boundaries that has been everywhere in the past five to 10 years, and how important good boundaries are. I’m curious, as somebody who thinks about mediation and gathering, how you have thought about the boundary revolution.

So I’m a conflict resolution facilitator of groups. In group life, in a group and gatherings, people think it’s all about the “we,” right? It’s only the “we.” But that is a cult.

Group life is actually about the dance between the “We” and the “I.” So if you have too much “we,” it’s a cult, and if you have too much “I,” it’s a federation.

And so part of group life is the tools we have to make sure we have enough voice as an individual, and also the tools we have to choose to give up some amount of freedom to be part of something greater than ourselves. Even if that’s practically like: Yeah, I don’t usually eat cheese, but I’m going to come over to your house and eat what you’re going to serve me.

Boundaries, at some level, are the healthy line drawings for the space of the “I.” But particularly in therapy — and I love therapy, I’m in therapy, therapy has helped many people in my family change their lives — we are using therapy to draw boundaries over bridges. We are using therapy — the excuse of therapy — to focus on separation rather than connection, versus the tools of repair, versus the tools of the mess of relationship, versus the tools of thinking about how we actually apologize and alter one another.

By the way, most therapists would say: This is not actually how we mean to use boundaries. So part of what is happening when we are overusing boundaries is we are isolating ourselves more and more and more. So we’re going to end up DoorDashing our food, sitting alone in our twin bed, watching Netflix. Then you don’t have the messiness of actually being in relationship with other really annoying people, with the friction of other people.

I became obsessed with this quote over the past year from Bernard Crick. It’s in his book “In Defense of Politics.” He says: “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”

Whew!

Contained in that is something that you’re getting at, which is that other people are difficult.

And also: Other people are inherent to the interaction. When I listen to you, I think of Martin Buber.

Thank you. [Laughs.]

When I listen to that quote, I think of Martin Buber. [Chuckles.]

Oh, not just me. [Chuckles.]

I’m a conflict resolution facilitator. My mentor, Hal Saunders — the first book he ever made me read was Martin Buber’s writings and the relationship between “I” and “Thou” and the idea in my field of dialogue, which is: Relationships get out of whack when relationships become an “I–It” — an object of my charity or a task for my redemption. And dialogue, which is the real consideration of other people, moves the relationship from an “I–It” to an “I–Thou.” It restores the relationship. It restores us to each other.

For those of us asking for a friend and who have never made it through Buber’s “I and Thou,” what is “I–Thou” versus “I–It”?

So “I–Thou” is an idea that the relationship between you and me is sacred. It’s divine. And by the way, this is in many cultures. There’s a Hindu version of this. Basically, every interaction between us is a relationship that, whether or not you believe in God, has the potential to be holy, to be sacred.

And when “I” turn you into an “It” — into an object — we’ve basically broken that sacred interaction.

What turns me into an “It” for you?

Hosting a party where I need bodies in the room versus hosting a party where I deeply think about who I want to be there because I care about them.

So it’s instrumentalizing other people.

It’s transactionalizing. It’s using people rather than making them of use.

I’ll give a simple example. Right now, when people are thinking about how to gather, a lot of the reasons I think people don’t gather is because a lot of the gatherings are vague and diluted, and you would actually rather be home Netflixing and chilling.

I saw this recently on Instagram. There was a woman who was hosting a baby shower, but the baby shower was all of her friends coming over with sponges, listening to music, scrubbing her walls, having the best time. They were actually feeling like they were of use to her.

She needed a clean house. She was completely overwhelmed. They came over rocking, and it went totally viral because it’s very moving.

They weren’t being used — they were being of use: I want to be part. I want to know how I can help you in this time of need. I want to know that I can help.

A lot of people don’t even think anyone needs them. It’s so lonely.

There’s so much I want to follow up on, but I want to talk about cleanliness for a minute.

You were talking about how we invited people over to the cave, whether the cave was clean or not. When I think about what stops me from hosting, what stops me from being more hospitable, what stops me from doing more gathering — and this podcast is somewhat motivated by my own New Year’s resolution to try to do more ——

More gathering.

More gathering — it’s actually that the standards — not just that I have set but that I feel the culture around me sets, that the people around me believe in, that I believe in — there is so much work in the house, in the schedule, in the cooking and whatever, just to get to the point where I feel like I can have anybody over, that it’s intimidating.

I want to see and be with other human beings, but with the kids, it’s hard to go out. But if the expectation is that everything has to be perfect before anybody arrives ——

You will never gather. I mean, I actually think we are living in an era where no one has the same expectations. People are confused.

We all, in traditional societies, shared norms. If you go to a Southern Indian, you go to a Brahminical red-thread-tying ceremony, everyone knows what that means. Everyone cries because they understand, and all of their previous generations did it in the exact same way.

But I remember reading in 2008 that the U.N. said it was the first year in the history of humanity when more people lived in cities than villages. Which means that people are uprooted.

I mean, I’m biracial, I’m bicultural, I’m bireligious. I grew up in two different households that were also both joint households, and I can tell you that most families are making stuff up.

I’ll give a simple example. Two of our best friends, once we started becoming really close with each other, years and years and years ago: It was the first time they ever invited us to their home for dinner, and my husband and I showed up, and we were dressed to the nines.

You guys are intimidating.

[Klein and Parker chuckle.]

We wanted to honor them. We come from cultures on both sides that feel like you dress for yourself and you dress for others as a sign of respect. There’s a boundary between in-house and out-of-house. We love it.

And our best friends open the doors, and they’re in their pajamas. And we both looked across this threshold, and we all burst into laughter. But actually, both sides were honoring the other side. For them, they would only be in their pajamas for people whom they’re actually letting into their life.

The good news is we have totally different expectations of what a gathering should be. I actually don’t think everybody assumes that the room or the house should be totally clean, and part of the beauty and the power of modern life is you get to decide.

There’s a woman who wrote to me. Her name is Ryan. She and her closet friends have a gathering that’s called the Half-Assed Potluck. They do it every week. There’s no holiday, there’s no birthday, there’s no milestone. They gather every week.

And the rules are simple: Bring whatever is in your fridge or pick up something on the way. Wear sweats. Don’t clean. Use paper plates. They eat what appears, they pile onto the couch, talk, laugh. Everyone is home by 8:30.

The most successful shift in my own community since moving to New York has been that there’s another couple who have kids around our kids’ age, and we spend a lot of time on the weekend co-caring — and we have a name for it. But what emerged then over time was a rule that you do not have to clean your house or put on real clothes before you all get together.

That’s very good. It’s such a relief!

So then you can hang out at 8:00 a.m., when the kids are actually up and before you’ve done anything.

One hundred percent.

Somehow in that, we freed ourselves from expectations that would have made this much harder.

Yes. It’s a beautiful example.

But how do you free yourself from those expectations?

Exactly what you’re doing. You and your wife are feeling a need, right? Which is company, I imagine, on the weekend — people who aren’t going to be totally annoyed if your boys are running around and being loud. So you have a need.

Then, at some level, you invite someone with a shared need: Oh, this couple also has this. It sounds like you’ve given it a name. Names create structures. Names create stories.

You’ve actually given it a wardrobe — no real clothes. That actually creates context. It creates permission. You’re creating this permission around you. And what was the other rule?

No cleaning.

Yes, no cleaning. So part of what you’re doing — you’re doing it intuitively.

This is not rocket science. Every gathering I think of as a temporary, tiny social contract. But the part of modern life that’s both beautiful and terrifying is that we create the social contract.

One thing you focus on in the book that felt very real to me is the discomfort many of us have imposing structure on others. It feels somehow inhospitable for me to invite people over to my house and then tell them what to do.

I would not recommend doing that.

Don’t you?

I think you need to prime them well before.

Got it. Tell them what to do before they come to my house? [Laughs.]

Yes, I’m serious. Part of modern life is that we are so confused. Most people don’t want structure to tell people what to do when they get in their home.

A woman wrote me a few years ago. Her name was Robin. She and her husband moved to a block outside of Chicago, and she wanted to be part of a neighborhood where people hung out. As she got there, a few weeks in, she realized that this was not a neighborhood that hung out, and she wanted to get people together. But if she had just invited eight strangers who had never met to come over and talk to each other, it might not work.

So she started priming them. She sent her 6- and 8-year-old girls out on scooters to hang a paper coffee cup on their door: Save the coffee date. Then a week later, they went around again on scooters. She went to VistaPrint — she told me she really thought about this — and there were invitations, and it was like: Come to our house for bagels and brew. And if you’d like to come, there are three questions: Please tell us your email, the number of years you’ve lived on this block and two or three interesting facts about you.

She practiced what I call “call and response.” She’s actually creating buy-in.

And then these cards start coming back: My dream is to go to Poland to visit my people. And: I once delivered a baby — not ours.

When they came, they were given name tags with the number of years they had lived on the block, and then a second name tag with three interesting facts, but it was someone else’s — another neighbor’s.

So they all mingle. It’s casual, it’s in the morning, it’s coffee and bagels. And then right when people are about to leave, she brings out a cake with “342” on it. And someone says: That’s the collective years we’ve all lived on this block.

And years later, she changed the culture of that block. But if she had just said: Come over, and I’m going to make you go around and tell three interesting facts about yourself — they’d be like: Buzzer off. Who are you to do that?

I had two reactions listening to that. One was I felt myself clench up with the amount of work.

[Chuckles.] OK.

And the other was: What an incredible act of generosity. What a gift to put that much work and intentionality into connecting other people.

It’s a deeply generous act. And I would say: What clenches you up did not clench up Robin. She loved doing it. She loved sending her girls out on those scooters. She loved designing those invitations.

So you shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t do something that clenches you up. Host a gathering that you want to attend.

Simple examples — again, this can look so many ways. It’s easing the barrier of entry of hosting.

Pableaux Johnson passed away almost exactly a year ago. And somebody from my Group Life community sent me an email and a video of these dinners that he had hosted around his table in New Orleans for 20 years.

These were simple dinners. They happened every Monday night. It was the same menu every Monday night: red beans and cornbread. He did it around the table that his grandmother left him. No table was ever the same people twice, and it was everybody from his neighbors to visiting actors filming a TV show to somebody whom he literally ran into in the coffee shop.

I posted this on Instagram, and it went totally viral. It was the most viral post I had ever posted at that time. And what was so interesting to me was when people posted it, the majority of the people said [feigns crying]: I wish someone would invite me to something like this.

And I’m thinking: Host it. You host the dinner. This assumption of: Why aren’t I getting these invitations? It’s like: No, no, no, no — you host the red beans and cornbread dinner. It’s enough.

Just start. Just start. We’re all sort of sitting there being like: I wish I were invited. Host! One of the most powerful ways to begin to feel like you belong to a place, especially if you’ve moved to a new place, is to host.

When people move to other countries, my biggest advice to them? Host something in the first week.

What if you’re terrified to start? You’re a very graceful person. I’ve known you a while.

The art of gathering is like in the movie “Ratatouille”: “Anyone can cook.” Anyone can gather.

I really feel strongly that as much as “Ratatouille” pretends that is its message, that is not its message.

[Laughs.] Exactly. Exactly.

Anybody with incredible gifts can cook? Any generationally talented rat can cook? [Chuckles.]

[Laughs.] OK, you watched and analyzed that movie, and I don’t disagree with you. But at some deep level, we’re almost overcomplicating it. Our ancestors in any community that we moved to did this.

And so first of all, I feel fear every time. I feel nervous every time. I feel like: Is anyone going to show up? I feel sick to my stomach. I start snapping at my most beloveds. It’s really normal to feel. It’s being willing to hold that anxiety and be like: Oh, I must care about this.

So first is to say: Hey, if you’re feeling some amount of fear, that’s because you care about this. How interesting! And build the ability to hold some of that anxiety.

Second is to start with something you think would be delightful, because that’s going to give you some energy. Co-host something with people. I know of a guy who got a champagne magnum. He worked at an ad agency years ago. His boss didn’t drink, and so he inherited this massive bottle of champagne. He was like: What the heck am I going to do with this?

He invited eight friends to share the bottle. The year of the bottle was 2004, and the price of entry to the party was to bring a story from your life from the year 2004.

That’s cool.

It makes the night.

Michel Laprise — I wrote about this in the book — he travels a lot for his work, and he wanted to dress his tree for the holidays, for Christmas. He invited 12 friends who didn’t all know each other to send two photos ahead of time of two moments of happiness from their year. When they arrived, on the table were scissors, ornaments and their photos, their moments of happiness. And he heard: Oh, wow, you sold a house this year? And: Wow. I didn’t know you looked so great in those tights. And: Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know you went underwater scuba diving.

It created the context and the conversation for the whole night. He could kind of disappear. And the rest of the night, ornament making, then conversations about the past year — it’s like a play. It goes its own way. And people then feel like they’re also part of it.

We have been talking from the perspective of hosting or attending a gathering, which implies you’ve been invited to one or you have people to invite to one. But it’s a pretty notorious statistic that in 2021, almost half of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends.

There are many people who perhaps would like to be invited to things who are not. What do you recommend to people who first have to cross a chasm of social connection?

Yes, absolutely. If you feel a need and a desire to have connection with community, first of all, protect that. Don’t be embarrassed by it. You’re not weird; it’s not because you’re not strong enough. That is a beautiful yearning to protect and to feed and to grow.

And then: Look into your community. This is what public spaces are for. This is what libraries are for — “Palaces for the People,” Eric Klinenberg’s beautiful book about how libraries serve as this really important social third space. Most libraries have public programming. Go meet up. There are many institutions that have free programming. Go to a museum, go to a class. Look at places where there’s pre-existing community but that’s open to the public.

The whole purpose is: We want more people, presence and showing up.

Being consistent — going over and over and over again — actually builds trust. Proximity builds trust. So go and make it a priority, something that is not only nice to have but that’s fundamentally crucial to your life.

I want to keep two levels of this conversation in mind: One is my own interest in gathering, and the other is a civic interest I have in gathering.

You have mentioned individuals and individualism a few times here. Everybody talks about late capitalism, which I don’t think is a concept that makes a lot of sense, but I do think we live in late individualism.

Interesting. I agree with you.

And that we have gotten to an almost terminal point in how much we understand ourselves as individuals and our purpose here as individual expression and fulfillment.

With the cultures you know and the gatherings you’ve explored, I’m curious how you think about the way we form our individualism now and the tensions that creates for us then living in, being in or creating community.

You may be listening to this and thinking: Well, isn’t that the only way to be? How else would you structure society?

And I think of so many examples — whether you think of it religiously or whether you think of it as the pursuit of purpose — where the design of the philosophy or of the society is based on each other.

Rhaina Cohen, whom you’ve had on the show — I know her beautiful book “The Other Significant Others.” One of the things I loved about that book was that she went back and looked at lots of different societies and many religious traditions where the attainment of God was actually through the other person.

I’m half-Indian, and there are many, many different cultures and religions that form India. And in almost every context — whether it’s Baha’i, whether it’s Hinduism, whether it’s Sikhism, whether it’s Islam — virtue and attainment of God is through the other, through community.

There’s a saying in Hindi: “Atithi devo bhava”: “The guest is God.” And so there are so many traditions in which the sacredness, the sense of our purpose on Earth, is the orientation to the other.

And by the way, many of these societies are oppressive to the individual. There’s also a reason so many immigrants come to America. It’s sort of to escape the group. It’s to escape the oppressive community. It’s to have a self ——

The multigenerational household.

Absolutely. I mean, my mother came here in the 1970s. She secretly applied to Ph.D. programs. She got into one in Iowa and one in Virginia. Had no idea what the difference was. Begged her parents to go. She’s the third of five children. She was supposed to have an arranged marriage. They’re theosophists, and to their credit, her father let her go.

She came to this country in part to think about what a self could look like for an Indian woman — Hindu, middle child, person. And so many people who come to this country are delighted, are so relieved, to have a space — literally just a space — to think.

There are beautiful, beautiful parts of the protection of the individual. Western civilization is based on the rights of the individual. The individual deeply matters. But we have gone to late-stage individualism, where we’ve fallen off the cliff and completely forgot that the individual also needs group life.

What are we if we are not also through and with one another?

It’s also boring.

Something that I see around me, something that I even see in my own family sometimes, is: Parents who immigrated here in part to find more freedom and more space for individual expression are then surprised or taken aback or disappointed on some level to see how far their children take it.

Yes.

You move from not wanting to have the entire multigenerational family under one roof, and then you’re here, and you realize that none of the families outside of the nuclear families live under one roof. Often they don’t even live in the same states — including my own.

My father came here from Brazil, and we have much more family in Brazil than we have here. And I think among all of us, to some degree, there’s a yearning here for the closeness of the family there.

Deeply.

I live across the continent from the rest of my family, and you feel that we got what we wanted, good and hard. [Laughs.]

Absolutely. I’m biracial — my mother is Indian, and my father is white American. I remember one of my earliest memories of my father — I wonder if he would remember this — was when I went to shut my door. I was really annoyed with him, and I shut my door, and I yelled out, and he said: What are you doing?

I said: I want privacy! And he opened the door, and he said: In India, there’s no such thing as privacy! [Laughs.]

My father loved being enveloped by my mother’s Indian extended, multigenerational family. He always longs for it.

And this idea of: What is the right role of privacy in a family? In a relationship? To our in-laws? What do we share or not?

That actual moment I’ve come back to over and over and over again now with my children because it’s actually a deep question: Where is the right balance between the “I” and the “We”? Between the self and the other? How do we actually do this?

I think it’s important to ask the question.

One of my favorite books by far this year was “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny,” by Kiran Desai.

Ah! It’s so beautiful.

It sits in my heart. I think about it a couple of times a week.

Me, too. Oh, I’m so happy you’re bringing this up.

But it’s all about this dance of the pride of the parent on sending kids out into America, where they can find these destinies and fulfill them, and then the disappointment and the distance, knowing that in some ways you caused it.

And then on the part of the kids — and again, I feel this. I’m across the country from my parents as they age, and we’re partially here to be near to my wife’s family, but that just speaks to how impossible now the choices are. We can’t live near both families. They live on opposite sides of the country.

Yes, one has to choose.

And so you feel the loss.

I love that book. Desai is so brilliant. The opening scene is of the grandparents sitting on this balcony in the morning in Allahabad, in northern Uttar Pradesh, in India, in the ’90s, and they’re worrying about what the cook will make over lunch. A phone rings, and it’s their granddaughter Sonia, studying in Vermont, crying.

And the grandmother is like: But why is she crying? And he says: I don’t know. She says she’s lonely. But why would she be lonely? And the grandmother is like: She has Mexican food at that school cafeteria. She has something called Tex-Mex. They can’t imagine, after all they’ve done, the “spoiled brat” — I’m saying that in quotes — that Sonia is lonely in Vermont. And that’s the opening of the entire novel.

I think what is so beautiful about what Kiran Desai does is she puts a jackhammer to this myth that the East is connected and that the West is lonely. To me, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is actually that the East is lonely because they are unknown within their own families, and their roles are stuck, and there’s no way to actually be an individual or to actually have an “I–Thou” relationship, to use our earlier language. And the West is lonely because of the hyper-individualism.

It’s a beautiful book where she actually, through her characters, looks at the entire journey between the oppressive “We” to the oppressive “I.”

So your read of that book is so much deeper than mine.

[Klein and Parker laugh.]

I could really relate to that book.

Well, I’m so glad I actually got to hear that from you.

It’s funny, because you brought up something else that’s interesting and speaks, in a strange way, to the economics of it all. You just mentioned how much of that book revolves around the cooks and the housekeepers. And in America, where the cost of labor is high — which is wonderful, it’s how we’re rich — you don’t have that.

Which circles back to: And then you’re doing everything yourself. You’re cooking, and you’re caring for the kids, and you’re not in an intergenerational household where the weight can be distributed among different people, some of whom are working full-time, some of whom are not. You have to stay at home — women, usually.

Yes, something has got to give.

And it seems to me that what gives is community. What gives is hosting.

One hundred percent.

It is easier to be alone. Or I should say: It is easier on any given day to be alone.

Well, we say that, but it’s actually devastating. If Americans don’t gather more — and there are so many ways to do it — we will slide even more into authoritarianism because we actually don’t know each other.

Every legal expert in authoritarianism basically says the antidote to authoritarianism is connection. It’s knowing your neighbors. It’s knowing: Hey, how bad could they be? Their first concert was a Toni Braxton concert! It’s these tiny little social bridges.

And part of modern life, I think, is not assuming that there’s a way to host. I almost want to go over there and get this framework of a fancy dinner party, or whatever your mental model is of what it means to gather, out of your head.

So there’s a long-running argument that authoritarianism or totalitarianism is built on loneliness. There’s a very famous quote from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which, when I read it out on the show, I got a bunch of emails from political scientists being like: We’ve disproved that.

[Klein and Parker laugh.]

Can’t wait for the hate mail.

Whatever — people like to argue about it. But I’ve been thinking about this from a different perspective because I can come up with lots of examples of communities in America that have been, let’s say, very pro-Trump and are much more communally structured than mine is. Evangelical churches are overwhelmingly pro-Trump and better at much of the gathering and structured community than the Brooklyn creative class. [Laughs.]

Absolutely. By the way, Trump is a great gatherer. He’s a great host.

Say what you mean by that.

When I first started, there was a show, I forget what it was called — maybe it was called “The Circus” — but these reporters would go around to all the rallies. This was in 2016. And they went to a Trump rally, and I saw the line and saw it was a party outside the rally. They went in, they experienced it.

It is a temporary, alternative world. Trump is creating the world you wish you were a part of. There is merch. It felt fun. It felt vibrant. It’s alive.

Sociologically, you may not like anything he stands for — but he is an excellent host.

This, I think, gets to something that you say is one of the more interesting premises for being a good host, which is that the reason for a gathering should be disputable. It’s not just: Hey, we’re all getting together in a room.

In a way, a Trump gathering is very disputable.

One hundred percent.

You have to agree on Donald Trump, and a lot of people don’t agree on him. So I’d like you to talk a bit about disputability and why you think it’s so important for gatherings.

When you’re gathering about everything, you’re kind of gathering about nothing. When I actually started researching for “The Art of Gathering,” I wanted to demystify how anyone can create a meaningful, transformative gathering. You don’t need a fancy house, you don’t need the right silverware, you don’t need to be an extrovert.

I interviewed over 100 types of gatherers whom other people always credit with creating transformative gatherings — a hockey coach, a choir conductor — and they all had two things in common: One was they didn’t have a mental model in their head of what a hockey practice has to look like or what a choir practice has to look like. The second thing is they were OK not being for everybody. They were OK having a disputable purpose that not everyone would agree with.

When you are actually thinking about bringing people together, start by asking: Why do I want to do this? Or: What is the need in this community or in this workplace?

And when you actually think about what your specific disputable purpose is, it helps you all the way downstream to figure out: Who should be there? Who should not be there? Where should this be? And a disputable purpose just basically allows people to understand what this is for.

Let’s do this in real time. I want to host Shabbat dinners this year. If I were to name the main kind of gathering I want to do, it’s that. What would be the disputable version of that? What would not be?

So I’d first take a step back and say: Why do you want to host a Shabbat dinner? What is your purpose? What is your need? What is it that you’re seeking?

Well, I want to build a Shabbat practice. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time. I get closer and further at the same time, but I’ve gotten better at it for myself — staying off electronics, building some structures, having the intention not to act upon the world in the way I normally do. But I also recognize that cannot be a real practice if it does not have community around it.

And what do you mean by “a Shabbat practice”? Give me your boundaries. What does that mean to you?

I want a 24-hour period in the week when I rest — actually rest — in the Jewish spiritual sense. The thing I find very moving about Shabbat, among other things, is the idea that what decides what you can and can’t do is whether you are trying to undertake that action with the intention of creating, of changing, of manipulating, of acting upon the world, versus accepting the world as perfect or holy the way it is and simply living in it for a day.

And do you have a sense of who you would like to do that with?

No. [Laughs.] Because — and this has actually been a problem for me — I have a much more specific sense of this, and my sense of what I want here is in some ways too disputable. It is not what my children want — they would like to act upon the world at all times. [Laughs.] I don’t want to speak for my wife’s interests, but she has her own schedule and needs.

Then you’re inviting people over, and they’ve not spent as much time reading Abraham Joshua Heschel as you have. I don’t want it to just be necessarily a thing that I only invite other Jewish people to. And even most Jewish people I know don’t necessarily have the relationship to this — they’ve had something much more intense in mind, or less so.

So no, that has actually been one thing that has stopped me. Because I don’t want to impose this weird search I’m on on everyone else.

Yeah, absolutely. This to me is a beautiful question because it kind of gets to how, in many religious traditions, people have left the church, synagogue, temple and in some ways try to create their own collective practice — and then realize why there’s a church and a temple. The infrastructure, the institutions, actually matter. It’s a forced shared collective.

If you’re all listening and thinking about starting a gathering that you do regularly, whether it’s every week or every month, here are elements that allow groups to take off: There’s a beautiful book called “Small Groups as Complex Systems.” It’s very nerdy.

That does sound beautiful. [Laughs.]

It’s beautiful to me. Welcome to my brain.

One of the core elements of that book is that it looks at what allows for nurturing long-term group commitment. And there’s what I consider a magical equation. A group that has long-term commitment to it has two things true about it: That every member feels like they’re valuably contributing to the group, and that the group feels like it’s valuably contributing to the member. OK? That’s it.

Part of what I think for you to think about this Shabbat dinner is I would create a container, I would experiment, I would think about what you most need. I would start with the invitation. I would think about who you most would want to be part of this. I would think about whether you want the same people the same night, which is a huge commitment. And in that case, if the question is: What would allow them to meaningfully contribute to it? — it’s probably six or eight or maybe 14 people you do a lot of work ahead of time to think about: Would you like to have this shared collective resolution with me?

So that’s one version where it’s actually building community intentionally ——

Boil that down to what makes that the disputable purpose, because the disputable purpose is such an important part of your book that I want to find it tangibly here.

I think, inherently, the category of Shabbat — I’m not Jewish, but from my understanding, Shabbat in and of itself has a specific disputable purpose. There is an edge. Shabbat creates the negative space in the week. It is a specific and disputable purpose to turn off your phone. It is a specific and disputable purpose, in modern life, to be at the same place, the same day of the week, no matter what may come. It is a specific and disputable purpose to go to the same house over and over and over again. And it’s not for everybody.

If you wanted to, there’s one version where you create a really thick and strong boundary, and you say: Actually, I’m going to see if there are other people — and there probably are in your community — who feel a similar tug. Do they need to be Jewish? Do they not? Do you have specific non-negotiables?

I’m basically giving you your social contract, which needs to be true for people to show up. Do they need to show up on time? If you’re going to light candles, does it matter that everyone is there? Can they come when they want?

This is when I’m starting to say that boundaries are specific and disputable, and you feel uncomfortable creating structures, but actually structures are such clarity because then people understand: Where and how do I show up?

Or is this a Shabbat-like experience where you are inviting whomever you’ve met? Like Pableaux Johnson: You met somebody in the coffee shop in the morning, invited them to come, but you’re creating this temporary alternative world where if you’re going to come into my home, this is what we do here.

And across cultures, it’s such a relief to be told.

I want to be talking about this both because it’s a good specific example, but I also mean it to be illustrative, because not everybody wants to do a Shabbat dinner. One thing that I do hear you tracing here that I think is often tricky in hosting is the discomfort between making your vision and your needs the group’s vision and demands upon the group.

So yes, I want something that feels like time out of time. What makes Shabbat “disputatious,” to use your term, for me, is actually whether or not I make it a dinner or make it a Shabbat.

You’re not supposed to be working. One thing I could do is, say, ban all conversation of work and politics at this dinner, and that would make it something different than it would otherwise be.

Great example.

And I feel as a host, in any respect, a discomfort with that kind of stricture and structure on other people.

So this is where it comes to be a social contract. People think invitations are a carrier of logistics: date, time and place. Invitations are your opening salvo of your mini-constitution. I’m serious. It’s your opening salvo to say: I’m going to create this temporary alternative world.

Even in that, you feel how aggressive that is. [Chuckles.]

No, I don’t.

The “opening salvo” language.

Yes. Well, I mean, the first line of your opera — use whatever metaphor you want — which is: This is something I’m trying to do.

And by the way, if you are uncomfortable with this, my advice is to find a co-host, or two co-hosts, who would love to do this with you. And as anybody who runs any group will tell you, anybody who is really passionate about it, you’re going to bump up and think about new norms. You’re going to see what works and see what doesn’t work.

And so there is a part of you that may need to grow this muscle of practicing what I call “generous authority,” which is using your power of the host to protect the guests from each other, to enforce these pop-up rules, to connect them. And then, if they’re the right structure, this beauty arises, and people may realize: Oh, my gosh, this is the first time in three years that I haven’t looked at my phone in three hours. Thank you.

I love the term you use — “generous authority.” Can you talk through what that is?

So generous authority: People think gathering is all about connection and love. Gathering is also about power, because all relationships are also about power. It’s about decision-making. One of the challenges of modern gathering is in part because we’re trying not to impose — and it comes from a good place. Like: Who am I to say how we’re supposed to gather or what God we pray to?

But often in modern life, we underhost. And a host has power, if you choose to host. And part of practicing your generous authority is to use your power for the good of the group — for the good of the gathering — to help it achieve its purpose.

And in part because you are suggesting a thing — you’re creating a thing — tell them ahead of time, so that they’re not coming in and being like: What do you mean these “pop-up rules”? I didn’t sign up for this! Because they didn’t sign up for it.

When my husband and I first moved to New York, I read this book. I think it was called “Literary Brooklyn” — very nerdy — about different writers who lived in Brooklyn. I loved the geographic tracing of that book.

And we came up with this idea — because I realized I’m not a native New Yorker, I don’t really know the city: What if once a month we went and spent 12 hours in a neighborhood on foot and didn’t look at our phones? And my husband was like: Great.

Did you have kids at this point?

I did not have kids. And we moved to the city and happened to tell a friend about it. And she was like: That sounds great. Can I join? And we said sure. And again, it was organic. There was a real need. She also was an immigrant to the city. And she said: I’ve lived here for four years, and I’ve never been anywhere except where I live and where I work.

So then she brought a friend. And long story short, over five years, we hosted what ended up being called I Am Here days.

There were 12 hours. If you were going to join, you had to come at 8 a.m. or 10 a.m., join us for the meal and be there the entire time. No leaving early. No microcoordinating with people who wanted to pop in and out, in part — again, it wasn’t controlling — because we were trying to be off our phones, and you’re microcoordinating with someone who’s dropping in for the 2 p.m. walk or whatever. We spent 12 hours in East Harlem, 12 hours in Inwood, 12 hours in Staten Island, 12 hours in Red Hook.

Part of what was really interesting about these days is, first, we learned, and we created these boundaries as we started bumping against what was working and what wasn’t working.

The second thing that was super-interesting was the first four hours, everyone was in a great mood and on their best behavior. Different people would come, sometimes people would bring friends. It was always a group of about six to 12 — 12 was a bit big because we couldn’t find a table — and we would nap in parks and do all sorts of things.

Then the next four hours, people would often split off into different side groups and talk. And by Hour 8, people started getting cranky, tired, not on their best behavior. Someone might burst into tears because all of their guard was down. And we would have these beautiful conversations that were so real. The timbre of that third of the day was fundamentally different. It felt like what it used to feel like to talk until 2 a.m. in a college room or to hang out as friends.

So much of what ended up happening with this experiment as we created some structures was some people were like: I can’t leave? And I was like: Yeah, but you don’t have to come. This is a very specific thing. I’m not asking you to come.

This is a category that worked for a specific period of time. And then we had kids, and we stopped it. And that was OK, too.

What you just said about the way the I Am Here gatherings ended, I think, is very real for a lot of people, which is that people maybe had ——

They had kids.

Yes. Meaning kids ended up ——

Not that we had a powerful ritual at midnight.

No, no, no. Although that would be fun, too.

Absolutely.

I think there are a lot of people out there who had a structure of their social life, of their gathering, of their hosting before they had kids, and then kids broke it.

And now they don’t really know what to do. Maybe they do a play date, but the kids have to go to bed.

How do you think about gatherings after becoming parents and making things open to kids, but not completely about the kids? I think people really struggle here.

They really struggle. I really struggle.

It is a land mine, I’ll first say. It might seem like this is child’s play. Parenting has become political. Parenting styles have become incredibly, incredibly divided — including judging one another. And it’s crazy making. I mean, the surgeon general issued parenting as the latest mental health crisis.

I would say a couple of things. The first is I think that ages 0 to 3 is a fundamentally different phase versus 3 and up. So let me take 0 to 3 first.

We keep hearing so much about how everybody wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager. There was this awesome piece in “The Cut,” maybe a year ago. I can’t remember the exact title, but it was something like: Can People With Kids and People Without Kids Still Be Friends?

One of the elements to saying yes, they can, is to choose to still want to be part of a person changing. Becoming a parent is also a new identity. And so part of that is a relationship across difference — being a parent and being a nonparent — and a relationship across difference needs conversation. It also needs reciprocity.

So what does that look like? Reciprocity could be, again, if you want to be part of this family life — that’s a big “if” — offering to babysit your friends’ kid for a night and letting them go on a date. And then the parents being trusting and teaching the person without a kid how to roll a diaper. So some of that is actually like an intercultural relationship to teach both sides, and to ask.

This goes a little bit to the way a society that becomes very individualistic changes. But a society that becomes low fertility changes. When I am in societies, in countries, where people have many more kids, like the number of kids Americans used to have, you see that the expectation is that children are just running around underfoot everywhere.

And then here, it becomes very like: Hey, is it OK if I bring my kids?

Which I actually think is OK.

It’s OK, but it is ——

But also, in a lot of these places where kids are allowed, kids benefit from being around adults, so often they behave differently at a table than many American children behave at a table.

And they’re around older kids who take care of them.

I did a piece: “How to Include Kids Without Centering Them.”

And how do you do it?

I’ll give a couple of examples. Again, the age matters.

Let’s say, over 3. We’re just trying to survive until they’re 3.

This is a real example. A person invited us to a New Year’s party, and we couldn’t get a sitter because it’s New Year’s Eve, and our kids, at that point, were going to be like 5 and 8. So she was like: Just bring them.

And so we brought them, and there weren’t other kids there. And we wanted to have a good time. We wanted to talk to adults. We didn’t want to be with our kids the whole time, but we also wanted them to have a good time.

My son is really good at foil art, and my daughter loved to draw at the time. So what my husband did was take aluminum foil with us, and my son spent the evening going and asking people what their favorite animal was, and then he’d go away and for five minutes create that animal. Then he’d hand it to an adult, and the adults were just amazed. And my daughter would ask if she could sketch them, and people would sit and quietly look at her, and she’d sketch them by hand. I mean, it looked more Picasso.

What if your kids lack an unusually party-friendly talent? [Laughs.]

Forget the talent. A woman wrote me on Instagram and said she read this piece. She said: I often take my daughter to the National Charity League meetings, and she sits and just does her homework, and she’s just so bored. She’s on her phone. And she said: But then after reading this piece — I forget the exact details, but she gave her a little reporter’s notebook, and her daughter went and met different members at that meeting, and said: Why do you come to the Junior League?

When they left, she was so excited. The 12-year-old had conversations. It wasn’t gratuitous — it was asking about the actual thing. It was scaffolding.

And so, I think parenting is seeing your kid, knowing who your kid is and setting them up for some amount of success. This is why the age also matters. But then also — again, this is if other kids aren’t there — finding ways to give them scaffolding to base on a way they actually want to spend time, and to also know that it’s OK to be around and to listen to a conversation that isn’t for them or about them, but how adults talk.

Something you’ve touched on here a few times that I think is worth pulling out is the idea of gatherings where you are asking people to help you. You talked about the baby shower where people sponge down the house. You’ve talked about inviting people to come learn how to babysit your kid.

And this has been a strange lesson for me in my own life: It is so much easier to help than to ask for help. And oftentimes, very deep relationships are forged when people will ask for help in a way that almost makes me uncomfortable.

Yes.

I had a friend who went through a divorce and really leaned on me throughout it. And it was a great gift — to me — because we ended up much closer on the other side of that.

And I think, in some ways, it inverts some of what we’re talking about: the idea of the host making this offering, making everything perfect and then bringing somebody in to experience the perfection and the structure. There’s something very much else about the host asking for something. The gift is vulnerability and the opportunity to be of use.

I’d be curious to hear you talk about that.

At some deeper level, it’s a deep and generous ask — particularly in a group context — to be the vessel for the question.

What do I mean by that? I had a friend years ago who really wanted to quit her job. She was at a consulting firm where at the moment they can smell you’re about to leave, they’re like: Here’s a bonus! Here’s a raise!

She finally hosted a quitting party. But she hadn’t quit yet — she was scared. And she invited eight of us and said: I need your courage. I’m really scared to leave this job. Would you come and would you bring one piece of art or poetry or song — anything — that gives you courage?

And I was like: Wow, what an interesting gathering. We went, and she told us she’s really stuck. She knows it’s super-prestigious — many people in her life feel like she’s so lucky — but she just needs to jump and leave this job. And we each shared moments where we took risks that no one understood. And it was for her, ostensibly.

And then she said: I’ve invited each of you here because you each are people who I think of as courageous, and I wanted to thank you for blowing courage my way.

Part of what she did was then we all got this beautiful gift of everyone else’s ways that they are courageous. She reified our own identity, our sense of self. Like: Wow, she thinks of me as courageous?

I still think about that day. When I am terrified of making a decision that feels really scary, I think about the poems that were read at that gathering 15 years ago.

You need to think about how to make it fun and interesting for folks at some level. But people want to be of use — not used. And most of us share common conundrums. So instead of being isolated in these tiny fragments where we’re all sadly wondering the same thing, when one person takes a risk — like Robin, whose neighbor told her: We’re not a block that hangs out. But she found, with care, a way that was delightful for her to begin to shift that.

Something that you’re getting at there, which I think you’ve touched on a few times, is the significance of discomfort for something that is going to be really deep. And to me that’s important — and actually gets us back, weirdly, to authoritarianism.

You were saying earlier that if we can’t gather, we’re not going to be a democracy. And I would say that there are plenty of people gathering in this country who are perfectly happy with at least the turn Donald Trump has been wanting us to take.

I did an episode of “Search Engine,” PJ Vogt’s podcast. He had asked me to come on to talk about how to talk to your family about politics at Thanksgiving. And if you remember, there was this period in which there was all this content on the internet that was like: How to Argue With Your Uncle at Thanksgiving.

In doing that show with him, something that I began to think about was the way that all of that content was actually not about winning arguments — because nobody really thinks you’re going to win an argument at Thanksgiving. It was about protecting people from the fear of being in a social situation where there was going to be difference that they could not control.

Beautiful.

What we’ve been talking about here are gatherings where the host has an enormous amount of control. And what I thought interesting about all of the content and the fear of being home with their families over the holiday, is it reveals a way in which we have lost the comfort and maybe the capacity to be in social situations where we cannot control, where we don’t feel we can just walk out, where we’ve not carefully curated everybody there to make sure we agree on all the fundamental things.

And when I think about what is going to break our democracy, it’s not that we don’t gather enough — although maybe it’s that, too — but that actually we’ve lost the skills, not to be in a gathering that we control, but in one that we don’t.

I love that.

So I’d be curious to talk a bit about gathering amid discomfort.

Something that I thought was really interesting in the book is you talk about being in college and finding that the kinds of cross-cultural and cross-ideological gatherings that worked best were ones where there was actually an incredibly specific dispute between the people there.

Yes. A disputable relationship.

Do you want to talk a bit about that and what you learned from that? Because I’m interested not just in your gathering side but your conflict-facilitation side.

Yes. I went to the University of Virginia. I’m biracial, as I’ve said. I was very frustrated by the unhealthy racial climate there. The first question people would often ask me was: What are you?

And I literally didn’t understand what the question meant. I realized I was supposed to answer, like: Racially, what am I? And I learned very quickly that, OK, race really matters here. OK — got it.

And I learned about a process — actually, through my mother — called Sustained Dialogue, and we launched these dialogue groups called Sustained Dialogue. We learned to become moderators. There would be two moderators assigned.

For the first year, groups of 10 to 12 students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds were to come together with the intention for the entire school year to meet every other week or so for three hours at a time, to deepen relationships, to be able to have trusting relationships, to begin to see across race, to bring the conversations that often happen behind closed doors into this group, to moderate them and then to begin to see if you can change your relationships to begin to change the culture.

We launched on Sept. 10, 2001. So Sept. 11 happened the next day.

Wow.

In part because of the timing, it became a very popular student group.

In the beginning, we really didn’t know what we were doing — we were throwing stuff at the wall. And many of the groups were diverse. While it was interesting and beautiful, one of the things we found was, as soon as we would come up to a very interesting conversation around Black-and-white dynamics on the college campus, after about 20 or 30 minutes, always — and for a good reason — the Latino person or the South Asian person would be like: Gosh, this drama again? What about the rest of us?

But there were two groups that were different. One, if I remember correctly, was College Republicans and an L.G.B.T.Q. student group. The other group, I think, was Jewish American and Arab American students.

In our moderator groups, basically every single time, the other groups’ moderators would come and be like: Yeah, it was a fine conversation.

But the facilitators of these two very specific groups were electric: We had incredible conversations. We went into territory that we barely ever get to go into. We also didn’t know how to handle it.

Those groups were transformative because there was a specific and disputable line. Everyone knew why they were there. They were also willing to be together in that. This was 2001, 2002, 2003. And having the boundary of the relationship was so helpful.

Is that why you became a conflict facilitator?

[Chuckles.] I think I became a conflict facilitator in part — actually, I’m conflict averse. When my parents divorced — when they separated — everyone was shocked because they never fought. And I learned from an early day that human connection can be as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict.

So then you were a conflict facilitator in the, let’s call it, 2014 to 2023 period. You have had this outlook and had been in these worlds during what people now call wokeness.

Yes.

There was a huge period of social ferment, and we began talking about things that we did not talk about — “we” being American society — very much before that. There was #MeToo. It felt like everything was changing. What we could talk about was changing. What we could and could not say was changing.

And then you watched, with 2024 and Trump’s return, that shattered into a million pieces.

I think there’s a tendency for a lot of people on the left to just move on. Like: Let’s just not do whatever that was again. But I’m curious if you have reflections, as somebody who thinks about these questions, on what was done well there and what lessons need to be learned if we are going to not just avoid everything that got talked about or pretend it was all wrong. Because that, I think, would also be a mistake.

How have you reflected on it?

That’s a beautiful question. I think that movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter unearthed deep power imbalances. They powerfully revealed the collective treatment of Black people in this country. And with #MeToo, if we go back — I mean, it feels so long ago — to this very simple invitation to put online and to verbalize elements that before, as a woman, one would never talk about. These were radical, radical movements.

I would say a couple of things: First, structurally, there was not enough focus on actually creating laws to change what has been revealed, rather than trying to change workplace culture. Second, I remember reading this beautiful, surprising piece in BuzzFeed, back when they had an investigative journalism department. It was by Katie Baker, a female journalist who went around and actually interviewed college students who had been accused of sexual assault. In some cases, they had been expelled, been suspended, gone through all of the structural movements.

And I remember a quote that was something like: There is no place for me to go. There is no place for me to come back to. I don’t understand what you want me to do. Do you want me to commit suicide?

I remember it — the quote just struck me in my being.

There’s the social movement: What needs to actually shift, and what do we actually need to create space for? And then there’s: Where and how do we repair and allow people to collectively, socially, structurally make amends to come back reformed if they want to?

I know I sound like a broken record: We have so many tools for self-help. We are so impoverished for tools of group help.

One of the books that I think is powerful in this new bookshelf that we’re going to call Group Help is Danya Ruttenberg’s “On Repentance and Repair.” It’s a beautiful book. She’s a rabbi, and she basically says that American culture is pretty bad. It overemphasizes forgiveness — the Christian notion of forgiveness — and underemphasizes the Jewish notion of repair and repentance. She says that we don’t have meaningful mechanisms to actually repair with one another.

And she says that, by the way, everybody causes harm. It shouldn’t be this big, scary thing. Everybody — all of us, in our friendships, in our relationships — everybody causes harm. Everybody has been harmed, and everyone has witnessed harm. And we don’t have the tools to even understand how to apologize in our interrelationships.

She looks toward the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and through her entire book basically says: These are the steps to think about, if I did something, what does it look like to, first, understand and name what I did, without even beginning to look to see if you forgive me or not? How do I then begin to understand how to change to be a different person so I would not do that again?

I think so much of what has happened structurally is we don’t have tools to help people who used to have power — whether they’re men or whether they’re white people — to integrate, to have a new way of being a man in the world, to have a new way to be a white person in the world in a multiracial, multicultural context.

I think one thing that went — I don’t know if “awry” is exactly the right word here — but I think about now is that there was often an assumption that we knew who was oppressed or oppressor, who was wrong or right, who should be listened to or should be discounted, who had too much power or had too little.

My point isn’t that those judgments were wrong or always wrong, but I think that’s a very political or judicial way of thinking about things — that there’s going to be clarity, and then you need to figure out what the reparation is.

I guess the thing I’m getting at is that we went through this period where the point was to understand each other better, and it is very hard for me not to believe we now understand each other much worse. And I don’t think that was just a failure of the left or something — the left has its own failures, I have my failures. But something went profoundly wrong in our ability to sit in not just conflict but diverse narratives — uncertainty.

By the way, I think that what the #MeToo movement revealed, what Black Lives Matter revealed, was true. It was deep and profound generational cultural work. And it’s not always the job of the organizers leading that movement to be the people then integrating it and doing the work in those communities. So these are complex questions.

But I think one of the elements that goes back to our gathering in modern life is: We each can think about where and how we want to shape and help based on where we are.

I’ll give an example. There’s a Black facilitator, she’s biracial, named Alicia Walters. I’ve worked with her for years. And before Black Lives Matter, she had this art project called the Black Thought Project. If you walked into the Oakland Museum, you would see this maybe 10-foot-by-30-foot wall — huge wall — and it said something like: This wall is for Black thought. Black thought is sacred. And then it was like: What are your dreams?

They had multicultural trained facilitators — non-Black, nonwhite, if I remember correctly. And if there was a white person who went to reach for a chalk and went to write on the wall, they would, with care, interrupt them and say: Do you see that this wall is for Black people?

And often, the person would kind of recoil and be like: Oh, sorry. What am I supposed to do here? So you don’t want me here?

And then the facilitator would say: No, no, no. You have an incredibly important role. Your role — and it was also written there — is to use your power to witness and to honor and to protect.

The person might respond: Oh, you mean I’m of use here?

Again, you may be listening and be really triggered by this project. But it’s one project, it’s one experiment, it’s one person who has seen in her own life how you help white people readjust when they’re not the only ones in the room — when maybe, for a moment, another community, for whatever reason, is centered.

Part of why this project is so radical is you’re literally retraining and holding that moment of rejection. They’re slowing down that moment of: Well, what am I supposed to do here? They’re slowing down their roll, and they’re giving them practice with a slightly different stance.

I’m biracial. I’m half-white. I was actually also raised by a white biological family because of the strange configuration of my family — my father is white, and he remarried a white person. So in a lot of ways, I was raised both Indian and then white, every two weeks. So I have deep empathy for being a white person.

And I think projects like Alicia’s are interesting because they allow us to just turn the heat down a bit — turn the volume down a little bit — not putting it on social media for everyone to judge but literally to practice like lambs learning new steps.

It is a radical thing to try being part of a multiracial democracy. My husband, Anand Giridharadas, always says this: No country in the history of the world has tried it. And he often says: We are falling on our faces because we are trying to leap so high.

It’s Alicia’s specific and disputable purpose as a gathering. If you don’t want to go to it, don’t go to it. But I think the interstitching and the ability to practice these new roles when you have lost some amount of power is a deeply important way to actually integrate and still feel like we all belong here.

One of my worries in this post-2020 period that we’re in has been the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. The tendency for people to say: Well, the lesson of losing politically is to not try. It turns out that maybe talking about systemic racism isn’t good for winning elections. So don’t talk about it. Or, even, begin to persuade yourself it isn’t there — which is, I think, factually wrong.

At the same time, when you’re in a conflictual, multiracial democracy, you have to find ways, at least within the construct of political gatherings, to bring people in and to make people who have very deep disagreements and differences with each other feel welcome.

You were involved with the gathering side of the Zohran Mamdani campaign. And the Zohran Mamdani campaign, it’s vibes all the way through ——

It is vibes all the way through.

But from him and his sort of omnipresent smile — your husband wrote a beautiful Substack piece about the rhetoric of his smile — all the way down to the ways people gathered together, which I understand you advise him on — tell me about the thinking behind that. Because it’s about a successful social movement with actual in-person socializing.

Yes, absolutely. If Donald Trump is a great host and a great gatherer, Zohran Mamdani is a great gatherer.

I was at the right place at the right time. Fourteen months ago — I have permission to share this publicly — I got an email from Katie Riley, Mamdani’s deputy campaign manager, saying: Hey, I took your Art of Gathering digital class. I’ve read “The Art of Gathering” multiple times. Could you come? I want to infuse joy and meaning into politics, and we want to do what we believe in, which is be and love and be part of New York City — not New York City politics.

I would argue New Yorkers didn’t vote for Zohran Mamdani because they all became social democrats overnight. They voted for Zohran Mamdani because he was throwing a party they wanted to attend. He was throwing a party over and over and over again, whether it was a thousand-person scavenger hunt across the city or his early day house parties.

He hosts — and his team and the campaign gather — in a way that has two things, which I know you believe also create a great vibe at a party: great vibes and serious policy ideas. [Laughs.] Every single time ——

That is absolutely not what I think creates a great vibe in a party. I want to defend myself from this slander.

[Klein and Parker laugh.]

You’ve been to one of my parties. I don’t make everyone talk about policy.

But serious ideas — you’re seriously arguing about stuff. I have been to your parties — the vibes are awesome. And people are arguing about high and low.

Zohran Mamdani — they hosted a shredding party. They went around in trucks, and people would come together and bring all of the paper that they had in their home to shred.

Katie Riley was in charge of a lot of these different gatherings. I actually interviewed her on my Group Life Substack, and she said: People kept asking me, Why are you doing this? And she was like: Because it’s fun.

At those shredding parties, there would be a D.J., there’d be a dance party. People would also then, interestingly, get rid of this weight.

Why shredding?

Well, Zohran loves it, apparently. Again, I’m telling you: Host the gathering you want to attend. He loves shredding. It’s such a relief.

He enjoys the feeling of shredding paper.

Yes. It’s such a relief. In New York City, who has a shredder? So you go around and have these shredding parties. But by the way, while you’re having all this fun, you’re also like: Oh, government can help me? Government can provide services?

From the very beginning, they threw this party. They did a scavenger hunt where they announced it on Instagram. So many people, they ran out of supplies. The scavenger hunt was: They got hints, and all of the hints were based on past mayors. Like: Even though we don’t agree with this former mayor, we really loved what they said about public transit. Oh, the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building! And New Yorkers were running around taking public transport.

So every single party, every single gathering, you want to be there, you want to be part of it. And every single rally, they deeply knew what they were for, they knew what they were trying to transform. The merch is amazing. But it’s not a trick. It is serious vibes and serious policy.

At some level, again, New Yorkers didn’t all of a sudden, overnight, become social democrats. You said earlier that you have to like Trump to be at one of his rallies. Actually, if you look at some of those exit interviews, people are like: I can’t really believe I’m here. I don’t really agree with all this — but it feels good.

Anand Giridharadas wrote this in “The Persuaders”: These gatherings can create a sense of home, of belonging.

I have been to probably more political rallies than your average person. I have been to some that you leave feeling a sense of communion, a sense of almost spiritual unity with the other people who are in that mass of human beings who become one body with you.

And I’ve been to many that you leave feeling like: What was that exactly?

And it gets me to a question I had while reading the book. People always say — and I feel — that there is nowhere you can be lonelier than inside of a crowd. So what is the opposite of a gathering if it is not simply being alone? What is the opposite of a gathering that nevertheless has a lot of people in a room?

I don’t assume gatherings are all good. You can have a terrible gathering — that leads to exclusion, that leads to people feeling deeply alone.

I think of a gathering as anytime three or more people are coming together for a purpose, for a reason, for an intent with a beginning, middle and end. You can feel deeply lonely at a gathering, and you can also feel deeply content at a gathering.

So I might frame it slightly differently. I would just say I think there’s a healthy relationship to the antidote to being together with other people, which is also being contentedly alone. And I spend a lot of time alone. I refuel alone.

Actually, one of the interesting things about “The Art of Gathering,” when I was interviewing all these people, was how many people identified as introverts — how many of the hosts who other people credited with creating these transformative gatherings identified as people who are often, in their language, loners, slightly on the outside of things, don’t really like people.

I asked one of them: So many of the people I’m interviewing identify as introverts. Why do you think this is?

And she said: I am so uncomfortable at most of the gatherings I go to, I finally decided to host a gathering that I would be comfortable at, that I like. And other people seem to like it, too.

I also identify increasingly now as an introvert, and the thing I particularly dislike is small talk and unstructured conversation — not because I don’t think people should do it or it’s boring, but I actually find it unclear and stressful.

I actually have found that a lot of podcast hosts identify that way, because podcasting creates structured conversation.

One hundred percent.

Like somebody walks in the door, and you’ll be like: What do you think about death?

[Klein and Parker laugh.]

And it’s a relief. You have a context for them, you’ve prepared for them. And I do think there’s some dimension of that in gathering, too.

Hugely. I mean, podcasts are rituals. I walked into this studio. There’s a red mug here that I can pick up and hold. You entered. We are both wearing the equivalent of not real clothes — in our cases, we’re both wearing matching headphones. There are norms. I was primed and briefed ahead of time, but not too much. This is a virtual, distributed, asynchronous gathering.

So absolutely, it’s a ritual in which you feel very comfortable using your power. I would harness some of that, and I would take that same resonance and permission and apply it to your Shabbat dinner.

I want to end on something that maybe relates to Shabbat dinner, but also to something that you had talked about earlier, which is the way older societies thought about treating strangers, thought about hosting, but specifically thought about hospitality.

This has been on my mind. I did a show a year or two ago with Marilynne Robinson, the amazing writer. She had written a book about the Book of Genesis. And in preparing for that conversation, I was rereading Genesis, and I was so struck by how central hospitality was to the Bible. So much else that you see in the Old Testament and the New Testament — we talk about kindness and compassion. But the idea of welcoming in the stranger, of feeding them, of washing their feet, of clothing them — it is constant. And we don’t talk about it now, actually, that often.

Then I was doing reporting work in Israel and Palestine, and I was so struck by the people who said they would not talk to me without trying to feed me — from the absolute poorest people, who had almost everything taken from them, all the way up to the wealthiest people.

And it’s very different than doing reporting here. Hospitality is working in a different way in both of those cultures.

I’m curious how you think about hospitality as a virtue. I mean, you go into our old books, in Judeo- Christianity, at least, and it is all over — what you’re commanded to do. What is hospitality to you?

Hospitality is treating others as you would be treated. Hospitality is loving on the stranger. Hospitality is opening your heart and your home to somebody who might be in need.

And again, as I said earlier, gathering is about connection, but it’s also about power — hospitality is also about defanging the enemy. Hospitality is also a structure to assess and to defang a threat. Hospitality is the ability to first be humans together.

Also, when you gather, when you bring people together, it’s not always great. It’s not even just always friction — all groups, to become groups, have to fight. They have to fight. No group is without conflict.

This is the first time I’m allowed to talk about this publicly: I’ve spent the last five years looking at what happens when people come together and when they fall apart, so I’m writing a book called “The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict.”

Because so much of what hospitality does and what the gathering does is like water on a garden: It allows us to grow the muscles so that when we do have difference, when we do have conflict, when we do have to think about whose land this is, we have pre-existing ties in which we’ve drunk the same water and we’ve broken the same bread, and we think: Yes, we have these different identities, and yes, we need to sort this out, but we are also proverbially standing on the ground, holding hands first and saying: We, too, are here.

What if somebody’s intention is not just to host people like them and their friends, but actually to move beyond themselves and their circles — to be in difference, not in sameness?

As somebody who thinks a lot about community, what options of that sort are open to people?

So many. First, it depends on where you live, but think about what preexisting communities there are in which there are shared interests or shared activities that you could join where there are a lot of different people interested in that.

Mahjong is apparently all the rage. And yes, there may be some Brooklyn hipsters playing Mahjong, but also Chinese grandmothers and elders are all playing it. Where and how and whether you go to trivia night and meet people whom you would never otherwise meet outside of your social circles, outside of your age group — I think we are deeply, deeply bifurcated across age.

We assume that to be friends, we need to have the same life experiences at the same moment. Also — my husband says this — why would all of the advice I get be from other mothers who have given birth in April 2015, versus looking up and looking down and having different generational cohorts?

So first, think about what your shared interests are. Second, if you want to intentionally do this, think about one person in your life or at work who, for whatever reason, might also either be interested in this or be different from you in one vector, and — again, like the Shabbat dinner — start to think with care about where and how we might want to bring people together.

My last piece of advice is: I would not talk about your differences. Pause. Sometimes what a community needs is to actually talk less. Sometimes what a community needs is a soccer game. They need to stop talking, they need to play together, they need to have a dance party, they need to have a kickball team. Be humble about what form it might take.

If you feel this need, and it’s a very important need right now — Americans have fallen out of love with each other — find someone else, ideally who might hold a different identity than you, start building trust and a relationship there, and then start asking the question: What would really bring us joy? And what would others want to do with us?

Or find a local shared project in your community that everyone can agree on, and start organizing around cleaning up the park or building a waterway.

I once heard David Brooks say at a conference: No question worthy of pursuit is answerable in a lifetime. And I think gathering and group life is a question worthy of pursuit that’s not answerable in a lifetime. We are gathering all the time: in our classrooms, in dinner parties, in our rallies. These are human beings who are dynamic and not always going to like what it is, and this is so fascinating.

So part of that is: It’s OK. Look, learn. We’re alive! We’re trying to figure this out. We’re bumbling through this together. How interesting!

Then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

We actually went over a couple of them. I was going to say “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny” by Kiran Desai. But I’ll take the opportunity to talk about “The Politics of Ritual” by Molly Farneth. It is a book that came out a few years ago, I think from Princeton University Press.

We think about ritual as a way to keep solidifying older values, and she looks at ritual and says that ritual is a tool, and looks at all of the different ways where rituals can also be used to change communities. I love that book. I think it’s a beautiful book that actually looks at ritual and its relationship to power.

My second book was going to be Danya Ruttenberg’s “On Repentance and Repair.” It’s a beautiful, careful book in which she basically lays out these five steps of repair from this 12th-century philosopher, but she demystifies them and looks at what this looks like interpersonally, what it looks like between organizations and within organizations and what it looks like at the state level. What does it actually look like structurally to repair? It’s a beautiful book.

And then I would recommend “BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity” by Ruth Whippman. I’m a parent of a boy and a girl. Whippman is a journalist. She was raised by — she says this in the book — a feminist mother, second-wave generation, who put her in gender-neutral clothing, and she wasn’t allowed to have Barbies at home. Then she got married and had three boys, and the mental models and the structural framework of how she was parented were simply not working for what she was doing.

So she went out and looked at: What are our mental models? And as the feminist revolution expanded what women can be — not just in the home, not just connection, vulnerability but power and being out in the world — it didn’t have an answer for men to also be able to equally expand.

And if that’s the shot, I would have a chaser with the book “Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men” by Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder.

This is a brilliant book that is literally: These are the conversations to actually talk to your boys. This is how to have the conversation, whether it’s porn, whether it’s sports, whether it’s bullying, whether it’s power, whether it’s dating. It’s a brilliant and beautiful book. I would actually pair both of them together.

The reason I love both of these books is because these are ways to help deeply think about how to equip all people with group-help tools, with the tools of connection, across parenting and children and across helping boys and young men have thick and connected relational lives.

Priya Parker, thank you for gathering with me.

Thank you for hosting me.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez and Marlaine Glicksman.

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