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Discursive Dinners

Discursive Dinners brings a changing group of interdisciplinary thinkers from across New York City around one table and one theme. Each intimate, Jeffersonian-style dinner is a single shared conversation: the food gives us a way into the subject, and what we say changes how we taste what’s in front of us.

I grew frustrated with extraordinary dinner conversations that disappeared by morning. So I built a tool that listens throughout the meal and turns its insights, unanswered questions and open threads into a conversational menu, mirroring the one we’ve just eaten. At the end, a hidden voice command sets a receipt printer going. Each guest leaves with a small record of the night, the people and the ideas—without attributing anyone’s remarks. Something to pick up again the next day.

Our first dinner, Luck, drew on traditions including Chinese New Year dumplings, Hoppin’ John and collards, and apples and honey. A chance encounter in Myanmar became an invitation into a stranger’s village; other stories turned on the opportunities we notice and the coincidences we remember. We kept returning to a possibility: perhaps luck is partly a practice of staying open, and partly the story we tell afterward.

The second, Power, was co-hosted with the Soros Family Office. We began with where each of us first learned what power meant, looking for a shared vocabulary for the structures we often live inside without seeing. Over shrimp toast, duck and mushroom budino, we pulled apart force, authority and influence. One distinction stayed with me: having a title is different from being listened to—and choosing not to speak can be its own kind of power.