How our weekly dinners are going
An update on the New Years resolution
First: Some unapologetic book stuff:
When We’re in Charge was one of the top 100 best-selling books on Bookshop.org so far this year! Get it now and support indie bookstores.
Another option: Pick up your copy of the book PLUS a very cool tote bag (with the title of chapter 8 on it!!) from the Crooked Media store.
If you’re thinking about reading this book with your book club, I’ve put together a handy-dandy discussion guide. I’m also happy to Zoom in to any book club gathering -- just reply to this email and let me know, or email me at hello@amandalitman.com.
Finally, seeing Ilana Glazer recommend my book on Instagram this week had me all up in my feelings. They wrote:
I am clutching Amanda Litman’s book “When We’re In Charge,” about Gen Z & Millennials running for government and winning, which she continues to aid with her org Run for Something. She is clear-eyed and hopeful about our future, and she’s the leader I’ve needed for 9 years and will continue to turn to. Her press tour for this book has been filled with answers. Amanda communicates clearly about the systems she, herself, has mapped out and how we can plug into them. This is a practical manual for Gen Z & Millenials to take on positions of power. Quells my anxiety in this time where I need it bad.
Get the book wherever you get yours!
Okay! Now onto the good stuff…
A mid-ish year check in on on our 2025 resolution…
Many of you found me via one of my first posts on this re-launched Substack back in January:
The TLDR, in case you never read that:
My husband set a New Years resolution to host dinner at our home every single Saturday we’re in town this year. We did this for two big reasons:
To fill the time on Saturday afternoons — we are very bad at “just hanging around the house” with the kids.
To expand and solidify our community.
So far, so good!
Breaking down the logistics
We’ve kept to the spirit (and very close to the letter) of the resolution every weekend this year.
Our only slight variations were one Saturday when we went to someone else’s house (and this weekend we’ll be doing the same for a family BBQ) and one weekend we hosted a second night of Passover seder on Sunday, as appropriate for the holiday.
Otherwise, based on the spreadsheet my husband dutifully keeps, and with only a few repeats in there, we’ve had 84 adults and 47 kids over to our home so far this year, and we’re currently booked thru mid-August to keep hosting.
He’s also kept track of the menus, for those looking for inspiration. (My personal faves have included the chicken shwarma and the gochujang caramel cookies that are unbelievably good.)
I absolutely agree with Katherine Goldstein’s “8 Ways to Embrace ‘Deep Casual Hosting’ advice and don’t have much more to add — the secret really is to just set the bar low!
We aim for hygienic but not perfect on cleanliness. We’ve eaten at our kitchen table when it’s just two other adults, on our couch/living room floor when it’s more, or now that the weather’s nice, out on our deck.
Given our social circle, most of the kids who come over are still very little (think: toddlers or pre-schoolers) so my husband preps kid plates with lots of fruit, crackers, cheese, bread, and whatever else might be appropriate in case they don’t like whatever we’re serving. When they’re done munching, we’ve put a movie in (as long as the parents are okay with it) and let them hang out or play. (And to answer a question I got a lot in the comments — dinner starts at 5:00 pm!)
We ask people to BYOB, or if they’re insistent on more than that, we ask them to bring some type of cheese/cracker situation to snack on before we eat. Otherwise, we cover it all.
There have been a few logistics hiccups — some last minute cancellations that left us scrambling to find people to keep our streak going had us panicked a few times, but the thing about the resolution (and being lightly crazy people) is that in our panic, we ended up extending invites to people we might not have otherwise reached out to, and sometimes, they said yes!
Six months in to hosting weekly dinners, our community is both broader and deeper
Both objectively and subjectively, we have stronger relationships — and way more of them — than we did when we started this effort.
The practice of having people over for dinner has accomplished the thing that otherwise feels impossible: Turned acquaintances into friends.
For the first time in my adult life (or at least since COVID), I feel like I’ve brought new people into my life in a way totally disconnected from work.
People asked in the comments of my initial post what we’d do when folks invite us over on Saturdays — we decided that as long as the spirit of the resolution was maintained (regular adult socializing!), we were fine if dinner was at someone else’s house, and as noted, we have! But to be honest, we’ve been surprised how rarely an invite is reciprocated.
I don’t judge anyone for this!
As Katherine writes in her post:
8. Don’t Immediately Expect an Invitation Back. If you enjoyed having someone over and they haven’t invited you back, don’t let that stop you from reaching out again. The point of hosting is relationship building and creating a social ecosystem around you that fulfills connections, not filling out a scorecard. (I’ve actually had to work on this myself!) Also, it’s a long game. People have different levels of comfort hosting, but if you start to host casual, low-key dinners often, I think there’s a strong chance you’ll get invitations or other forms of reciprocity. There may be people who will never invite you to their house for dinner, but they might bring over takeout pizza to your place for you all to enjoy, or they might be fantastic listeners, happily pet-sit for you for free, or always remind you about teacher work days.
I, like Katherine, have had to remind myself: Some people are inviters, some people are invitees. There is no moral valence here.
One thing that has become clear as we host people regularly, and as I suspected last year when folks would flake or be tough to pin down: It’s never about us.
Few people have the vibrant social lives we imagine they’re having when they seem busy. Literally: The data backs this up. From
’s post on the death of partying:
Most of the time, people are thrilled to be invited over. As you’d expect, most people are lonely! Life is just a lot for basically everyone — kids or familial obligations, work, travel, sickness, the news, impending fascism, etc.
It’s easy for friendship-maintenance to fall by the wayside if you don’t actively prioritize them (or make it a goal you feel obsessive about hitting). Hosting can feel hard, leaving the apartment (especially with kids) can feel hard, putting out feelers and inviting people to things only to get rejected can feel hard.
But as the bar for hosting has gone down, I’ve found my tolerance for rejection or flakiness has gone up. The resolution has given me a baked-in excuse; I just text out invites a la “Hi! My husband made a new years resolution to have people over for dinner every Saturday — help keep our streak alive? Come over on X, Y, or Z day?”
No single invite holds the entire weight of social fulfillment. There will always be another weekend; there will always be another dinner.
A final bonus: While this year has been very chaotic for me personally (busy stuff at work! a new book! two kids under three!) for the first year in a while, I haven’t once been lonely.
I’m not an extrovert (even as I must force myself to be one for work) but as it turns out, when all my not-work time is spent with two little kids, I do genuinely crave adult interaction IRL.
It has been a godsend for my mental health that every week, rain or shine, there have been 2-ish hours (or more!! we love when people stay longer!!) of talking to grown-ups in person. Beyond that, while my phone addiction has gotten out of control this year — a topic for another post, perhaps — at the very least, I’m pretty good at not looking at it when we have people over.
It’s soothing how consistent the emotional beats of the weekend are:
Every Saturday around 2:00 p.m., as the kids are finally napping, my husband is stressed about cooking everything in time, and I’m sweeping dog food off the floor for the umpteenth time, we have basically the same conversation:
Should we just cancel? Should this be the last one? Should we call it? Is this stupid?
And then every Saturday night after our guests leave and the kids are in bed, even with a counter full of dirty dishes and a lightly messy home to straighten up, we say to ourselves:
That was so lovely. What a nice night. Let’s do it again next week.
Some book recs:
Let’s Make a Scene by Laura Wood - After getting caught up in scandal, Cynthie the movie star must reconnect with her arch-nemesis Jack for a sequel to the movie they worked on/hated each other on/fake dated for PR on 13 years ago — now they have to fake date again. The conceit sounds silly but let me tell you: I smiled through basically this entire book. What a charming read.
Park Avenue by Renée Ahdieh - Jia Song is a junior partner at a law firm trying to climb to the top when she gets assigned to work on a Korean billionaire family’s scandal. She ends up with exactly one month to work thru the shenanigans of the complicated siblings, messy parents, big wealth problems, and Korean immigrant dynamics. There’s an interesting structure at play here that I didn’t fully love until the end when there was a deeply satisfying conclusion.
Other recommended reading:
Why success is quieter for younger Americans [WSJ]
From girl boss to no boss — a whole article glamorizing how women are stepping back from work (kind of! they’re just stepping back from institutions and making their own workplaces because institutions no longer serve them!!) that tbh I am still processing and have so many thoughts on that I may come back to this next week. [NYT]
Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon’s conversation about gen Z and in particular, the blurred distinctions between the attention economy and the IRL economy [The NYT]
I loved this piece by Rainesford Stauffer on how ballerinas are fighting for their rights as people (and as workers) to have paid time off for maternity leave, post partum recovery, and the challenges of being a working mom dancer. I’m trying to imagine doing leaps (or hell, being eager to put on a leotard again) 3 months post-partum and I think I’d rather be buried alive. [Elle magazine]
One last thing: You may notice I turned on paid subscriptions for this Substack. I don’t plan on putting anything behind a paywall anytime soon, there probably won’t be special perks. But since I had gotten a few people asking how they could support me (besides making donations to the organization I run!! or buying a copy of my book!!!), I figured YOLO, why not?
Read this, loved it and then zoomed in on the spreadsheet because I love seeing people’s menus and was so touched to see that your husband prepared so many of my recipes (and love many of the others mentioned!!). Thanks for making my day!!
I read your original post, and it hung out in my head for a few weeks before I understood that I was being inspired. So I copied you! We modified to every other Saturday, and serve spaghetti every time (to keep cooking simple, and because it’s easy to accommodate dietary preferences). Spaghetti Saturday! We’ve been going strong since April, and it’s just the best. Some of our friend’s kids now call us “the spaghetti house”. We’re slowly adding more acquaintances to the invite list. Thank you for the idea and the inspiration. And if you’re ever in Sacramento on the second or fourth Saturday of the month c’mon over!