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7,657 dinners.* Don’t mind the smoke!

That’s how many plates of chow I’ve cooked (with love!) for salon guests since 2015. I went back through a decade of guest lists and counted: over 140 salons, about 4,900 people. (Not counting everyone's plus-ones. Not counting the post-work hangs or the scores of dinner parties. And NOT counting the 20 years of gatherings before 2015.) !!!

Some salons were underwritten, and I’m grateful to every partner who backed one over the years. More often than not, I underwrite them myself. It’s not my pay-my-rent work, but it adds so much to my life, and hopefully to a few thousand others’ too. Music by @starya and some pics by @christopher_patrick_ernst

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Susan @mactavishbest on the art of gathering, and why real rooms matter more than ever.

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The company one chooses to keep, the community one builds around oneself and one’s business, that’s uniquely on us individually. 🕯️What differentiates each of us is the interwoven community of people in real life that we have cultivated and curated around ourselves. For all its technical brilliance, AI cannot replace the time-intensive effort of creating an intricate tapestry of people you trust, admire and enjoy around yourself. check out @thesalonhost to learn how to host your own salon! and read @mactavishbest ‘s manifesto on creating and curating your community.

Link in bio to @thesalonhost
📸 @christopher_patrick_ernst

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A pile of old & new friends gathered @posthocsalons recently in soho on a hot and steamy NYC evening. Summer suddenly felt close! @thebryaneng took a night off from his residency @bemelmansbar at the Carlyle to perform. I threw out some questions to @tracy.alloway , cohost of ODD LOTS @bloomberg & James Van Geelen, CEO, CITRINI RESEARCH. We could have chattered for hours bouncing around from the inevitable AI convo to geopolitics and the state of the economy but ultimately no matter how riveting the convo I find hosting a salon is as much about giving the guests lots of time to catch up w each other as it is diving into a topic - a micro festival, a rave for the intellect. 📸 @christopher_patrick_ernst

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NYC! The Wednesday bump is real. Thanks for coming to dance under the glitter ball @joyfacenyc X @posthocsalons .. Not just intelligent conversation, a rave for the intellect.
Photos @christopher_patrick_ernst

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2026, hullo! 📚🧐
🕯️How to Host a Book Salon🕯️
article up @thesalonhost
Photo #1 by @thesupermaniak

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🖋️ @meenalexander ✒️
🕯️wow! thank you for including me - @dualipa ‘s newsletter @service95 - The Ultimate Hosting Guide.. how to ace hosting no matter the size of your gathering. Tips from “the coolest, most creative minds sharing their go-to hosting tricks…” - head over to @thesalonhost for a whole resource of original content @posthocsalons created for the budding to the experienced hosts out there, YOU 😘

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🎄🍾HOLIDAY PARTY RECIPES FOR A CROWD OF 20 or so🎄 over a dozen recipes that I wrote or passed down through the women in my family and tested over and over again to perfection by the very patient @margotrue & her prior food team @sunsetmag back in pre covid times. Margo would stand by me hovering making sure to catch every little thing I did to a dish. Batches of cocktails (3 kinds), appetizers and huge roasts for hungry revellers. And cookies that have stood the test of time, recipes from the mid 1800s so easy. Enjoy! Don’t forget, perfection is over rated, gathering friends is about the friends part. 😀 The link in bio.

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Some moments from a recent @posthocsalons - Inside North Korea in the Digital Age of Conflict with journalist @newsjean .. music from @thisisqueenesther. We’ll share a conversation with Jean here shortly. Photos by @christopher_patrick_ernst

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📸 @michelnafziger
🚨NEW PODCAST - live set 🎧 @elkschoolofmanners
#trance #melodictechno #house (mix!!)
Music, running and cycling in deep nature are lifelong relationships … ups and downs, sometimes one’s head is more in it than other times, but the commitment is forever and reassuring.
Link in bio to 🎶
Sweater & top by Glaswegian/French label @studio_lafetiche
Location, 🙏 @mollygochman
@greymodelagency

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Well! No big surprise, skepticism creeps up with age, ya old crank. 🦀 (full article I wrote at www.thesalonhost.com) Context: a couple of weeks ago @thesalonhost & @posthocsalons ran a few polls w/ Ipsos of 5000 people nationwide specifically around hosting habits. Cheery stuff! 🕯️For fun, I threw in one additional poll on 👀CEO TRUSTWORTHINESS👀 putting IRL gatherings up against media and advertising. (Where do you trust a CEO more? In an interview in the media? In an ad? IRL event?)of course I expected IRL to lead … but the 🤯SHOCKING SURPRISE TO ME WAS HOW ADVERTISING AND TRAD JOURNALISM 😱fared equally within 1% overall. Wot.
🆗Both ads and media profiles are one-way conversations. A live, unscripted event is a give-and-take experience and there is an opportunity for the audience to question a CEO in real time as well as note body language and get a sense of the personality of the individual. Recording these conversations brings the intimate feeling from the interview to the masses. Hullo, Call Your Daddy. We see how popular those sorts of intimate convos are. Kamala is aware.
🆗Events are the shiny currency of-the-moment in media that sponsors are super keen on. (Over advertising in, say, print). As a member of the audience, one expects the live-ness of an event to be inoculated from deepfakes and synthetic media. Like by being there, you believe more. No wool pulled over your eyes k.
‼️According to Gallop (October 2025), US media trust is at a record low of 28%, and now it appears that audiences judge ads and articles similarly. That makes sense, it’s frequently hard to tell what is original media, what is AI slop, and what is original media that is also sponsored content? And who’s caring anyway?
🤵‍♀️Women are less trusting of CEOs across the board.
In 2024, 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs were men. ‼️What we may be seeing in the data here is less about how CEOs communicate and more about who the respondents picture when they read the word CEO.
And the rest of the article I wrote w/ thoughts is up @thesalonhost website, our little editorial site from @posthocsalons . Methodology of the poll there too.
Shout out to @dgelles and an old book of his 📸

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PODCAST LIVE - The Geopolitics of Rare Earths & the Shadow War for Global Tech Supremacy w/ music from Posthoc artist @thisisqueenesther & @firaszreik . What are the economic, national security and geopolitical ramifications of China’s rare earth monopoly? Listen to @mactavishbest ‘s interview with Jim Kennedy. (Podcast: POSTHOC Salons LIVE w/ Susan MacTavish Best - Intimate Conversations on Topics of the Zeitgeist .. link in bio.)

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