The Art of Gathering

Why I'm Trying to Bring Old-School Gathering Back

I’ve thrown a party where guests came dressed in theme - pearls and pineapples. I’ve hosted an evening YMCA'ing around the fall of a dictator. I've made twenty-plus masks of the birthday girl for guests to wear, so she'd walk in to a room full of her own facial reactions. I've gathered friends at my place before folding them into our family's tradition on Hippie Hill in San Francisco. I’ve hidden hand-painted Easter eggs and watched two dozen adults hunt for them with complete, unironic delight.

And every single time — every time (even though it's so much work) — I remember why I do it.

There’s a kind of magic that only happens when you bring different parts of your life into the same room. The friends you've met this year who have never met the friends you've had since you were three. The colleague who doesn’t know the neighbor. The person you met traveling sitting next to the person you’ve known since college. For one evening, all the separate chapters of you coexist. And sometimes — the best times — those people find each other separately afterward. They build their own thing. You just created the conditions.

I used to co-host these gatherings with my friend Mariya, and we had a rule: no small talk. Every party had a question. If you could replace money with another currency, what would you calibrate it to? Or: What is the actual value of art? Not ice-breakers. Real questions. The kind that make people forget what time it is.

I grew up in a culture where the house was always open. In Iran, there’s no such thing as a closed door — hospitality isn’t an event, it’s a baseline. A party isn’t a production. It’s just an extension of how you live. And that’s the energy I try to bring to hosting: an abundance of love, no judgement (ever), just wonder in each other.

Where Have All The Random Sparks Gone

Because here’s what I believe: people need to be around other people. Not virtually. Not asynchronously. Actually present, breathing the same air, sharing the same food, bumping into each other in the kitchen, looking for a fork while the other person finds the tea. There’s a reason we still go to restaurants even when cooking at home is cheaper — we want to be near strangers. And I particularly enjoy when people are very different from each other. That's where our boundaries break. We want to feel the ambient warmth of community, even with people we’ll never know. We learn from one another in the ways we carry ourselves and how we do culture.

A house party, done well, is just that feeling — concentrated and intentional.

Yes, it’s stressful to create the space. Every party takes work: the logistics, the food, the music, the energy, the question. But I’ve never once thrown a party and thought: that wasn’t worth it. Each one has its own life, its own synergy, its own unexpected moment, its own particular delight.

That’s the art of gathering. And I think we need it more than ever.