Last week I wrote about starting Zen’tinis, a conversational salon. Maybe, like me, you’ve been to enough cocktail parties, networking events, and informal hangouts and you long for the substance of real stimulation.  “This is Hanging Out 2.0. It’s the art of using inspiration to do the shaking and stirring.” You wish you could have it in an environment where…

A few years ago, something struck me: our culture simply doesn’t offer many situations that are designed to support us in authentic dialogue. Most of the time, adults interact in ways that are either accidental or transactional. Cocktail parties are about transaction according to attractiveness; business-networking events are all about the elevator pitch. We rarely walk into those kinds of…