Brigid: Should you put hot gossip in a text message, split the bill evenly at a group dinner out. We're going to have a modern-day etiquette conversation. Stay with us.

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It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian who's off today. We live in confusing times. Blame the pandemic or digitally interconnected world but it can be hard to figure out what the rules for social interactions are these days. Thankfully, New York Magazine has just put out an etiquette guide that covers a wide range of common awkward situations, from how to properly split the bill when you're out with your friends to the new rules on tipping to how to discuss your kids with non-parents. New York Magazine's new guide has you covered, and my guest is New York magazine editor Choire Sicha, who worked on the guide. Welcome back to WNYC Choire.

Choire: Hi, what a great show today. Thanks so much for having me.

Brigid: Oh, thank you for joining us and listeners, we also want to hear from you. What are some of the awkward, challenging, and maybe just ambiguous social situations you've had to navigate in the past? Do you have an etiquette question about these situations for our guest? Anything on dating, tipping, texting, parenting? Do you have any modern-day etiquette tips you'd like to share or ask about? Give us a call, 212433-WNYC or 2124339692. You can also tweet at Brian Lehrer and let us know. Choire, this etiquette guide has a lot of different sections that cover, as I said, those ambiguous situations with friends while dating, while making plans with people, tipping, working, parenting, and even guidelines on social media posting. Why did you feel like modern life needed this new etiquette guide?

Choire: Sure. Well, I think we've all been through a lot the last three or last 30 years here in New York City. [laughs]. We just felt really rusty. A lot of us have talked about how conflict is up in the subways. A lot of us are engaged in different relationships with our bosses in our workplaces. There's a lot more conflict in our lives and the terms are really different. New York City's changed a lot. We thought this was a great moment to-- Well, the great news is we have a nice smart staff of people. We locked all of them basically in a room one by one and grilled them about what was most stressful for them, and then also what their best rules were for getting along with other people.

Brigid: [laughs] Well, let's get into some of those rules. Let's talk about tipping. Tipping post-pandemic is one of the most controversial topics in terms of social rules. There's a whole section on tipping etiquette and how much to tip when at a restaurant or getting a delivery or picking up takeout. The guide says that the standard for tipping should now be between 20% to 25% at a restaurant. Why is that the case now?

Choire: Sure. Well, we all know that COVID was devastating to this industry and we also live in America. This is very confusing to people who aren't Americans but the fact is, the customers kept a significant percentage of the income that servers and other people who work in hospitality make. It's on us and we know that cappuccinos are already $6 in New York City, and it feels wild to pay more. The fact is these are people's livelihoods. When we talk about people leaving New York City as we just did with Troy, then we're talking about helping people stay here and being able to live here as people who have those jobs. Tipping starts at 20%. You should tip more. If you've got the money, you should tip 25% to 30%. Some people are going to flip out over this and they can get over it.

Brigid: [laughs] Well, let's talk about some more of the new rules that are making the rounds in social media since the guide was published just yesterday. I want to start with number seven in the friends and lovers section. Never send an edible arrangement. Tell us more about that.

Choire: This one turned out to be surprisingly controversial [chuckles]. There is a lot of people who love edible arrangements. I might feel a little bad about this one.

Brigid: Oh, really.

Choire: You know what, the point of this is to send gifts. What we really want to say here is, do you send something, someone lovely. Send someone a piece of food. If someone has a death in the family, be that person who shows up with something that people can eat and pop in the freezer. We're pro gifting very strongly and if you are attached to edible arrangements, so be it.

Brigid: [laughs]. Well, how about-- This one through me. That's number 22 in the going out and staying in section. "If you put out bowls of cigarettes at a party, you have to let people smoke inside. They're not just decorations." Now, I want you to talk about that and forgive me because I've never been to a party where there is a bowl of cigarettes sitting out.

Choire: Listen, you and I are going to different parties, and that's the joy of New York City is that we're all doing different things. Some of us are going to bed while others are getting up. We talked to our nightlife people and we talked to some of the younger people on staff and this is apparently a thing. What was hilarious was that Brock Collier and Sean McCree, who are often out seeing things socially, they said they were going to parties and there were nice bowls of cigarettes at them, very Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen wedding style, and yet they had to go outside to smoke. That just seems like such a mixed message as a host. Being a host is about not confusing your guests, and that mixed message just makes a mess for everybody.

Brigid: Well, Choire, not surprisingly there are a lot of people who have questions, comments, thoughts about this topic for you and we're going to kick it off with Zenut in Brooklyn. Welcome to WNYC, Zenut.

Zenut: Hi there.

Brigid: [chuckles]. Hi.

Zenut: Hi. Thanks for having me. I own a small business called Playground Coffee Shop in Brooklyn. We survived the pandemic. Definitely still thriving through the now recession that we're in. My question was, what is the etiquette behind asking your friends to pay full price when you're a small business owner?

Brigid: Good question.

Choire: That's an incredible question.

Brigid: I'm not sure it's in the guide but on the fly etiquette.

Choire: It is shocking to me that friends are expecting discounts from friends when you own a small business. They should be paying you twice as much and you should feel free to tell that to them.

Zenut: The struggle is when you have intentions to make sure things are accessible, we don't want to make people feel like they are neglected with the price. I think that's where sometimes the guilt comes from but at the same time, depending on what the business is, we still have to show up for each other and be able to support them even outside of just money. I think the branding of it all, giving my friend a t-shirt would be cool because then when they're at this club or a restaurant super recognizable and that is free marketing for you. At the same time, do we still hope and wish that our friends are going to pay the $40 for the T-shirt versus the $25? Who knows.

Choire: Wow. That's such a great question. I love this one. That's a toughie. I know a lot of places do scholarships for friends. You know what I mean? There's sliding scale stuff and a lot of people, there's a lot of work study things. At the end of the day in New York City, you have rent to pay. I respect wanting to incorporate and include friends when they can't, but you can't help them and they can't help you if you don't have a business anymore.

Brigid: Zenut, thank you so much. Give your small business one more shout since we still have you.

Choire: Yes.

Zenut: Absolutely. It's called Playground Coffee Shop and we're in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn

Brigid: Zenut, thanks so much for calling. Let's go to Alana in the Catskills. Sorry about that. Elena in the Catskills.

Elena: Hi, thanks so much for taking my call.

Brigid: Do you have a question for Choire?

Elena: Yes. I have a question. It relates to our new digital workspaces and some sensitivity issues. I'm a person who has struggled with infertility and gone through the whole gamut of IVF and all kinds of interventions with unfortunately no success. I've noticed that more and more of my coworkers are bringing their children into video calls during work. I'm curious what you would say the etiquette is for how much am I just supposed to swallow that tender reminder? How can I bring this up to people who obviously have been successful having a kid and maybe don't even realize that almost 30% of the population struggles with this?

Brigid: Elena, that is such a heartfelt question. Choire, any thoughts on it?

Choire: Yes.Thank you for sharing that. It's such an interesting perspective. You know what's funny, as a non-parent in the workplace I think there's a lot of unspoken conflict about people with children and people without children at work. A lot of it, I think we should probably keep unspoken [chuckles]. In your world, I think this is going to be a question about the boundaries you want to set with your workplace. It's really challenging to bring that raw part of you into work and once you open that door, sometimes I worry that it cannot be closed. I wonder how much of that pain is stuff you want to share there and how much of it you want to keep at home. I would encourage you to think about that for a while. It's a tough one and a lot of it is going to be really specific to what your workplace is like as well.

Brigid: Choire, I want to go back to some of the etiquette you had in terms of some of our social outings and maybe one of the more controversial suggestions. New York Magazine has declared that the only way to split the check at a restaurant with friends is to split it evenly. We have a caller, James from Manhattan. James, welcome to WNYC.

James: How are you? Thanks for having my call.

Brigid: I understand that you are in favor of this new etiquette edict that has been declared by New York Magazine that we must split our bills at restaurants evenly, why is that?

James: Yes. I've agreed with everything Choire by the way says so far. Every once in a while, I'm out with a group of people. Whether or not it's a family affair and they have four kids and I have two, or it's a couple of thing and two of them haven't drank and my wife and I have drank, I always think that the bill should be split evenly. When people make a comment that they shouldn't, that, "Hey, I only ordered that," or whatever, it irritates me so much that I'll never ever socialize with them again. [unintelligible 00:11:31], but that's how it has to be.

Choire: He's got a hard-line people.

Brigid: James, bright lines are very helpful. Choire, what about, this is one of those tips that I think some people are like, "Hey, wait a minute, what about I'm the vegetarian out at dinner with all of these meat eaters," or, "I don't drink and I'm there with everyone who's had cocktails all night long." Talk about why splitting it evenly or people who push back on that, why you would push back on them?

Choire: Yes, and there's a bunch of tough stuff around this. In my life in New York City, I've been the friend who has no money surrounded by rich people. In New York City where people have different incomes who mix regularly, which is what makes the city exciting, right? That sometimes comes out when you're at dinner and the bill comes, and you're like, "Wow, I have $20 in my pocket." Overall, the guiding principle here is that, ideally, it's going to come out in the wash, and ideally, you're there because you love these people and you're having a splendid time.

You know what, next time it's going to be different. Next time you're going to order the weird, expensive, whatever's hot that moment. In the ideal world, it works out. That being said, if this starts to pushing your boundaries, if you're like, "Every time I go out with Kathy, she has six drinks and I end up spending $100 on her," and then you're going to do like our caller here and you're going to cut her out, which is great. We got enough friends, right?

Brigid: Wow. Again, bright lines are helpful. Another rule says that you can discipline a friend's kid but a stranger should never discipline your kid for a minor squabble, like if you're out at a playground. How'd you come up with that one?

Choire: Kathryn Jezer-Morton, who wrote this, who runs an excellent newsletter here at New York Magazine called Brooding. Do you like my plug?

Brigid: Good plug.

Choire: [chuckles] She's a parenting expert and I am not because I personally don't care for children whatsoever. It seems to me that the last thing I would want to do as a person without kids is to step into someone's parenting life with a small child in a public place. That just seems like a recipe for disaster. If there's some mess going on, I think it's my job as a non-parent to get away from the mess.

Brigid: Fair enough. I want to talk about some of the communication etiquette. One of the rules says that hot gossip cannot be texted. What do we talk about if we can't text the person the hot gossip?

Choire: [laughs] I know. I'll tell you, I have to say the rise of voice memo text has been really actually very wonderful. It provides a connection and a warmth with friends in communication that straight text doesn't allow. That is incidentally a great venue for a really douchey story, for all that stuff, and it's not something that they can really forward to a friend. It's something that's easily managed. It's something that can't be screenshot. It can't be used against you later. Also, it's a little bit of safety. It's a little bit of OpSec as they say, and it's also a little bit of actually relishing the delight of the gossip by getting to tell them out loud.

Brigid: The voice memo Is okay, it's just the text that isn't.

Choire: Yes.

Brigid: Got it.

Choire: Voice memo is the future. It's a beautiful thing.

Brigid: [laughs] Let's go to Kate in Montclair, New Jersey. Kate, welcome to WNYC.

Kate: Hey. I have relatives that are transgender. We just say their name. I was reading the New York Times and the person had pronounced that they want to be a they and that New York Times had put they in and I kept on looking for who was the other person in the article. I was like, "They could have just used their name."

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Kate: [unintelligible 00:15:28] Okay, now it's just them.

Brigid: Well, Choire, I think the guide does talk about what you can do if you have maybe misgendered someone, how can you recover from that?

Choire: Yes. A lot of us think we're in a little bit period of a correction, and that's partly because some people have no idea what we're talking about when we use they are we explain why someone has pronouns, and then some people it's a very much an important part of their lives. We're at a strange cultural crossroads which is also being fanned into cultural warfare but never mind.

The situation here, the Times is generally really good about saying, "Hey, they use these pronouns," like just [unintelligible 00:16:10] going to go.

For some people, this still reads a little confusingly. IRL, it's very easy to make mistakes, forget these kinds of things. These are everyday mistakes. De-escalating that fear and that conflict about this stuff really makes life a lot better. Be like, "Thank you so much for letting me know," and then moving on. You know what, no one wants to feel awkward about their situation.

Brigid: I have another question in this theme. Straight people can only use the word partner when they're trying to get something out a bit. What does that mean exactly and why should straight people generally avoid using partner to describe their partner, spouse, husband, or wife?

Choire: Listen, in working on this rule, we realized that we're missing some words to describe our relationships. There's no great words to describe that friend in your life who you go on vacation with every year or that non-romantic partner who's such a big part of your life. Our language is weak and this is actually a failing of English, not of etiquette necessarily. What happens for a lot of us is that people started using the word partner for their-- what's the right phrase? For their heterosexually partner, non-married person [laughs]. See how hard it is. It became like this weird liberalist dog whistle for a while and honestly, for us gay people, it was really confusing because I was like, "I don't know what's going on here." We appreciate the solidarity that got us through the '80s and '90s, but for now, we have gay marriage. We're willing to let you say husband, just go for it.

Brigid: [chuckles] Let's go to Robin in the East Village. Robin, welcome to WNYC.

Robin: Thanks, and thanks for this great guide. I want to take issue with number 94. It's okay to email, text, or DM anyone at any hour. Here's the thing, I have parents in their '80s and they're fragile, and they're very far away. I have my phone on all the time just in case there's some kind of an emergency that I need to know about in the middle of the night. I can't pre-program to accept texts and calls from a particular hospital or a distant family member. I can't anticipate where that information might come from. If somebody has insomnia, and it's two in the morning, and they want to text me, they're going to wake me up. I believe the burden is on the sender to think about, "Okay, 2:00 in the morning, maybe I can wait and send this at a more daylight hour." You know what I mean?

Choire: I do. In your case, you're totally right. I just went through a similar situation here, actually. The fact of the matter is, we don't know where that emergency call is going to come from and we have to leave our phones on and bad things happen because of that. That being said, hopefully, we get through this transitional period in this world too and this gets fixed also because, at the end of the day, we're being run around. Part of this is that we're being run around by our phones, right? They're controlling us too much, and seizing some control of those phones is actually going to make our lives a lot better, but you and I are going to suffer when there's family emergencies involved.

Brigid: We have time I think for one more question. Let's go to Susanna in Brooklyn. Susanna, your question, really quickly? [chuckles]

Susanna: Hi.

Brigid: Hi.

Susanna: Well, I didn't really have a question [chuckles]. I was more of a comment in response to in terms of tipping just an observation specifically post-pandemic. Working as a server during the pandemic, the tipping was 22% to 30%. Everybody was like, "I am so grateful for you." Then like three months in when masks came off, people were like, "Yes, not so much."

Brigid: Susanna, thanks so much for your call. Choire, thank you so much for your guide. Choire Sicha is an editor at New York Magazine. He and his colleagues have put out a whole guide on etiquette in 2023 and it's got a lot of answers to all those awkward situations. I'm Brigid Bergin and this is the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Thank you so much for listening.

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