On Sunday, our founder Bari Weiss texted me, “You should be so deeply proud.” She was referring to last month’s edition of The Free Press Supper Club, a new dinner series connecting thousands of our subscribers for real-world conversation over shared meals. The idea is almost embarrassingly simple: Get a bunch of Free Pressers who don’t know one another around a table and see what happens.

But when I read the article below, I realized this small, simple idea may not be so small after all. It’s written by Andy Brehm, an opinion writer at The Minnesota Star Tribune (where the article was originally published), and it recounts his experience at a Free Press Supper Club in Minneapolis. At his restaurant, five strangers with different jobs, different lives, different politics, spent an evening actually listening to one another—and it inspired Andy so much that he wrote a piece about it.

It inspired us, too. Last month, thousands of you sat down to dinner together. That’s thousands of conversations like Andy’s happening at the same time, all over the world. Pinch me.

Can we keep growing this thing? I really hope so. Our next supper club on September 17 is now on sale. Come join us.

—Olga Moriarty, head of community and events

I made many resolutions for 2026. Most didn’t survive past winter. But this month I managed to honor one—getting out of my comfort zone more by doing something that would have sounded insane to me a few years ago. I signed up to have dinner with complete strangers, on purpose.

The occasion was a supper club hosted here by The Free Press, the online media company founded by journalist Bari Weiss. To be clear, I remain a loyal reader of this newspaper. But a balanced news diet requires reading widely, and The Free Press is a publication I like. So when it announced it was bringing its supper clubs to Minneapolis, my resolution left me without an excuse but to go.

The concept is simple. Subscribers fill out a short questionnaire, a matching system assigns each to a table, and you arrive at a restaurant with no idea who will be sitting across from you. There is no moderator and no agenda, and everyone pays for his or her own meal. It is just strangers, menus, food, and drink, and whatever conversation you can build together.

I nearly bailed. It was a Thursday at the end of a long week, and I had typical Midwestern hesitation about the whole idea. We Minnesotans like familiarity and to navigate in circles we know. I went anyway, and I am very glad I did.

Five of us gathered around a table at The Freehouse in the North Loop. We could hardly have arrived from more different corners of Twin Cities life. Our group included a 3M engineer, a rental property manager, a woman working in Catholic ministry, a finance executive, and me, a corporate lawyer who moonlights as a resident conservative of these pages. A matching algorithm had somehow decided we belonged together for the evening.

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What I discovered at dinner was something I had nearly forgotten existed in modern American life: genuine curiosity and civility. Yes, we talked politics, and no, we did not all see the world the same way. But nobody yelled, nobody lectured, and nobody delivered a monologue. My dinner companions, all sharp and well-informed, asked questions of one another about our work and families and how each of us came to believe what we believe. When someone offered an opinion that would have started a brawl online, the response at our table was a version of “tell me more.” How refreshing and enjoyable it all was.

I drove home in a good mood, and science says I shouldn’t be surprised. Researchers have found that people are happier and feel a stronger sense of belonging on days when they chat with more strangers and casual acquaintances. In one memorable study, University of Chicago researchers asked commuters to strike up conversations on the train. Nearly everyone expected the exchanges would be awkward. The opposite proved true: The talkers enjoyed their rides far more than those who kept to themselves. We are wired for connection with people we do not know, and we chronically underestimate how much we need it.

I wrote in this space last year about America’s friendship recession, citing survey data showing that the share of Americans who claim no close friends at all has quadrupled in recent decades. I argued then that friendship requires intentionality and conscious upkeep. After my evening at The Freehouse, allow me to amend the record a little. The layer just beneath friendship, populated by friendly strangers and one-night dinner companions, turns out to be a not insignificant source of happiness as well. And it is available to any of us willing to say “hello” first.

Nobody at our table that night changed anybody’s mind, as far as I could tell. That was not the point. The point was that five adults who did not know one another, and who did not all vote the same way, spent an entire evening asking questions and listening to the answers. So why don’t we do this more often? It’s really not that hard.

This piece was originally published in The Minnesota Star Tribune.