Episode 525 - Carpool Favors
Your Awesome Etiquette podcast episode for the week. Plus your weekly etiquette challenge, the Monday joke, and an etiquette extra on creative table setting.
On today’s show, we take your questions on carpool favors, AirBnB tipping, and wedding gift communications. For Community Members, your question of the week is about giving a plus one to a guest who just went through a breakup. Plus, your weekly challenge, etiquette salute, and a postscript segment from Emily Post’s How to Behave Though a Debutante.
Etiquette Extra - Table Setting Interpretations in the style of Picasso
We didn’t get the blue phase, but we did ask an AI image generator to produce table settings in Picasso's style, and a sample of what was produced can be seen in the gallery above. As we do our best to write each week about etiquette in a very fast-paced world, the question of what role artificial intelligence is going to play in writing and thinking about human relationships can get very meta (and confusing) very quickly. These new AI tools are very powerful, and we thought we would slow down for a minute and have a bit of fun by asking generative AI to take us to new places in the world of etiquette. We began with one of the most prolific and recognizable artists of the 20th century but so enjoyed the results we look forward to sharing more traditional etiquette reinterpreted and reimagined here in the ‘etiquette extra’ as time allows. Feel free to share your favorite artists as tablescapes in the comments.
SIGNED COPIES OF OUR LATEST BOOK AND TRIVIA GAME are available from our local partner, Bridgeside Books, who can also secure copies of our other titles. Check out the Emily Post Collection there; there are so many options for great gifts!
Weekly Podcast Etiquette Challenge
This week’s challenge is to Let someone go ahead of you in line. While no etiquette says anyone has to do this, it’s easy to have blinders on when we’re running errands. As you head to the checkout line, if you see someone either also heading for your line with fewer items or someone behind you in line with fewer items, invite them to go ahead of you. Unprompted, this can be a small bright spot in someone's day, and who knows what it might inspire.
As always, thank you for spending a bit of your Monday with us. We hope your week is off to a great start and that good etiquette is a part of it.
See you on Thursday.
All the best,
Lizzie and Dan
Happy Monday Joke
“Is this pool safe for diving?”
"It deep ends."
Honestly I was very disappointed to see that the place settings were AI generated—not only because it would’ve been a great art initiative from a museum or Picasso’s foundation to transform his work into a visually interesting commercial series, but also because of the ethical issues surrounding “generative artificial intelligence.”