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Kaitlyn: Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Martha Stewart literally did surgery on a grape. This was nearly 20 years before the idea became a confusing internet meme. She invented it! In her 1999 book Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, which I recently received as a 30th-birthday gift, Martha sincerely recommends hollowing out grapes and filling them, individually, with goat cheese and crumbled pistachios. She also recommends hollowing out cucumbers, apples, pattypan squash, and, if you can believe it, cherry tomatoes. Of course, I know that Martha has a good reason for everything she does, even if it isn’t obvious to me what it could be. I am very humble and I am taking notes.

Lizzie and I are always trying to educate ourselves about parties. We would like to be perfect hosts. We know our limits, but we strive to surpass them—it’s called shooting for the moon and landing among the stars. That’s why we study texts like Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, and why another of my 30th-birthday gifts was a packet of papers that Lizzie printed off the internet, detailing how Nancy Reagan planned for dinners at the White House. I think my favorite book about parties is probably Putnam’s Book of Parties, from 1928, which explains a concept called “Mushroom Party”—you decorate a high-school gymnasium to look like an enchanted forest, then you make up a bunch of prophecies and write them on cards tied to mushrooms, then you ask someone to pretend to be a witch. As each teen approaches the witch, she stirs her cauldron and mutters:

Seek a mushroom in the forest,

In the dank and blue-lit forest,

Bearing on its stem this number.

Tell thee what the Fates shall give thee

In the days that lie before thee.

Go—but let not word nor laughter

Pass thy lips until thou find it.

And then everyone drinks coffee!

Of course, there’s only so much you can learn from reading. At some point, you’ll need to take the next step: a four-week course held on Zoom. That’s how Lizzie and I ended up enrolling in “The Table as Canvas: Designing a Bizarro Dinner Party,” hosted by the chef Jen Monroe, whose very cool and interesting career we’ve been following ever since she served us jellyfish sorbet at a dystopian-themed dinner party in 2017.

Lizzie: When Kaitlyn first sent me the course sign-up page, I imagined a laboratory of bizarro dinner-party scientists sitting studiously at stainless-steel tables somewhere in Midtown, learning how to make carrot rosettes. But I would come to find out, as Kaitlyn mentioned, that this was an online course. I’ll admit that there was a twinge of disappointment, but I understand that the internet means access to a larger audience and it also means none of your classmates ever have to see what you look like.

What reading did I do in preparation? Well, I’m basically always reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel to stave off my despair, and one of the many constantly repeated activities in his books is eating and drinking at large estates in the countryside. A chef is always in charge of the meals because everyone is rich, but none of the food ever sounds particularly appetizing: soft-boiled eggs, deviled kidneys, whatever a “savoury” is, a magical hangover cure made with Worcestershire sauce and a raw egg.

All of this to say that I may have been—pardon me—starved for inspiration when the first class rolled around.

A screenshot from class. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: The first week of class, I hustled home from work, went straight into the bedroom, and shut the door. Our instructor, Jen, called us from a room full of cake pans, and started off by asking us to “clarify” our “goals” for the course. My goal, as I said, was to become perfect.

Jen told us not to be afraid of the many constraints imposed by time, money, skill level, etc. These would only serve to make us more creative, she argued. For example, a former student had made her apartment more like a 24-hour diner for a 24-hour-diner dinner party simply by making the floors a little bit sticky on purpose. This innovation took hardly any time or skill and cost her nothing, except for the raised eyebrows of at least two strangers who heard about it years later on Zoom.

60-some people were on the Zoom call with us, and we soon got the opportunity to meet a few of them. After Jen played a clip of the food-fight scene in Hook, she put us in breakout rooms to discuss any notable childhood memories we might have about food. I said that my mom had always bought the puffy Cheetos, so when I went to the homes of friends whose mothers bought crunchy Cheetos, I thought there was something kind of sinister about that. “At least you had snacks,” one woman in my group responded. Well, sure.

Lizzie: My breakout room was a somewhat stilted place, but we did eventually get into a rhythm. I talked about eating crickets and astronaut ice cream at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City as a child. In my notes, I wrote, “I have no memories,” which longtime readers will recognize as something I’ve said before.

I also wrote, “We’re gonna need a bigger budget,” after Jen played a clip of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the 1989 Peter Greenaway movie that takes place in a restaurant and ends with a dinner party to which I would not want to be invited. (Spoiler: A very crispy man is served atop a bed of Brassicaceae.) Thankfully, Jen did not play that particular scene, which would have turned all of our stomachs.

I left the class a little hungry and wondering why you can’t stream this movie anywhere right now.

Kaitlyn: I really wanted to watch it! They don’t even have it at the library!

Our homework assignment for the first week was to make a mood board that would capture the desired spirit of our dream dinner party. As I mentioned, I was very inspired by Martha doing surgery on a grape. I also love Jell-O. So I thought, What about a party combining these two things? For appetizers, I could hollow out lots of different fruits and vegetables, just like Martha, and then, unlike Martha, I could fill them with various flavors of gelatin. Because it’s almost Christmas, I looked for further inspiration from my favorite Christmas story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, in which the characters are obsessed with festive, multicolored “Who Pudding,” which appears to be Jell-O-like.

After a few days of scrolling through Instagram, I had several dozen photos of improbable gelatin-based dishes with garish Dr. Seuss aesthetics. I was especially excited about the idea of “Cranberry Candles,” which are candles made from cranberry sauce, strawberry Jell-O, and mayonnaise, then decorated with orange-peel stars. I thought they would make a stunning centerpiece.

Martha's instructions for grape surgery. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: I like that the mayo is both in the Jell-O and served on the side. Mayo two ways. My theme came from Matt, who loves a Mai Tai and will do anything (anything!) to have one. Before the class started, we were planning on having a vaguely 1960s tiki holiday party inspired by Lee’s Hawaiian Islander, in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, so I stuck to that idea. I put this photo on my mood board, but as I currently own no rattan furniture, achieving this look may be slightly out of reach.

Because this holiday party was never meant to be a sit-down dinner, my menu so far is relegated to the “bites” arena, and lacks Kaitlyn’s structural, textural, and mayo-ral innovation. If you have ideas for how to make mini hotdogs and a fruit tower feel more elaborate, please let me know.

Kaitlyn: I think the fruit tower will be good. I can’t wait to see the fruit tower. I do think it will be expensive and possibly wasteful. I know I would feel some hesitation to rip a banana off of a beautiful sculpture. Lizzie and Matt will really have to enforce a rule of “eat the fruit tower,” and I think they might even have to pay someone to go first.

For the second week of class, Lizzie came over to my apartment and Nathan put the Zoom up on the TV for us. To start, Jen reminded us that we were supposed to have been thinking about the “feeling” we wanted to evoke with our dinner parties. I’d forgotten to do this.”What’s your feeling?” Nathan asked. “Uh … Grinch,” I said. He was like, “Evil?” And I said no, of course not. I was thinking more of the end of the movie, when he’s carving the “roast beast” and everybody is singing. “Redemption?” he offered. Yes!

Nathan said the feeling for his dream dinner party would be “decay,” but he didn’t explain how he would execute that, because we promptly reminded him that he is not in the class.

Lizzie: Peter Greenaway might have an idea he could use …

This week’s class was about menu and logistics. Jen kindly reminded us to consider our limits. For example, we may want to think twice before cracking into our 401Ks to buy enough beef tenderloin to feed a midsize town’s elementary school. This would have been helpful a few years ago, before I accidentally spent a few hundred dollars on a giant slab of beef tenderloin for a New Year’s Eve party.

The most fun part of the class was when Jen showed us some of the “bizarro” things she’s done with food. It made me realize I could probably dream bigger, which I guess is literally the point of being inspired.

Kaitlyn: We got excited when Jen showed us some wacky, multicolored lollipops she’d made. She said that all she’d done was melt a bunch of Jolly Ranchers and mix them together. That sounded like something we could do—which would cost about $7—and everyone would be impressed by the result!

Toward the end of class, she started to get into the nitty-gritty—the practical considerations. Don’t invite more people than you have plates for, bring a rolling suitcase to the grocery store, that kind of thing. Jen said that it’s important to consider course timing and portions, as well. Serving too much food can be just as bad as serving not enough food, she explained. Here, Nathan and I told Lizzie our patently unsympathetic story about being served too many dinner courses and too many complimentary desserts at the fancy restaurant Pujol in Mexico City on my aforementioned recent 30th birthday. (When the waiter brought a pair of cream puffs along with our check, I almost cried.) I understand that this is a disgusting thing to complain about, but that is exactly why serving too much food makes people feel bad!

Nathan then pointed out that my Jell-O dinner might have the opposite problem: It might not fill anyone up to eat only Jell-O for dinner. I’d already thought of a solution to this, though. In the corner of the dining room, there will be a table with a pile of loose baguettes on it. If anybody gets hungry, they can just walk over there and rip off some hunks. And you know, if you have to grab a piece of pizza on the way home, that’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s why we live in New York City.

Lizzie: Jell-O does have a small amount of protein in it (due to the hooves), but maybe you could boost the satiety factor by throwing some salami in there. I also have concerns about people leaving my party hungry, but I’m thinking I’ll include one of those hidden-picture images in the invitation where it looks like Santa but it’s actually dozens of chicken nuggets—essentially subliminal messaging suggesting that people should eat beforehand.

Kaitlyn: For homework, we’re supposed to begin doing more in-depth research and development and testing our recipes. The first one I’m planning to try is a dish I saw on Reddit. It’s a can of pineapple rings with lime Jell-O poured directly into it. After it sets, you dump the whole thing out and slice it up. Also, to Lizzie’s point about protein, I’m thinking I’ll do a “Garden Salad Ring,” which is lemon Jell-O with radishes and hard-boiled eggs inside.

Lizzie: As I mentioned earlier, my menu could still use some work. Shrimp luge, perhaps?

Kaitlyn: Please look out for a special Christmas Day issue of Famous People! It will be about a triumphant holiday dinner party at Lizzie’s house.

Lizzie: Let’s call it dinner-party-lite.

When inflation started to spike in 2022, the Federal Reserve made the only move it could: raising interest rates. Over the course of 18 months, rates shot from near zero to above 5 percent and have remained there since. Now inflation appears under control, having fallen steadily since July 2022. But while the Fed may be done raising rates, it’s not cutting them back to zero anytime soon.

According to the central bank’s most recent projections, rates will stay where they are for most of 2024 and will fall only slightly in 2025, ending the year at about 4 percent—more than twice as high as in late 2019. Activity in the bond markets suggests that rates could stay near that level for the better part of a decade. Wall Street has begun summing up the situation with a simple phrase: “higher for longer.”

As jarring as 5 percent interest may seem, by historical standards it is pretty modest and, believe it or not, represents a healthy adjustment. America since the Great Recession has been living through an anomalous period of super-low rates that contributed to widening inequality and speculative-asset bubbles. Higher-for-longer should herald a fairer, more sustainable economy. Americans just have to survive the transition. Because before we get to the good place, higher-for-longer is going to feel bad—or at least very weird. Rates haven’t been this high since George W. Bush was president and Taylor Swift was in elementary school. At this point, nearly every facet of the American economy has reshaped itself around near-zero interest rates. As with any dependency, withdrawal will be painful.

The core irony of raising rates to tame inflation is that higher rates can make major purchases—like a car or, especially, a house—more expensive, because most people take out loans to make them. In other words, the cure for inflation may itself be experienced as inflation. In January 2021, the interest rate on a 30-year fixed home mortgage reached a record low of 2.65 percent. Today, it is just over 7 percent. In theory, higher borrowing costs are supposed to cool prices. Instead, they’ve hardly budged. With rates spiking, many homeowners have decided to stay put to preserve the cheap mortgages they secured when rates were low. The resulting restriction of supply has led to the slowest pace of existing home sales since the height of the Great Recession, keeping sticker prices high even as the cost of a mortgage has ballooned. This double whammy has produced the most punishing housing market in at least a generation: Buyers can’t afford to buy, and owners feel stuck in place. As my colleague Annie Lowrey points out, the market could be bleak until the 2030s.

[Annie Lowrey: It will never be a good time to buy a house]

Higher borrowing costs can hurt in less obvious ways, too. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, estimates that higher-for-longer will increase the cost of renewable-energy projects by 20 to 30 percent. In just the past few months, two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey and three in New England—which together would have accounted for nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s 2023 offshore wind-power target—have been canceled because of soaring costs. The world’s largest borrower is also feeling the squeeze. Thanks to rising rates, the U.S. government will pay $659 billion in interest on the national debt this year, nearly as much as it spends on Medicare or national defense.

But the most alarming potential consequence of higher-for-longer lies in the pressure it puts on the financial system. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank earlier this year was largely a story about interest rates: When rates went up in 2022, existing government bonds, which had lower rates, lost value. That inflicted huge paper losses on Silicon Valley Bank, triggering a bank run. A wider crisis was averted, but banks remain vulnerable to future shocks. Regulators worry that additional pressure on balance sheets—from, say, a collapse in commercial real estate—could trigger a larger round of bank runs, with damage spilling over into the broader economy. “Eventually,” says Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, “something could break.”

And yet, higher-for-longer appears to be worth the risk. To understand why, it helps to go back to the origins of the previous regime. In 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, the Fed cut interest rates to zero as part of a desperate bid to avert a second Great Depression. (It also began buying securities itself in an effort to push effective interest rates below zero, a program called “quantitative easing.”) This “zero interest-rate policy”—which became known as ZIRP—was meant to be a stopgap. But as it became clear that the economy needed more help, and a Tea Party–controlled Congress wasn’t going to pass any more stimulus spending, the Fed decided to keep ZIRP in place indefinitely.

The idea behind ZIRP was to encourage spending and, in turn, create new jobs. At the most basic level, the policy made borrowing money extremely cheap. But the flip side was that investors could no longer earn nice returns by simply stashing their money in safe assets such as U.S. Treasury bills. With rates at or near zero, they had to find riskier investments—things like publicly traded stocks or leveraged buyouts or luxury-condo developments. The Fed believed that this would trigger a flood of new investment that would send asset prices soaring and generate what economists call “wealth effects.” People who owned property or stocks would see the value of their portfolios rise, encouraging them to go out and spend more money, ultimately helping to speed along the recovery.

The Fed got the first part right. Almost every single asset class, whether real estate or private equity or cryptocurrency, soared in value in what became known as “the everything bubble.” The stock market more than tripled from 2009 to 2019, and the value of Netflix, Tesla, and Amazon each grew by more than 2,000 percent. But the robust recovery did not materialize. For much of the decade, GDP and wage growth were anemic. The share of working-age Americans with a job didn’t recover from its pre-crisis levels until the fall of 2019.

Instead, because assets like stocks and real estate are disproportionately held by the rich, ZIRP helped produce the largest spike in wealth inequality in postwar American history. From 2007 to 2019, according to calculations by the economist Austin Clemens based on Federal Reserve data, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by 46 percent, while the bottom half saw only an 8 percent increase. A report from the McKinsey Global Institute, not exactly known as a bastion of economic populism, calculated that from 2007 to 2012, the Fed’s policies created a benefit for corporate borrowers worth about $310 billion, whereas households that tried to save money were penalized by about $360 billion. The journalist Christopher Leonard wrote in his 2022 book, The Lords of Easy Money, that “no single policy did more to widen the divide between the rich and poor” than ZIRP.

ZIRP transformed the American business environment in jarring ways. With borrowing cheap and the market booming, established corporations realized they could exploit financial tactics such as stock buybacks to boost earnings per share without improving their underlying business. Meanwhile, riding a wave of cheap money, Uber, WeWork, and other start-ups burned through billions of dollars of venture capital, pushing entire industries toward hard-to-sustain business models in the process. The private-equity industry, infamous for its debt-heavy leveraged buyouts, began eating up more and more of the economy. Desperation for higher returns also allowed speculative assets including cryptocurrencies and NFTs to attract trillions of dollars, only to collapse spectacularly.

[Rogé Karma: The secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy]

The return of higher rates should help the economy course-correct. More money will flow to long-term investments and sustainable companies instead of speculative assets and impractical start-ups. Companies looking to boost their stock price will have to win new customers or develop better products instead of relying on financial engineering. The gains of economic growth will be more widely spread because less money will be funneled into assets owned mostly by the rich.

Today’s higher rates also signal an underlying economic health that the ZIRP era lacked. The Fed is only comfortable keeping rates higher for longer because America’s post-pandemic recovery has been so strong, thanks to a generous helping of fiscal stimulus. Unemployment has remained at historic lows. Manufacturing is off the charts. Wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about 40 percent of the rise in income inequality that has occurred since the 1980s. In terms of growth, inflation, and employment, the U.S. is doing much better than other rich countries.

Americans used to cheap mortgages and a bonkers stock market understandably might not see all of this as good news. And the risk remains that higher rates trigger the kind of financial crisis that necessitated low rates in the first place. But we shouldn’t pine for the ZIRP era. That was the product of a crisis that our leaders failed to solve. As strange as it is to say, higher-for-longer is what it looks like when things are going right.