The Thanksgiving Issue
It’s Thanksgiving Week here in the United States and at Clubland USA where we’ve recently celebrated nine months of publication. We’re beyond excited for the future and what we’ve learned about clubs, ourselves and the future of America’s club life.
Writing these words now, yours truly is boarding a flight to Ireland where he will be taking advantage of multiple clubs on his respective reciprocal lists—and enjoying some pubs too.
Please be aware that while you will continue hearing from us on Tuesdays in December. We will not be producing full issues until January 2026 as we enhance editorial and promotional opportunities. You will be seeing a new and improved Clubland USA that you will be proud to share with family and friends.
Today, Ishaan Jajodia and I share what we’re most thankful for in the world of American clubs. Enjoy this special week — and the holiday season! —LR
An Opportunity to Meet a New Friend
When I first moved to New York straight after college, I remarked to a friend that I needed to find three things in my first week: a supermarket, a place to smoke cigars and a synagogue. Yes, the order mattered.
Each of these places provided a larger surface area for luck to find me. Luck almost always favors those with the widest networks and communities of people. A quick chat with a cashier at the supermarket — especially in my historically Dominican and Jewish neighborhood — leads to recommendations on a great cigar lounge. The latter leads to synagogue recommendations, or by my luck, meeting a rabbi within my first week.
Clubs operate similarly, especially if there’s the right ingredients for painfully low-stakes social engagement. Through my visits to clubs around this great country, from New York to California and fun places in between like Duluth, Minnesota and St. Louis, I’ve met authors, doctors, actors, politicians of the good and bad variety and even descendants of legendary political dynasties.
The best part, however, has always been the opportunity to meet a new friend. Friends that have become Shabbat dinner guests, who I’ve visited in their respective home states and countries, who’ve stayed up too late with me eating and drinking just the right amount of too much and who all have reaped more than they deserve from an incredible community.
It’s not only something to be grateful for, but the single driving force behind my efforts here at Clubland USA and a mission that I hope continues to flourish in the new year.—LR
A Time for Gratitude
Much like Leonard, I can’t help but admit that I moved to a city not knowing too many people. In fact, I knew a friend from college, and that was about it, really. As I began my time in New Haven, I pined for college, for my college friends, and for the ease with which I made friends and built relationships across generations at college.
And then, things changed. They changed when I joined a club, returning to my roots, having spent my childhood playing racquet sports at a club endlessly, alongside a steadfast dedication to time spent in the library. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it wasn’t necessarily a momentous one either. But it was a big decision.
Joining a club was probably one of the best decisions I’ve made as an adult. I landed up joining a club where there was a generational chasm that existed between the other members and me, and that led me to push to initiate conversation with people who I would have barely imagined then to have now become my closest friends.
Over the years, I’ve become ingrained into the social fabric of a place far older than myself, and older than any single living member present. But it is a social fabric that, in its best moments, provides fulfillment and admiration, love and respect, and most importantly of all, intellectual and social stimulation and possibilities for all kinds of growth that the commonplace view of clubs doesn’t even begin to capture.
Like Leonard, whose friendship I treasure dearly, many close friendships have been formed and cast in the grill room and the locker room, on the squash courts and over a round of drinks. And much like him, it is incredibly difficult to begin to account for the hospitality and the camaraderie of a hitherto unknown cadre of individuals who are now much like a second family.
Behind this institution, though, there are people. It is people who make this place—whether it is my club or yours—special, from the people who work there to the people who spend so much time there as to become part of the furniture and fabric. From your friends to your bartenders to your servers to your club managers, take time this season to thank all who make your lives at the institution feel warm and welcoming.
Clubs, in my mind, remain the last bastion of a healthy social fabric in a world so terribly infatuated with the virtual dimension of every expressible reality. For all their faults, they represent the last of the institutions of sociability governed by a set of norms: we live and we die by these norms, for they are the measure of our stock. And yet, within those constraints, those demands of behaviour, we find the thrills of flourishing.
I find it hard to close this piece, if only because the list of thanks begins to overwhelm me. But as I do, I remember that the gratitude we ought to show this holiday extends not just to our friends and our family, but also to the institutions that sustain us.—IJ