Some advice a lot of us would do well to remember.
Peter Post, great-grandson of Emily and author of several etiquette books, argued that laptops should be banned from the main meal, but are fine during coffee hour, when guests linger at the table conversing. “If you’re using the laptop to look something up in the context of a conversation, it’s really no different than going to a dictionary, and we certainly wouldn’t tell people not to do that,” he said. “The mistake would be checking your e-mail. The minute it becomes something personal, it’s the same as answering your cellphone.” A caveat: “Showing friends what I saw most recently on YouTube isn’t the first place I’d go in conversation. It seems to me that that’s starting to cross the line.”