That is an version of The Surprise Reader, a publication during which our editors suggest a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Join right here to get it each Saturday morning.
Gary Shteyngart spent seven nights (or, as he calls them, seven “agonizing” nights) on the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship that’s ever sailed. In our Could 2024 challenge, he writes about what he discovered there. “The ocean is teeming with fascinating life, however on the floor, it has little to show us,” he writes. “I’m continually advised by my fellow passengers that ‘all people right here has a narrative.’ Sure, I wish to reply, however all people in all places has a narrative … Perhaps what they’re saying is that everyone on this ship desires to have a much bigger, extra coherent, extra attention-grabbing story than the one they’ve been given.”
Shteyngart is the newest Atlantic author to enterprise into a spot he doesn’t fairly perceive and inform the story. At present’s publication collects a few of our writers’ journeys into new communities, methods of considering, and methods of being—explorations that left them skeptical, enlightened, or a little bit of each.
Explorations
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Largest Cruise Ship Ever
By Gary Shteyngart
Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas
I Went to a Rave With the 46-12 months-Previous Millionaire Who Claims to Have the Physique of a Teenager
By Matteo Wong
Bryan Johnson desires to construct a nation of immortals. Would you be part of?
I Gooped Myself
By Amanda Mull
I spent $1,279 of The Atlantic’s cash on lotions, crystals, and a vibrator from Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire. Issues received bizarre.
Nonetheless Curious?
- Why is Joe Rogan so common? The author Devin Gordon tried to dwell like Joe Rogan for a number of weeks. He got here away each extra comfy with and extra skeptical of Rogan’s imaginative and prescient of masculinity.
- “I went to Disney World”: Because the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Florida, the Magic Kingdom welcomed again its most loyal topics—and our employees author Graeme Wooden.
Different Diversions
P.S.
I’ll depart you with Annie Dillard’s account of her journey to witness a photo voltaic eclipse in Washington State.
“It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain move … It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that gap in sleep from which you wake your self whimpering,” she writes within the essay, first revealed in her 1982 assortment, Instructing a Stone to Discuss. “We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we had been in an odd place—a resort in central Washington, in a city close to Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled right here to see would happen early within the subsequent morning.”
— Isabel
