I thoroughly enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s marvellous long essay in the latest edition of Harper’s, I Really Didn’t Want to Go. It recounts her experience on a Goop cruise, and makes frequent reference to David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Harper’s essay about another cruise with the same line.

The latter essay was familiar in parts, so I think I must have read it at some point—though I can’t imagine it was in Harper’s, and I’m certain it can’t have been in 1996. I’ve never been on a cruise, but they do somehow seem to offer a rich seam of entertaining journalistic essays.