A Meatball at Sea
For the Might 2024 concern, Gary Shteyngart spent seven nights aboard the most important cruise ship that has ever sailed.
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I’ve by no means written a letter to the editor earlier than, however uncommon are the instances I’ve learn an article extra hilarious, sensible, and incisive than Gary Shteyngart’s on his escapades at sea. I used to be moved, entertained, and wowed by his eager observations. However largely I’m grateful to him for reinforcing a promise I made to myself: I’ll by no means, ever go on a cruise.
Jennifer Ripley
Menlo Park, Calif.
I laughed out loud a number of instances whereas studying Gary Shteyngart’s account of his expertise on the inaugural voyage of the Icon of the Seas. As somebody captivated with cruising, I acknowledged the reality in a lot of what Shteyngart wrote. I’m additionally a journey agent, and the considered crusing on the Icon fills me with dread. So many individuals! I inform my purchasers that cruising is for everybody, however not all cruise strains are for everybody.
There are just a few features of cruising that I believe the creator missed, although. My son is a full-time wheelchair person and an avid cruiser. It’s exhausting to think about how he would see the world if not on a cruise ship. On right now’s trendy, accessible vessels, the indignities that he and different folks with disabilities would possibly undergo every single day at house are largely absent.
We love cruising due to the workers. The pleasure and care that crew members soak up offering wonderful service is obvious. We like to ask about their household at house, and we tip them generously. We hope that Shteyngart did the identical.
Kathleen Moylan
Worcester, Mass.
As soon as upon a time, I used to be a journey author. As somebody who nonetheless revels within the marvel of journey 15 years after leaving the sector, I discovered Gary Shteyngart’s article in regards to the Icon of the Seas disappointing. Journey writing as an inventive type has been in jeopardy for years, and I concern that articles like Shteyngart’s reveal why.
Journey writing doesn’t need to comply with well-worn codecs or solid its topics in a positive gentle. Nevertheless it ought to create a way of place. No journey author value their salt would ever wallow in distress and disdain, as Shteyngart does right here. A journey author shouldn’t choose these round them or put themselves on the heart of the story; the job of a journey author is to take a look at an expertise and see its worth. After I labored as a journey author, if I ever discovered myself in an expertise I disliked, I attempted to grasp why others round me loved it after which labored to reconcile these two views.
We journey writers are a particular brood. We have now internalized that our work will not be about us. We all know we’re friends within the locations we go to. There’s a diploma of respect {that a} journey author will need to have in the event that they hope to see a spot clearly. These need to be desk stakes.
Kim Palacios
San Ramon, Calif.
It’s disconcerting that, solely 4 months after The Atlantic devoted a complete concern to the hazards of a second Donald Trump presidency, the journal revealed a narrative that appears designed to verify the central argument of Trump’s political motion: that blue-state elites despise odd Individuals and see no worth of their lifestyle. Like Trump’s speeches, Gary Shteyngart’s humor is suffering from name-calling and infantile insults; the “reprobates” and “bent psychos” who spend their cash on cruises are mocked for his or her weight, their garments, their hobbies, their tattoos. Even supposing a few of these “psychos” are, as Shteyngart notes, veterans who’ve served their nation, he concludes that his fellow cruisers don’t have any “inside life” and are thus unworthy of consideration from a member of the “inventive class” like himself. If Trump is reelected in November, a part of the blame will lie with these, like Shteyngart, who appear to have retreated to date into their progressive bubbles that they’ve develop into the mirror picture of the MAGA trustworthy.
Andrew Miller
New Orleans, La.
Gary Shteyngart’s colourful essay from the world’s largest cruise ship makes snobbery an artwork type. What did he count on? Cruise-ship builders take chunks of Las Vegas, Branson, and Disney and put them on a platform that strikes by means of the water. By no means have I entertained the thought of taking a visit on one, however hundreds of Individuals do it repeatedly, most of them solidly middle-class in wealth and style. Most Individuals would like to observe the Mets play the Marlins than the Met play Mozart.
Throughout my cruising years—on the Navy’s huge grey ships, within the Sixties—officers and crews had been a mixture of Individuals from in all places and each social strata. One chief petty officer was an outspoken socialist; certainly one of my commanding officers was a paranoid member of the John Birch Society. The crews of the ships I served on joined the center class upon discharge, and a few of them in all probability cruise and speak soccer and eat unhealthy meals and vote for Donald Trump. What a disgrace that Shteyngart couldn’t join with them. He may need realized one thing. I did.
Earl Higgins
River Ridge, La.
Gary Shteyngart replies:
What fascinated me most about my fellow cruisers—lots of whom had been from blue states and weren’t MAGA diehards—was their lack of curiosity. They had been very happy to eat meals that jogged my memory of a Yalta cafeteria in my Soviet youth. They laughed themselves foolish when a comic made enjoyable of “shithole nations” (though the African lady and her husband subsequent to me walked out). To Andrew Miller’s level, I believe it’s exactly this sort of passivity and incuriosity that lets a nation forgo its lengthy custom of democracy and, by means of both malice or inaction, permit a tyrant to take cost. To Earl Higgins’s remark, I attempted to attach desperately, virtually pathologically, with my fellow cruisers. Sadly, there was not one outspoken socialist or paranoid member of the John Birch Society to be discovered. Certainly, it was the blinkered blandness of my fellow cruisers that drove me to despair. In the long run, I started to respect the alcoholics and degenerate gamblers I met. They, at the least, had a narrative to inform.
A Examine in Senate Cowardice
Republicans like Rob Portman might have ended Donald Trump’s political profession, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic’s Might 2024 concern. They selected to not.
Good journalism ought to make its viewers indignant. And Jeffrey Goldberg’s detailing of the rank hypocrisy of the Republican senators who talked powerful however folded like low cost fits when it got here time to vote to convict Donald Trump for his position within the January 6 riot ought to incite anger in each reader who cares about this nation.
Significantly becoming is Goldberg’s phrase alternative about their conduct—pathetic, greasy. I hope historical past remembers and repeats the names of these senators who might have stopped a menace to democracy and decency however as an alternative caved to Trump.
Steve Schild
Winona, Minn.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s article holding sure Republican senators to account makes a sound level. Nevertheless, it’s simple to image the present GOP management retaliating with baseless impeachment proceedings towards their opposition, setting a harmful precedent that would undermine and diminish the USA. Goldberg calls that argument “pathetic,” however in all probability a few of these senators who voted nay believed Trumpism would ultimately move; they adopted the rule of legislation and regarded forward hopefully to a future technology of high quality leaders for whom the nation would matter greater than any particular person.
Michael E. Zuller
Nice Neck, N.Y.
Behind the Cowl
On this concern’s cowl story, “The Valley,” George Packer stories from Phoenix and the encircling Salt River Valley. Packer argues that the Valley’s issues—local weather change, conspiracism, hyper-partisanship—are America’s, and that its destiny could presage the nation’s. The duvet evokes a panorama that’s getting hotter and drier, and a future that’s blurry. It is a place the place American optimism and ingenuity are being put to the take a look at.
— Peter Mendelsund, Inventive Director
Corrections
“Democracy Is Dropping the Propaganda Conflict” (June) misstated the subtitle of Anne Applebaum’s newest ebook. The complete title is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Need to Run the World. “The Nice Serengeti Land Seize” (Might) misstated the gap between Sharjah Safari park and the Pololeti Recreation Reserve. The Sharjah Safari park is 2,000 miles northeast of the Pololeti Recreation Reserve, not 5,000 miles north. “Conflict of the Patriarchs” (Might) mischaracterized Roman Emperor Constantine’s coverage towards Christianity. Though Constantine favored Christianity over different tolerated religions within the empire, he didn’t impose it on his topics.
This text seems within the July/August 2024 print version with the headline “The Commons.”
