Why not pamper yourself with a little bit (actually a lot) of David Foster Wallace? I now know every conceivable rationale for somebody spending more than $ 3,000 to go on a Caribbean cruise. To be specific: voluntarily and for pay, I underwent a 7-Night Caribbean (7NC) Cruise on board the m.v. Zenith (which no wag could resist immediately rechristening the m.v. Nadir), a 47,255-ton ship owned by Celebrity Cruises, Inc., one of the twenty-odd cruise lines that operate out of south Florida and specialize in "Megaships," the floating wedding cakes with occupancies in four figures and engines the size of branch banks. The vessel and facilities were, from what I now understand of the industry's standards, absolutely top-hole. The food was beyond belief, the service unimpeachable, the shore excursions and shipboard activities organized for maximal stimulation down to the tiniest detail. The ship was so clean and white it looked boiled. The western Caribbean's blue varied between baby-blanket and fluorescent; likewise the sky. Temperatures were uterine. The very sun itself seemed preset for our comfort. The crew-to-passenger ratio was 1.2 to 2. It was a Luxury Cruise.
This is awesome. Long but awesome. See also, from the archive: My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. ... Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.
If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study.
Video from the 150th Anniversary celebration of Harper’s Magazine, including a reading by David Foster Wallace.
Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise | Harper's, January 1996 | 
