Our writers’ journeys into new communities, ways of thinking, and ways of being

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Gary Shteyngart spent seven nights (or, as he calls them, seven “agonizing” nights) on the Icon of the Seas, the biggest cruise ship that’s ever sailed. In our May 2024 issue, he writes about what he found there. “The ocean is teeming with fascinating life, but on the surface, it has little to teach us,” he writes. “I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that ‘everybody here has a story.’ Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story … Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given.”

Shteyngart is the latest Atlantic writer to venture into a place he doesn’t quite understand and tell the tale. Today’s newsletter collects some of our writers’ journeys into new communities, ways of thinking, and ways of being—explorations that left them skeptical, enlightened, or a bit of both.

Explorations

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

By Gary Shteyngart

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

Read the article.

I Went to a Rave With the 46-Year-Old Millionaire Who Claims to Have the Body of a Teenager

By Matteo Wong

Bryan Johnson wants to build a nation of immortals. Would you join?

Read the article.

I Gooped Myself

By Amanda Mull

I spent $1,279 of The Atlantic’s money on creams, crystals, and a vibrator from Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire. Things got weird.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Other Diversions

P.S.

I’ll leave you with Annie Dillard’s account of her journey to witness a solar eclipse in Washington State.

“It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass … It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering,” she writes in the essay, first published in her 1982 collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk. “We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place—a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early in the next morning.”

— Isabel