Shipping Out (later: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again)

David Foster Wallace's January 1996 Harper's essay (later the title piece of his 1997 collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), about a seven-night Celebrity Cruises Caribbean luxury cruise on the Zenith — which he renames the "Nadir." Roughly 25,000 words of footnoted reporting framed playfully as a brochure for the trip, the piece launched an entire microgenre of cruise journalism and remains one of the most-cited literary essays of the late 20th century. Wallace's central note: "There's something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad."