I Really Didn’t Want to Go

Lauren Oyler was pretty determined not to enjoy her nine days aboard a cruise ship on a “Goop at sea package,” and she succeeded. There is plenty of whinging going on here, but both Goop and the cruise ship industry feel like fair targets, and Oyler’s dry humor lifts this piece up.

Last summer, I got an email from my editor asking, sneakily, among the how are you’s, “Have you ever thought about writing on wellness??” She was looking for someone to go on “the Goop cruise.” Like most female writers, I had thought about writing on wellness, mainly in terms of the free stuff I could get to do so. And for name recognition and potential hate-read appeal, a Goop assignment is the ne plus ultra of wellness writing.

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‘Nothing will go wrong. It’s paradise.’

This story might make you think twice about taking a cruise. Based on extensive documentary evidence and interviews, Tom Warren and Anna Betts paint a portrait of an industry riddled with wrongdoing: sexual assaults — the crime most often reported on cruise ships, according to the FBI — inadequate investigation, potential coverups, and more. It’s like one of the central storylines of Succession come to life:

By midnight, the party was in full flow. [Jane] Doe decided to run around the cruise decks. As she ran up a stairwell, a Carnival crew member was waiting for her. According to a complaint filed in 2019, which BuzzFeed News reviewed, she claimed he then lured her into a closet and locked the door. 

“I remember being scared seeing him holding the lock, so I started asking him where he was from to, like, calm the situation down, and he just kept saying that I looked like his girlfriend,” Doe recalled during her deposition. 

She said the crew member then raped her and ejaculated on her. 

When the assailant finally unlocked the closet door, Doe immediately rushed to her room. According to her deposition, she was pursued by the employee, who caught up with her and asked to be let into her cabin. She declined and closed the door behind her. 

Once inside, Doe burst into tears and told her friend what had happened, she recalled in her deposition. She began having a panic attack and hyperventilating. She and her friend immediately reported the alleged crime to Carnival guest services.

Doe was placed in a wheelchair and taken to the ship’s medical facility. When she told the doctor what had occurred, Doe said the medic apologized and told her, “Unfortunately, this happens all the time.”

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The Once Unthinkable Revolution Coming to Figure Skating

Pairs figure skating is a truly beautiful thing to watch — but with far more women in the sport than men, why does a pair have to be opposite genders? It feels like a question that should have been asked a long time ago (apart from in Blades of Glory). But it’s only recently that a step was taken, with Skate Canada, the country’s figure skating governing body, removing all gendered language from its competition rulebook, redefining teams as “Partner A and Partner B.” In this informative, thoughtful essay, former skater Talia Barrington considers what this means for the future of the sport, along with a detailed look back at its history.

As piano echoed over the sound system, they began to dance, their bodies matching effortlessly, limbs stretching in identical lines, torsos coiling. With their arms wrapped around each other tightly, they unfurled to spin around in endless motion. Improvisation became choreography, and they alternated between carving across the ice and laughing at a botched move. Over and over, they practiced a Fred Astaire–style dip until it was easy. Cheek to cheek, then far apart with just a single push, the pair forged a new routine.

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My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon

Author Amy Silverstein has had a heart transplant—twice. Now she’s dying of cancer. Those facts are related, as she explains in this essay. The procedure that saved her is now killing her:

I gave my all to sustaining my donor hearts despite daunting odds, and the hearts rewarded me with extraordinary years. I have been so lucky.

But now I lower my chin and whisper the words malignant … metastatic … lungs … terminal. It is the end of the road for my heart and me — not because we didn’t achieve and maintain sparkling cardiac health. But because the sorry state of transplant medicine took us down.

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.

Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.

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The Prince

Stefano Cernetic was the Prince of Montenegro. His ancestors were said to be Julius Caesar and the real Count Dracula. He socialized and attended lavish parties on the French Riviera — as princes do — but something about him was off. He told people he could secure them diplomatic passports for a few thousand euros each; he bestowed titles upon ordinary people not born into nobility. Eventually, Cernetic was called out as a fraud.

In this entertaining, unbelievable story for Truly*Adventurous, Alessio Perrone unravels the truth about a conman and self-proclaimed prince.

Weeks later, a copy arrived on Tamenne’s desk of a baptism certificate from the Christian Orthodox Church of Trieste, the prince’s hometown. Tamenne showed it to an acquaintance who had experience verifying authenticity. Right away, the acquaintance suggested that something seemed off in part because some sections of the document seemed to have been tinkered with. It also appeared to contain a suspicious combination of fonts, indicating that multiple typewriters were used.

That was enough for Tamenne—the rumors, the obscure family history, even some of the bizarre titles. He discovered that the prince had not received the collar of the prestigious Order of Saint Sylvester after all, but the relatively worthless collar of the similarly named Association of Saint Sylvester, a different organization with a far lesser pedigree. Exaggeration was one thing, deceit was another. He had believed in the prince. With the Riviera awash in so much money, the currency with the greatest value was honor and trust.

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During a Pandemic, Walk

Alone on a 10-hour walk through western Colorado, David Jenkins finds community in the company of strangers, communicating by paper messages left inside hidden geocaches.

My message, cast adrift, simple and global, personal and ranging across the centuries, joined other messages, from Mary, who was pleased to find her fifth geocache; from Sebastian, visiting from Germany, who was joyous in the Erhabenheit of the desert; from Moonlight and Feather and Sunburned Rat, all “free-kin on the color”; from Joey and his boyfriend Joe, and a half dozen more. I wondered what future cache-seekers would find in this bottle. I silently wished them well and imagined their playful, rock-hopping, light-footed exuberance for a walk on their planet in their days of desert transcendence.

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Earth Day Reads: A Longreads Collection on the Environment, Climate Change & Conservation

“None of this is normal, yet we treat it as if it is,” wrote Sam Keck Scott in his Longreads piece on the disappearing tiger salamander population in California’s Sonoma County. “And it isn’t just Northern California that’s changed — the entire planet has. All the way down to the fish in the sea.”

In her reading list “Low Country, High Water,” Spencer George ponders another crisis — water rise and a drastically changing coastline in the American South. “How do you cope with that reality? How do you love a place that is sinking?” she asks. “I spent my entire life waiting to leave the South, thinking I would only find happiness away from here, but now that it is disappearing I find I cannot look away. I am desperate to find ways to archive my home. To preserve it.”

Gathering perspectives that range from bleak to hopeful, the writing we’ve published and recommended on the climate crisis, wildlife conservation, and other topics is at once urgent yet reflective. This week, in time for Earth Day on April 22, we encourage you to dive into our favorite Longreads essays, reported features, and reading lists, as well as favorites the editors have selected from across the web.

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