A Cruise to End All Cruises

Detailed summary

Passengers bought cabins aboard a cruise ship called the Odyssey and embarked on a round-the-world voyage. It was supposed to last a lifetime. Instead, it became a sort of floating Fyre Festival.

I posted a message on cruisecritic.com, the largest online cruise-reviewing platform, explaining that I wanted to talk to people who had decided to live at sea indefinitely. In July, Starr Davis, a retiree from Florida who was living aboard the Odyssey, e-mailed me. “I heard you were looking to find people who sold everything to do life on board,” she wrote.

Around the same time, however, I got a cryptic e-mail about the Odyssey from someone who asked to remain unnamed. “It is quite important to at least allude to current issues and risks,” the e-mail said. Positive coverage of the Villa Vie Residences, the Florida-based company that launched the Odyssey, might “jeopardize the finances of your readers by falsely creating the impression that VVR is a secure, low risk…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The New Yorker. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.