A Floating City Files Its Paperwork
Bertram Whitmore, Publisher · maritime / megastructure
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week, the Publisher, from the Margaret IV.
Word reaches the Margaret IV, slowly, as all word does out here, that Royal Caribbean has put to sea a vessel called the Star of the Seas. I am told it displaces some two hundred and forty-eight thousand gross tons. I am told it carries seven thousand passengers, and thirteen hundred crew to carry the seven thousand passengers. I am told it is the largest such object ever to float, a distinction it holds, with the unbothered confidence of the genuinely enormous, alongside a sister ship of identical ambition.
I have seen the photographs. I will say what the catalogue has always said, and say it plainly: this is not a ship. A ship has the decency to look like one. This is a municipality that has reached a decision about the horizon and intends to see it through.
There is a temptation, in this office, to be impressed by tonnage alone. I resist it. The Bagger 288 is heavier and does not ask you to enjoy a waterslide. The Star of the Seas earns its place in the catalogue not because it is large, largeness is cheap; any quarry will sell it to you by the ton, but because it is large and proceeds anyway, eleven hundred and ninety-six feet of it, through water that was getting along perfectly well without it. That is the quality we document. Mass with somewhere to be.
The Margaret IV, I should note, displaces considerably less. She does not carry seven thousand of anyone. She carries me, the mail, and on a generous day a single firmly held opinion. I find I prefer her. But I am not the editorial board, and the editorial board does not rule on preference.
The ruling: Thiccc. Entered under Vessels, Excessive. The committee notes for the record that a thing this large ought not also be permitted to be fun, and reserves the right to revisit the matter when the next one arrives, larger still, in 2026, as these things always are.
Filed from the Margaret IV, somewhere with worse Wi-Fi than the Star of the Seas.