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Read and Listen to Text Documents Online

Easily hear your text documents as audio books and experience the joy of hands-free reading. Start listening to your favorite text documents online today with ReadLoudly.

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Read and Listen to Text to Speech Online

Listening to your Text files hands-free is simple with ReadLoudly. Here's how to get started:

Select the text file, or write anything you want to listen to. Our website allows you to easily upload and select the text document you want to listen to.

Once the text file is loaded, navigate to the page you want to listen to. Our intuitive interface allows you to quickly and easily navigate to any page in your document.

Click the play button to start listening. Our advanced text to voice technology will read your document out loud, allowing you to sit back, relax, and enjoy your documents hands-free.

With ReadLoudly, you can enjoy your favorite Text file without having to read them yourself. Start listening today and experience the joy of hands-free reading.

Read and Listen Anywhere

ReadLoudly.com offers a convenient platform for uploading various text files and converting them into flipbooks. Additionally, users can compose new text and instantly listen to it from any location and at any time. The platform also includes an integrated text to speech feature, enabling users to listen to their documents on any device.

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We take your privacy seriously, which is why we never store any documents on our server or share them without your permission. Rest assured that your data is safe and secure with ReadLoudly.com.

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ReadLoudly.com offers a personalized reading experience that allows for customization of font sizes, colors, and backgrounds. Additionally, our user-friendly interface facilitates seamless navigation between pages and sections.

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Once you're done reading or listening to a document, you can easily share the flipbook with anyone via email or social media. Spread awareness and enjoyment in no time!

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You don't need to download any software or plugins to use ReadLoudly.com. It's a hassle-free way to read and listen to eBook online.

Customizable Text-to-Speech

Choose from a range of voices, customize the speed and pitch to your liking, and let ReadLoudly.com read your text document to you. Personalize your reading experience with our customizable text-to-speech feature.

Site News and Updates

March 3rd, 2024.

Exciting news! We've enhanced our OCR capabilities, providing more accurate text recognition. Now, with OCR, we offer support for over a hundred languages, making your reading experience truly global. Explore a world of literature in your preferred language!

Say goodbye to language barriers! With our new language change option, navigating through diverse literary landscapes is now hassle-free. Choose your preferred language and immerse yourself in a seamless reading experience.

Discover a refined reading experience with our latest design changes on the most viewed viewer page. Enjoy a smoother user experience, cleaner reading interface, and cool icons that enhance your interaction with the content. Immerse yourself in the world of literature with style and simplicity!

January 24th, 2024

Embark on a seamless reading journey with our new Text Viewer—an immersive experience designed to focus solely on the textual content of PDFs. Enjoy features such as highlighting, bookmarking, and effortless reading, all tailored to enhance your interaction with the written word.

For the PDF Viewer, take control with precision using zoom in and zoom out buttons. In the Text Viewer, elevate your reading experience by customizing font sizes with easy-to-use buttons. Your preferences shape your unique reading adventure!

Explore the power of Text-to-Speech with our new caption section! Enable captions to view the current sentence you're reading or listening to. Dive into the immersive experience where each spoken word is highlighted with a distinct color. Experience reading in a whole new way!

December 12th, 2023

Tired of straining your eyes during late-night reading sessions? We've got you covered! Introducing our new Dark Mode feature—because your comfort matters. Enjoy a soothing, eye-friendly interface while delving into your favorite documents.

Exciting news! Now, you can share the joy of reading seamlessly. Whether it's a captivating PDF, an engaging eBook, or a valuable textbook, sharing is caring! Head to your dashboard's book section, hit the share option, enter your friend's email, and voilà—spread the reading love!

But wait, there's more! Our Share Option isn't just about sharing; it's your personal storage haven. Safeguard your cherished documents while creating a vibrant reading community. Update your experience now and let the reading revolution begin! 🚀

Nov 22th,2023

A new version for added flexibility. Store and access multiple books effortlessly, eliminating the need to upload the same book repeatedly. Enjoy reading or listening whenever you want!

• Login : Experience a streamlined and secure login process, ensuring easy access to your personalized features and content.
• Personal Dashboard : Your customized hub for an organized and efficient user experience, providing quick access to all your account settings and activities.
• Book Storage : Store and manage multiple books effortlessly, eliminating the need to re-upload, and enjoy a clutter-free reading environment.
• Highlight and Bookmark : Enhance your reading experience by highlighting and bookmarking specific sections, making it easy to revisit and engage with key content.
• Preference : Personalize your reading experience with color customization for highlights and bookmarks, allowing you to tailor the visual aspects to your preferences.

Sep 27th,2023

We're thrilled to introduce a game-changing update to the ReadLoudly PDF viewer that promises an even smoother reading experience. 📚

• Each page is now processed on our powerful servers, significantly reducing the load on your browser.
• Enjoy lightning-fast page loading and navigation, no matter the size of your PDF document.
• Say goodbye to slow rendering and hello to a seamless reading experience.

Sep 19th,2023

Enhance your reading experience with our new Text-to-Speech page. Now, you can easily convert written text or upload a TXT file and listen to it being read aloud. Whether it's articles, notes, or your own writings, our text-to-speech technology brings content to life, making it accessible and engaging.

Introducing our convenient Page Selection option! We've made it even easier to read books and documents. You can now select the specific pages you want to read, resulting in faster load times for larger books. Customize your reading experience and access content more efficiently.

Sep 13th,2023

We've added a handy option to Repeat a Single Sentence. Now, you can easily replay a specific sentence or passage while listening, ensuring you never miss a word of your favorite content.

Our team has been hard at work, addressing issues to improve your audio playback experience. Say goodbye to audio player glitches and enjoy smoother, uninterrupted listening.

Sep 6th,2023

We're excited to unveil our fresh, new logo! It represents our commitment to providing you with innovative and user-friendly reading and listening experiences.

Introducing the eBook Reader Page, where you can now listen to your eBooks directly. Immerse yourself in your favorite eBooks with our text-to-speech technology.

Transform your eBooks into interactive flipbooks effortlessly. Visit our eBook to Flipbook Page to view your eBook files in an engaging flipbook format.

Sep 1st,2023

We've upgraded to a more powerful server! This means your books will be ready for reading even faster than before. Enjoy quicker access to your content.

Your security is our priority. We've implemented enhancements to ensure your data and reading experience are more secure than ever.

Essay Reader: Online Text-to-Speech Tool

If you’re a college or high school student, you might constantly struggle with writing assignments. Whether it is homework or a task in the classroom, you can use the essay reading tool to write a better paper.

❓ Essay Reader: How to Use

• 🤔 Why Using the Tool?
• 💬 Reading out Loud Strategies
• 🔍 References

Essay readers are a part of assistive technology. You might be wondering how this online text speech tool works. So, here’s how to use it.

• Paste your essay to the window. Copy your essay sample (or a part of it) and paste it into the window. Our essay reader allows you to insert up to 5,000 characters at once.
• Choose the preferable voice. We have different variations of voices to read your essay. The options include choosing between male and female voices, picking the timbre, and setting the reading speed.
• Press the “READ MY ESSAY” button. Once you’ve clicked it, the tool will read your text for you.
• New essay. In case you want to listen to one more essay, press the button below. Alternatively, you can download the audio for the current text using the according link.

🤔 Why Using Our Essay Reader?

How does reading out loud benefit your essay? Reading something aloud makes the text appear differently in our minds. We can see it from different perspectives and identify what is lacking. Most people are used to hearing and pronouncing English rather than reading and writing it.

First, there might be typos or mistakes that are hard to identify. Although we don’t intend it, we might also miss a word or write it twice. If we look through the text, we tend to skip those mistakes. On the other hand, if you read it out loud, you’ll easily spot them.

It is also easier to check your paper’s readability if you read it aloud. Sometimes the sentences and the paragraphs are too long and complicated, which makes them hard to understand. Reading them out loud can help to fix the format, style and make your paper readable.

Your essay should make sense overall. If your essay is very informative or complicated, you might be focusing on delivering your points rather than its readability . So, check if your transitions from topic to topic are smooth and if your explanations make sense by reading them aloud.

Let’s find out how you can use our free essay reader to make your paper even better!

💬 Reading out Loud: 7 Best Strategies

If you have already tried reading the paper out loud but still don’t identify all the mistakes or typos, you probably have been doing it wrongly. Our mind tends to correct minor errors naturally. We gathered these strategies that you can follow for the best result.

• Try reading from a printed copy. It is easier to make notes by hand on a printed copy. These notes can help identify the most crucial parts of your paper so that you can spend more time on them.
• Follow the text by pointing at it. Following the text as you read helps to concentrate. Reading significant amounts of texts, you might quickly lose focus. By following the text pointing at it with your finger, you can also focus on grammar.
• Don’t read too fast. Try not to hurry while reading. The faster you read, the more mistakes our brain misses. Slow reading doesn’t mean spending more time. If you read fast, you might need to reread the same passage several times. So, slow reading can save you time.
• Read from the end to start. If you want to focus on scanning your essay for mistakes and typos, try reading from the end so you won’t focus on the whole paper but each sentence.
• Cover everything except for the passage you’re working on. If you still find it hard to concentrate on reading your paper, try covering the parts you are not working on at the moment. That can help you concentrate on a specific passage.
• Ask someone to read for you. Another option you can use is to ask someone to read it aloud. Another person can take a look at it from another perspective. Since you are the one who is working on the paper, you might get used to it and not see something others see. Try to make notes as they read it for you.
• Use technology. Technology helps us with our studying a lot these days. There are online timers, graders, grammar correctors, etc. If you don’t want to bother others, you can use text-to-speech technology to read the essay for you. It has a list of advantages. First, unlike humans, it doesn’t miss any mistakes. You can also control the speed, the number of reading times, and where to start or to finish.

Online Text-to-Speech Tool: How to Choose?

Here’s what you should take into account when choosing an online tool:

• Speed control. Can you adjust the speed or pause the reader? It may be crucial, especially if your text is long.
• Voice. Can you choose between the voices? Don’t they sound robotic? You can also switch between the voices so that you won’t get tired of listening to it several times.
• Text control. How does the software work? Can you upload the documents? Can you highlight the crucial parts?
• Accessibility. Does it work offline? Do you need to download and install it?
• Tool speed. How long do you need to wait to hear the result? What’s the volume of an essay that the tool can convert at once?

If you are wondering, “Where can I have an essay read to me?” you can check our essay reader out for free and see if it’s suitable for you!

✏️ Online Text-to-Speech Tool: FAQ

• You can spot typos, misspellings, and mistakes.
• You can check the paper’s readability.
• You can see if it is informative.

Try our essay reader to listen to your essay for free!

Updated: Oct 25th, 2023

🔗 References

• Teaching Techniques: Reading Aloud Artfully! | Scholastic
• 7 Powerful Public Speaking Tips From One of the Most-Watched TED Talks Speakers
• 10 Tips for Reading Aloud with Children
• What Are the Benefits of Reading Aloud? An Instructional
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The tool available here is designed to turn any text into speech. You can choose the voice type and its timbre to make it sound just the way you like. The tool can be useful for when you need to know how long it will take to red through your speech, how it sounds live, or when you need a quick voiceover.

Read My Essay to Me: Text-to-Speech Tool

Read My Essay to Me is a text to speech tool that transforms any typed text into audio. It is absolutely free.

How many times have you received a bad grade for a silly mistake? You’ve proofread the text several times, but a sentence or two are inconsistent with the rest of the text. You cannot notice it because you know your trail of thoughts. Reading aloud helps to evaluate the overall text quality. But when you read by yourself, it is hard to focus on the details.

Who will read my essay out loud? If you're looking for a free text-to-speech tool, you're in the right place! Try this "Read My Essay to Me" converter. Choose the voice you love and enjoy!

• 🤔 How to Use the Tool?

💬 How Do Essay Readers Work?

• ✅ The Key Benefits
• 🤗 Who Can Use Text to Speech?

🔗 References

🤔 read my essay to me: how to use.

Below is a short instruction that explains how to use the text-to-speech tool above.

Copy the text from your document and insert it into the respective field.

Select the voice you prefer to vocalize your text from the drop-down list box.

Once you’ve pasted the text and selected the natural reader, press the “Listen” button.

If you need to go back and listen to a different text, there is a special button for this purpose.

You’ve probably heard of online and offline tools that can read a text aloud. So, what is Text to Speech in technical terms? Text to Speech (often abbreviated as TTS) is a form of assistive technology . Read My Essay to Me is one of TTS systems used to voice over any printed text online.

The Text to Speech tool works on any personal digital device. There are applications designed for each mobile operating system (that work on iPhone or Android). Alternatively, you can use an online tool in Chrome or any other browser you prefer. These tools can even read web pages aloud.

The computer generates the voice in TTS, but you can select the reading speed and the speaker. There are several variants of male and female voices entitled by the respective names. The voice quality depends on the tool, but many of them sound human. Some even feature a child’s voice for you to listen to. There are even robot voices that sound like children speaking.

The tool highlights the words as they are read aloud. It allows you to track the reading and is especially beneficial for foreign language learners.

Some Text to Speech tools can read out loud from an image. This technology is called optical character recognition or OCR. For example, you can take a photo of a street sign or a public notice and listen to it through the TTS app or website.

As we have mentioned before, Text to Speech tool can help people who learn a foreign language. But it can also facilitate the lives of those who have problems with writing, editing, and focusing. According to computer science research , such assistive technology is helpful for people with dyslexia. It motivates them to read by making the process more enjoyable and comfortable. The case study performed during the same research indicated an improved fluency and comprehension in the control group.

✅ Read My Essay: the Benefits

We suggest you try out Read My Essay to Me while proofreading your writing. This TTS tool has critical benefits, notably:

A few more benefits:

• It helps to detect and correct mistakes. It is always better to give your already-written paper to a friend or relative to read it for typos. Imagine you have a friend who always can find a half-an-hour to read your work aloud for you. Amazing, right? How many A+’s have you missed due to poor proofreading? Insert your essay into this TTS tool and listen to it while cooking or cleaning. Your ear will pick the places that deserve corrections.

It helps to evaluate the plot attractiveness or the content consistency. In the course of creating an essay, you get distracted by the need to type on a keyboard or write on paper. You look up the right words and return to the introduction to check your thesis statement . In a word, you do a whole lot of things that distract you from the beauty of the text. The only way to make it sparkle is to reread it.

Still, you are familiar with what you wanted to say. Our mind tricks us into believing that other people will understand us just as intended. But if you listen to your essay read by a different person, you will find many passages that require rewriting .

• It shows if the argumentation is clear and sufficiently grounded. In the follow-up to the previous point, argumentation must be complete. Read My Essay to Me can show you where your evidence is insufficient or needs more substantial arguments.

🤗 Read My Essay to Me: Who Can Use the Tool?

Who else should find out how to use a Text to Speech converter? We believe that anyone can find a practical application to this tool, but the following groups of people will find it helpful strait away.

• Auditory learners. If it refers to you, 100% that you are aware of it. People with a well-developed auditory perception memorize information better when they listen to it (rather than read, write down, or see it as a phenomenon). Listen to your reading assignment via the tool and upgrade your academic performance!
• People with dyslexia. Such people have problems with reading, although they are normally intelligent. They are affected to various degrees. Still, TTS tools can help people with problems in spelling words, low reading speed, “sounding out” words in their heads, or pronouncing them while reading aloud.
• People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or other emotional disabilities. Autism Speaks reported that almost 25% of people with ASD are low-functioning or non-verbal communicators. They can use TTS as a voice dictation tool for writing assistance or a real-life conversation simulator.
• Those who lack time for traditional reading. Have you been assigned a 300-page book by the next week? If it is in the public domain, you can upload it into Read My Essay to Me and listen to it while doing your domestic chores. It will be handy for literature that is unavailable in audiobook format.

❓ Read My Essay FAQ

❓ how can i get my essay read to me.

• Copy your essay from the file on your device.
• Paste it into the respective field of Read My Essay to Me tool.
• Select the voice (male or female in some variations) you’d like to listen to.
• Press the button below the text to convert it into an audio version.

❓ How can I convert text to audio for free?

To convert text into audio, you have to have an internet connection and any browser installed on your computer or mobile device. Go to Read My Essay to Me and insert the text in question into the blank field. Press the Read My Essay button to listen to its audio version.

❓ What is the best text to speech tool?

There are dozens of Text-to-Speech tools available for all sorts of mobile devices and computers, including all possible operational systems. Still, the best free TTS tool is Read My Essay to Me. It is relatively simple. It has the widest choice of voices and an unlimited number of words in the text.

❓ Is there a website that will read a text to me?

Read My Essay to Me will read any typed text of any length for you. It is intuitively clear for a user of any experience level. You can choose the preferred voice that will vocalize your essay. You can insert any text, from a one-page paper to a hundred-page book, since words are limitless.

• Enhancing the learning process through text-to-speech technologies
• What are some types of assistive devices - National Institute of Health
• Types of Assistive Technology | Web Access
• Strategies for Teachers - Dyslexia Help - University of Michigan
• What Is Auditory Learning Style? Definition and Strategies

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Add members through email or class code, share documents to a class, and manage or delete classes and members

Neural Speech Synthesis uses deep machine learning to study human voices, speech patterns, intonations and other linguistic expressions.

Neural deep learning has allowed AI voices to become extremely natural, and mimic human speech. Many AI voices now can be used in place of human voices depending on the use.

Dyslexia and other reading-based learning disabilities are most common among students. NaturalReader text-to-speech makes learning more accessible by assisting with any reading, taking tests and promoting independence.

For most students, learning does not stop when school ends. NaturalReader EDU enables students to be more independent and assists with learning at home. Whether they’re doing homework, reading at home, or just surfing the web, our Chrome Extension and Mobile Application are always available.

NaturalReader AI Text To Speech is only for personal use. Personal use means that only you the individual purchaser may use for your own private listening. Audio files created with NaturalReader AI Text To Speech cannot be used publicly (including on websites or YouTube videos), commercially, or otherwise redistributed in any way. Only you may create the audio files for only yourself to enjoy and they cannot be utilized or made available to any other systems or people.

Please keep in mind that 'internal' or 'non-profit' use (such as for messaging systems or training videos) nonetheless requires a commercial license to allow redistribution of the audio content.

For any non-personal use, please check out NaturalReader AI Voice Generator, which is a separate application.

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Writing an essay can be a hefty task for students, especially when they have multiple assignments. Similarly, for teachers, reading essays can be a time-consuming ordeal. To make your life easier, if you are looking for a TTS reader that can read my essay to me, you are in the right place. 

Today’s fast-paced digital world demands students and professionals to leverage advanced technology. Among the many modern tools, text-to-speech readers are emerging as a game-changing technology for readers, writers, and creators.

How can I use a TTS to read my essay to me?

A TTS reader or a text-to-speech reader uses artificial intelligence to convert written text into spoken words. For example, if you have an essay typed out in front of you, you can use a TTS reader to read the whole essay for you out loud.

Some software have built-in TTS. For example, in Microsoft Word, you can use the Read Aloud option to have the software read your text out aloud.

Adobe Acrobat’s PDF reader also has an embedded text-to-speech, or “ PDF-to-speech ,” option called Read Out Loud that can read your essay out to you.

Additionally, you can also use software like Typecast to read your school assignments and essays. Through the range of characters it offers, Typecast makes the boring task of listening to assignments fun. For example, you can use a cartoon character’s voice to read your essay to you. It will break the monotony and create a bit of an enjoyable experience.

Also, by listening to your essay in a different voice, you can spot any mistakes or typos that you couldn’t pick on in your reading.

Similarly for teachers, listening to the essay out loud can also make the task of marking the assignments easier and quicker.

Educators who use online learning software can also utilize TTS in course content creation including assignments and lesson plans.  

Should I use an essay reader?

An essay reader or a TTS tool is a great option for students, teachers, and e-learning-industry workers. It can enhance your writing and reviewing experience.

Here are some of the benefits of using an essay reader that can read my essay to me:

• Efficiency : Being a software program, an essay reader has the power to read text at a faster rate compared to humans. Using such a tool can save you time and make your essay-writing process more efficient.
• Better reception : In today’s fast-paced world, people are losing their attention spans. Listening, rather than reading, can prove to be more receptive for students and teachers. 
• Proofreading : As a last step to your writing, proofreading your essay is important to ensure no typos and mistakes are left. By using an essay reader, you can listen to your essay’s text out loud so you can catch any missed errors.
• Fun experience : Many TTS readers offer options to choose various styles of speech for reading your text out loud. By choosing these fun options, you can convert a boring task into a fun experience. 
• Adaptability : Often, students study at libraries or cafes. These places can be noisy at times, making it hard to focus on written content. In such a situation, using a TTS reader can be a helpful option in reviewing your essay.

What is a narrator’s voice?

TTS readers come in various flavors. Some traditional readers offer a robotic voice that reads your text to you. Other, more advanced, text-to-voice synthesizers often offer a library of narrators to choose from.

You can choose a male or female voice, and even a kid’s voice or an old man’s voice. If you are using narrative software like Typecast, you can even modify the tone and pitch of your narrator according to your preferences.

The purpose of a narrator’s voice is not just limited to reading your assignments out loud, rather, teachers can also use these characters to create lesson plans. Having different characters as part of a storyline can make the lesson much more creative and engaging.

Free online TTS

For students, it’s often hard to afford expensive software or text-to-speech generators. Fortunately, many online free and unlimited text-to-speech software are available.

One cool software that offers free access to over 400+ characters is Typecast. For each character, you can also choose a different speaking style and mood as well. In the Typecast dashboard, you can copy and paste your essay content and click the play button for it to read my essay to me. 

The pro version unlocks additional features such as emotions, speed, pace, intonation, tempo, and pitch. 

Though the free version is sufficient for students who want to read my essay to me, the pro version can be beneficial for teachers and educators in creating engaging lesson plans. By choosing from a number of characters and adjusting their tone and style based on each character’s personality, teachers can easily create fun storylines.

TTS for accessibility 

TTS readers are also beneficial for students with visual impairment or blindness. Often neurodivergent kids such as those with ADHD or Autism can find it hard to read long forms of written text. In such a case, listening to their essays and assignments can help with proofreading.

Similarly, those with physical disabilities such as mobility impairments, Cerebral Palsy, and musculoskeletal disorders can find it hard to hold or interact with written text. Through TTS, they can focus on listening to the text while staying hands-free.

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Free Text To Speech Reader

Instantly reads out loud text & pdf with natural sounding voices online - works out of the box. drop the text and click play..

Drag text or pdf files to the text-box, or directly type/paste in text. Select language and click Play. Remembers text and caret position between sessions. Works on Chrome and Safari, desktop and mobile. Enjoy listening :)

Best Text to Speech Online

• Online speech synthesizer, single click to read out loud any text
• Listen instead of reading
• Multiple languages and voices
• Reads PDF files too

TTSReader-X

• Chrome extension
• Listen to ANY website without leaving the page
• Adds a 'play' functionality to Chrome
• Clean page for readability and / or print

Try it Now for FREE

TTSReader / Android

• Podcast any written content
• Save data - works offline too

Get it on the Play store

Fun, Online, Free. Listen to great content

Drag, drop & play (or directly copy text & play). That’s it. No downloads. No logins. No passwords. No fuss. Simply fun to use and listen to great content. Great for listening in the background. Great for proof-reading. Great for kids and more. Learn more, including a YouTube we made, here .

Multilingual, Natural Voices

We facilitate high-quality natural-sounding voices from different sources. There are male & female voices, in different accents and different languages. Choose the voice you like, insert text, click play to generate the synthesized speech and enjoy listening.

Exit, Come Back & Play from Where You Stopped

TTSReader remembers the article and last position when paused, even if you close the browser. This way, you can come back to listening right where you previously left. Works on Chrome & Safari on mobile too. Ideal for listening to articles.

Better than Podcasts

In many aspects, synthesized speech has advantages over recorded podcasts. Here are some: First of all - you have unlimited - free - content. That includes high-quality articles and books, that are not available on podcasts. Second - it’s free. Third - it uses almost no data - so it’s available offline too, and you save money. If you like listening on the go, as while driving or walking - get our free Android Text Reader App .

Read PDF Files, Texts & Websites

TTSReader extracts the text from pdf files, and reads it out loud. Also useful for simply copying text from pdf to anywhere. In addition, it highlights the text currently being read - so you can follow with your eyes. If you specifically want to listen to websites - such as blogs, news, wiki - you should get our free extension for Chrome

Commercial-Ready

Use our apps for commercial purposes. Generated audio can be used for YouTubes, games, telephony and more. To export the generated speech into high-quality audio files, you can either use our Android app , or record them, as explained here . Read more for ttsreader’s commercial terms. Read more

We love to hear your feedback. Here’s what users said about us:

The new male voice is great. It is quite melodic and natural, much more so then other sites I have tried to use. This is a GREAT tool, well done thanks!

ttsreader.com

This product works amazingly well. I use it to edit my books, pasting in a chapter, having it read back to me while I edit the original. Cuts down my book edit time by over 50% !

Multiple voices from different nationalities. Easy to use interface. Paste text and it will speak. Can create mp3 files.

ttsreader for Android

Great app. Can handle long texts, something other apps can’t. Highly recommended!

What a great App! exactly what i needed, a reader to provide me content efficiently.

ttsreader-x for Chrome

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Android Gets the Best In Class Websites Reader

Android Gets Best In Class Websites Reader - With Latest Update to TTSReader Pro Start listening now for FREE Exciting news, as Android’s TTSReader Pro app, has been updated to use TTSReaderX’s algorithms to extract only the relevant text out of websites. This is super important for a text-to-speech website reader, as otherwise the reader would start reading out loud all the ads, menus, sharing buttons and more clutter.

Commercial Licensing & Terms

on May 10, 2017

When is a Commercial License Necessary Using ttsreader.com within your institution If you are a company, or organization, using ttsreader.com, please use our paypal donate link. If you are a personal user, or an educational institute - ttsreader.com is free, no need to even donate - you are welcome, of course :). Using the generated speech for commercial purposes Recording and using the audio generated by TTSReader in a commercial application (ie publishing)

Export Speech to Audio Files

How to Record Audio Played on PC (Speakers) for Free Need to record audio from TTSReader, YouTube or other? Here’s how in a few simple steps (includes screenshots). No need to record the speakers - you can record the audio from within the pc itself. It will be of higher audio quality - as it’s the original digital signal, clear and without ambient noise. Also, no need to purchase a software for that.

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Read My Paper to Me. Text-to-Speech Online Tool for Free

Do you find yourself drifting off when reading academic papers? Do you prefer audiobooks? Are you a big fan of podcasts? If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions, we have great news for you! You came to the right place.

You have probably noticed that reading your work out loud helps you improve. It’s easier to find mistakes and decide if your words sound good. However, doing it yourself ruins concentration. What if you miss important details?

If you don’t have a friend nearby to help out, you can always use Read My Paper to Me!

• ️🙌 5 Key Benefits
• ️⚙️ How to Use
• ️🎓 Text to Speech in Learning

🙌 Read My Paper to Me: 5 Key Benefits

New perspective

Get a completely different angle on your work. Imagine as though you are listening to a story narrator – does it sound good?

Evaluate your flow

The ‘flow’ is the sequence of ideas and arguments in your text. Hearing your points presented back to you allows you to evaluate the logic in them. If your ideas are sound, the words will flow seamlessly.

Hear your mistakes

You write a sentence, read it over, and you think it looks alright. Then you say the words out loud, and you realize you’ve made at least three errors. Listening to your work will help you identify mistakes quickly and easily!

Get ready for your oral presentation

Maybe you don’t have an essay to write – instead, you have to give a speech. Hearing someone else read it out to you is extremely important. You’ll know immediately if it sounds engaging, and if there are things you need to change!

You don’t need anyone else!

Instead of waiting around for a friend to spare you some time, just use Read My Paper to Me. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s free!

⚙️ How to Use Text-to-Speech Tool?

It couldn’t be easier!

• Insert your text. Copy the text you want to be read and paste it into the window. Unlike many other tools that you will find on the internet, there is no word limit.
• Choose a voice. Click on the drop-down menu and select your preferred narrator . Each will give your text a slightly different feel!
• Listen! When you are ready, press the “Play” button. Now all you need to do is enjoy your experience! Remember, you can pause at any time.
• Need to listen to a new text? Press on the “Read New Text” button. You can also delete your first text and replace it with a new one. Both options are available!

🎓 Text-to-Speech Online Tools in Learning

We believe that education should be accessible for all. With the development of the internet more and more learning methods are becoming available. Online text-to-speech tools are one of those methods.

So how are text-to-speech tools revolutionizing learning everywhere?

Well for one, they are opening up new horizons for those who previously struggled with reading texts. For example, people with dyslexia now have a quick and easy way of checking their work for mistakes. There is no more need to struggle in search of the right reading fonts. Now they can easily listen to their words with the press of a button.

Text-to-speech tools change the education system for many more. Those suffering from impaired vision can enjoy texts previously inaccessible. Foreign language learners have a tool to help them practice their listening skills. And the truth is, some of us simply don’t have the time to sit down and read. Now even those always on the move can access the wealth of information online. Text-to-speech tools are especially useful to those of us who are auditory learners . If that caught your attention, you might want to refer to the information provided below.

Tips & Strategies for Auditory Learners

Do you remember the questions from the very beginning? Here, let us ask you again – do you find yourself drifting off when reading academic papers? Do you prefer audiobooks? Are you a big fan of podcasts? If you find yourself answering ‘yes’ to these, we think it is safe to say that you are an auditory learner. What does that mean, you ask?

Every single one of us has a particular learning style that suits us most. Some find it easier to watch documentaries, while others would greatly prefer to read a book. And then some are very good at remembering spoken information. There are very many learning styles and learning style models. However, generally speaking, there are three main ones – visual, kinesthetic, and auditory.

The three styles reflect three of the human senses – sight, touch, and hearing. Though being an auditory learner does not mean that you have particularly good ears. It simply means that you are better at retaining information that you have received through listening.

If you think that this sounds like you, you will find these learning tips particularly helpful!

• Record your classes. Next time you go to your lecture or class, set your phone to silent and turn on the recording software. This way you can always get back to it later. Just make sure that it’s alright with your teachers first!
• Ask questions. This can be intimidating, but asking questions is one of the best ways for auditory learners to remember information. Engaging in conversation will also be a great learning experience.
• Use text-to-speech tools. Whether you are proofreading your own work or reading an article, you will find it much easier to listen to the words. You can even comment along as you listen. No one will judge.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat! Auditory learners memorize information best after hearing it. Use text-to-speech tools to replay texts back to you several times. This way you will comprehend them way better!

❓ Read My Paper to Me: FAQ

❓ how does reading aloud improve writing.

When you hear your work read to you out loud, you find yourself in the position of your audience. This is where you will figure out if you can connect with your text, or if it still needs work. Reading out loud also allows you to check your rhythm and pace, find skipped words and sentences, and hear mistakes.

❓ Is there a site that reads text to you?

There are plenty of websites online that are made specifically for this purpose. Of course, some are better than others. Some have a wide range of features, while others have only the basics. Some require a subscription to unlock extra options. Only you can decide which site to use.

❓ Are there apps that will read to you?

As with websites, many apps are made for reading texts. There are programs designed for use on your computer, also known as desktop apps. There are also apps that you can find for your tablet or mobile device. You can find both free and paid text-to-speech apps.

❓ What is the best text to speech tool?

You can find a lot of text-to-speech tools on the internet these days. The selection is far and wide – so why should you use Read My Paper to Me? For one, there is no character or word limit. You can have the entirety of War and Peace read to you in one sitting. There is also a large selection of voices that you can use. After all, your auditory experience should be of the highest quality!

📍 References

• What makes Text-to-speech technology so effective?
• Speech Synthesis for Educational Technology
• The Use of Synthetic Speech in Language Learning Tools
• What Is Auditory Learning Style? Definition and Strategies
• The Auditory Learning Style - ThoughtCo

Read My Essay: Free Speech Tool

Sometimes when you finish working on your paper, you want to hear someone reading it aloud. The reason for that is because you want to make sure it sounds as good as it reads. Our free and easy-to-use Read My Essay tool can help you with this task. It’s straightforward:

• You just copy and paste your essay into the box of our free speech tool;
• Click the button;
• Now listen to your work and evaluate how it sounds using Read My Essay tool.

Read My Essay: Q&A

Text-to-speech converters in learning.

Not everyone is born to be a natural reader. Text-to-speech converters help many students in learning because they can open new horizons for those who have difficulty reading or learning:

✅ Those with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that causes problems with writing, spelling, and reading. So, listening to books and texts can be a great alternative to task.

✅ Those learning a new language. When you improve your listening skills, you will better understand the native speaker. Plus, by listening and imitating someone else’s speech, you can significantly improve your pronunciation.

✅ Those with impaired vision . This group of people can also benefit from text-to-speech converters. Listening to tasks, text, books can allow a visually impaired person to participate in the learning process normally.

✅ Auditory learners. Recent studies show that people can develop learning preferences. Nevertheless, most people can use both methods. Those who better understand information by listening are called auditory learners . These types of people can use audio materials to boost their learning abilities.

We have some recommendations to assist in learning:

• Choose the voice that you like and can understand better: simply because it can get challenging to absorb information and enjoy listening if the agent is unpleasant.
• Listen to the text more than once. Ideally, you should try to listen to it at least two times while focusing on structure, argumentation, formation of sentences.
• Listen to other people's essays and audiobooks because it is the best way to widen your overall knowledge and get new information while combining it with other errands.

Text-to-Speech Converters: History

It might seem that computers appeared not so long ago, or it belongs to the far future with robots and other futuristic objects. Nevertheless, it can even be challenging to determine if it is a voice recording or a speech synthesizer. Indeed, technology develops quickly. However, speaking machines have an extensive history starting in the 18th century. Here’s a brief timeline for the speech synthesis technology:

1769: Wolfgang von Kempelen created one of the first mechanical speaking machines . It used the bagpipe to produce noises similar to human speech.

1770: A scientist from Christian Kratzenstein builds a mechanical version of the human vocal system. He later wrote a book called Mechanism of Human Language with a Description of a Speaking Machine.

1837: English physicist inventor Charles Wheatstone rediscovered a version of the von Kempelen speaking machine. He was fascinated with music and sounds.

1928: American scientist Homer W. Dudley develops a speech analyzer called Vocoder . Dudley later turns Vocoder into Voder, a speech synthesizer operated with the keyboard.

1940: Frank Cooper developed a system called Pattern Playback. It can generate speech sounds from their frequency spectrum.

1953: American scientists Walter Lawrence creates PAT, the synthesizer that makes speech sounds by combining four, six, and later eight frequencies.

1958: MIT scientist George Rosen created the first text-to-speech synthesizer. The 1960s/1970s: A scientist from Bell Laboratories named Cecil Coker dedicates his time to better speech synthesis methods.

1978: Texas Instruments came up with a TMC0281 speech converter toy called Speak&Spell.

1984: Apple computer creates a Macintosh with a built-in MacInTalk speech synthesizer .

2001: AT&T produced Natural Voices. The technology is used in online applications and websites that can read emails out loud.

2011: Apple introduces the Siri app to iPhones, an intelligent voice helper to their smartphones. Currently, Siri is available on most Apple devices - Macbook, iPad, iWatch, etc.

2014: Microsoft releases Skype Translator that can automatically translate speech from English to 40 languages.

2015: Amazon comes up with a voice software called Alexa .

2016: Google releases Google Assistant. Google later incorporated it into smart Google Home technology.

Updated: Apr 5th, 2024

References:

• What Are the Benefits of Reading Aloud? An Instructional
• The Evolution of Text-to-Speech Voice Assistive Technology
• History and Development of Speech Synthesis
• Does Use of Text-to-Speech and Related Read-Aloud Tools Improve Reading Comprehension for Students with Reading Disabilities? A Meta-Analysis
• What makes Text-to-speech technology so effective?

How it works

• Copy your text and paste it in the textarea.
• Select preferred voice.
• Press “Read My Essay” button. Now you can play or pause reading of a text.
• “Read new essay” button allows you to reload the form, so you can read new essay.

For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript.

Essay Reader out Loud for Students

Follow the 4 simple steps below to use the tool:

• Select the voice you prefer.
• Select the audio speed.
• Paste your text in the field provided.
• Click the tab “Read essay.”

Do you want your essay to be read aloud? Try our free text-to-speech tool and proofread your academic paper efficiently.

This essay reader out loud allows you to hear your essay being read aloud and correct silly mistakes you may have missed during editing. Hearing how your paper sounds helps you analyze the general quality. When reading by yourself, it may be difficult to focus on detailed aspects of your paper.

🔊 Why Read an Essay out Loud?

• 💬 Reading out Loud: 6 Tips
• 📻 How to Choose a Text-to-Speech Tool?

🔗 References

After completing your academic paper or article, you should always read it out aloud. It is a part of editing your work since you will easily listen to how your paper sounds.

Why is it good to read aloud?

There are many benefits to revising your paper this way:

• You will know if there are logical gaps or inconsistent arguments .
• At times, your paper might be too wordy or have grammatical errors. Reading it aloud will highlight such issues while setting the right tone.
• Your brain will process the text from a new perspective , and you will notice other silly mistakes you might have left out.
• Listening to your paper makes it easy to understand the flow of ideas . Flipping pages back and forth is cumbersome, and you may miss detailed information that needs correction. But listening allows you to identify gaps and paragraph transitions that need to be amended.
• The voice will give you an idea of how your readers will perceive your article .

💬 Reading out Loud: 6 Best Tips

Below are some strategies of reading out loud that you can use if you are a college or high school student.

However, you can eliminate the hassle of the entire reading process and take advantage of our free tool.

Our text-to-speech converter functions well with your smartphone, PC, tablet, or laptop .

It is an advantageous option that presents your text as it is without sugar-coating the errors.

📻 Essay Reader Aloud: How to Choose It?

When it comes to choosing a text-to-speech tool, it is imperative to consider some parameters. Knowing your options helps you identify the right tool that works effectively.

Here are some aspects you need to think about when choosing an essay reader aloud for your paper:

• Online access . Is the tool accessible online, or do you need to upload the entire file? The online tool requires a stable Internet connection since it functions within a web page.
• Free or paid . Another factor is to establish if the tool is free or if you must pay a subscription fee to use it. Students prefer free tools to get accurate results at no cost.
• Registration . Does the tool require registration? Many students don't like the registration process because it is time-consuming. So, you can go for an easily accessible online tool where you can copy and paste your text on the go without the hassle of registering your personal details.
• Volume . Check if the tool has volume control features ad if there is a pause or rewind button.
• Voice . Can you select a male or female voice? Are the voices natural or contain pitch variations?
• Speech tempo . How long does the tool take to read text per minute? Can you alter the speed to your preference?
• Pop-up ads . Some tools might have annoying pop-up ads, which can be distracting. So, you can choose a converter tool with zero to fewer ads.

Thank you for reading this article!

Note that you can also use our free essay reducer , paraphraser , and title generator at different stages of work on your assignment.

❓ Essay Reader FAQ

❓ how do i get my essay to read out loud.

If you want to read your essay out loud, you can ask a family member or friend to help you read your essay aloud. The most effective option is our free text-to-speech tool, and your essay will be read aloud in a voice you love. Just paste your text into the field, select your preferred voice and speed, and press the 'read essay' button.

❓ Is there any free text-to-speech tool?

Essay reader out loud is a free text-to-speech tool that converts your academic paper into audio. It is effective, and you can select a specific voice to vocalize your paper at a convenient speed.

❓ How long will it take to read my essay?

This tool reads 50-60 words per half-minute and 100-120 words per minute. It uses a natural oral speech tempo, but you can select a higher or lower speed. Therefore, the completion time for reading largely depends on your paper's length.

❓ How to choose an essay reader out loud?

There are several aspects to consider when selecting an essay reader out loud. Is it a free tool or paid subscription? Do you have to register before using and does it have annoying ads? Choose a tool that allows selecting a voice, processes large text volumes, and gives speech tempo options.

• Enhancing the learning process through text-to-speech
• Does Use of Text-to-Speech and Related Read-Aloud Tools Improve Reading Comprehension for Students with Reading Disabilities?
• The Benefits of Speech-to-Text Technology in All Classrooms
• Reading Aloud - UNC Writing Center
• University Writing Center (UWC) - Reading Aloud
• How Does Reading Aloud Improve Writing

Put a stop to deadline pressure, and have your homework done by an expert.

Read My Paper To Me

Read my essay: how to use a text-to-speech converter.

You may be wondering, “I've got someone to do my homework but is there an app that can read my essay to me?” Well, a text-to-speech converter is all you need. Read on to find out how. 

If you’ve been working on the essay for a long time, you may miss some mistakes and inaccuracies. So, this tool may help spot these mistakes and improve the paper’s readability.

The Read My Paper to Me tool saves you from proofreading and editing your paper alone. All you need to do is to comfortably sit down and listen if your essay’s readability needs any improvements.

How Does a Read Essay Out Loud Work?

Read Essay to Me is a page that reads out text aloud. It has a speech synthesizer program that repeats the words and phrases out aloud of any entered document.

With this, you can “read my college assignment ” for free painstakingly. 

How To Use an Essay Reader

Enter the full text into the main text area. You can also use the Read Me My Essay feature by entering the address of the web page whose document you wish to read out for free to you. To start the reading, press the “read text to me” option. It is fast and saves you time.

The Read My Essay to Me page enables you to pause, cancel or clear the current text. You don’t need to worry about the voices – they are natural, with some being masculine and others feminine.

If you still proofreading help, our writing experts and professional editors at AssignmentGeek are ready to help with these tasks.

Read to me: Make your devices read aloud

Table of Contents

Choosing a text-to-speech platform with strong "read to me" capabilities, like Speechify, will ensure you're getting the most out of your program.

If you are looking for a way to convert text files, docs, PDF files , and web pages into spoken text, then look no further than Speechify. This is a program that has become popular among business professionals, people with visual problems, and even learners with disabilities, such as dyslexia . With numerous formats available, access to a convenient Chrome extension, and an exceptional API that features a high-quality OCR that leads to completely accurate character recognition, it is easy to see why Speechify has become the most popular TTS converter on all platforms, including iOS and Android .

Read to me: How to get text read aloud

If you want to use Speechify to read aloud, there are a few key points to keep in mind:

• This is a program with a mobile app that is perfect for people with visual and learning disabilities.
• You can even use Speechify to listen to HTML pages, storybooks, docs, and social media posts in a foreign language. There are dozens of languages available.
• You can take advantage of premium voices through the pro plan. There are customizable options and shortcuts that allow you to adjust the reading speed, pitch, volume, and more.

Simply put, if you want to use the best program available, Speechify is your best choice.

Use text-to-speech for your docs

Speechify has a wide variety of productivity tools that can make it easier for you to convert your docs into text. You get access to instant translation, you can screenshot your documents, you can catch typos, and you can even select the page number you want read out loud to you!

While you can read about the features all day, it would be better to take a closer look at a few YouTube videos that will show you this amazing program in action.  Watch the video here!

Clearly, the program is very easy to use. While the premium features are amazing, you don’t have to commit to the program immediately! You can use the free plan, take advantage of a free trial of the premium features, and then decide if you want to go with this program! It is easily one of the top text-to-speech programs on the market today.

How can I get text read to me?

If you want to get your text read to you, it is a very easy process. All you need to do is write your message directly into the box or select the text file (or PDF) you want to get read to you.

After that, you simply need to select the voice you want to use! If you decide to use Speechify, there are hundreds of voices available, and you can select the best one to meet your needs. You can also customize a variety of features, including the volume, the reading speed, and the pitch. With Speechify, you can increase the rate of speech to nine times faster than the speed at which you can read!

Is there a website that will read my essay to me?

Yes, there are a handful of essays that will read your essay to you. While you might want to start with a free program, you need to go with a premium program if you want the best results available. There are a lot of people who really enjoy using Speechify because of all of the features available. There are a lot of productivity tools that can help you not only write your essay but also convert it into spoken text. This is even a great way for you to catch some typos in your essay. 

If you are interested in getting free text-to-speech, you might want to start with the free trial of the premium version of Speechify. This is a great program that gives you a chance to try out the premium version for a few days before you decide if you want to upgrade from the free version to the premium one.

What is the best free text-to-speech?

If you are looking for the best free program for text-to-speech, there are a few options available. They include:

• Wideo: This is arguably the best free option if you are looking for a program that can help you convert text into speech. It comes with a wide variety of features and is very easy to use. All you need to do is take the text and paste it into the box. Or, you can upload a text file.
• TTSReader: Another program you may want to try is called TTSReader . This is a program that is very easy to learn, but the voice is a bit robotic . As a result, you may not like the way it sounds. You may want to give it a try if you are looking for a free program. 
• iSpeech: If you are looking for a free program that is compatible with Apple products, you may want to take a closer look at this option. It does give you access to a few voices, but it does not have nearly as many productivity tools as some of the premium choices. 
• NaturalReader: Finally, you may want to take a closer look at NaturalReader as well. This is a program that is known for its speed and efficiency, but the quality of the voices leaves something to be desired. 

Remember that even though these free options can be cost-effective, it is always better for you to go with a premium option if you plan on using this feature a lot. For example, you may want to upgrade from the free version of Speechify to the premium one. That way, you get the most out of the program, and you do not leave any features on the table. 

How much does Speechify cost?

If you are looking for a cost-effective program, you should take a closer look at Speechify. It is important to note that Speechify does not cost anything to try. There is a free version available, and you are never asked to upgrade from the free version. On the other hand, if you want to take advantage of all the features available to you, you should upgrade to the premium version. There is a free trial that will last for three days, and it gives you an opportunity to try out all of the premium features. Then, you can decide if you want to upgrade to the premium version, which costs $139 per year.

• Previous The 5 best alternatives to ReadSpeaker
• Next The benefits of reading to children

Cliff Weitzman

Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.

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Read My Essay to Me: FREE Text-to-Speech Tool

Our online text-to-speech tool transforms any typed text into audio. It is absolutely free!

By clicking Read My Essay to me you agree to our Terms

We Can Turn Your Paper Into a Perfect One

Read my essay out loud to me, what is an essay reader tool.

Now let’s explain what these tools that read my essay aloud are. The technical term for the app is a text to speech tool, abbreviated as TTS. As assistive technology, Read My Paper to Me will voice over any written text you paste into the provided form.

Another advantage of these tools is that they run on various digital devices, including cell phones, tablets, and PCs. Moreover, specialized apps allow any mobile operating system (typically Android or iPhone) to load the tool. All browsers can open the free essay reader without problems and can even transform entire websites into speech.

Websites like PapersOwl feature various free tools to help clients improve their paper composition skills. They can also write your college essay for a fee. Once you receive the ordered piece, you can check its flow and consistency by uploading it in the field specified for text reading.

If you wonder how the Read Me My Essay app works, you should know that your device will generate the sound through TTS. You can adjust the speed according to your needs and select a speaker. Though some voices are robotic, the quality is superior and humanlike in most cases.

As the machine read essay, words get highlighted. Advanced variants can also read wording from images. This technique is known as OCR or optical character recognition. Overall, these tools assist people in tracking reading and are super convenient for mastering a foreign language.

Why Use Our Essay Reader Aloud?

Some of you may doubt the use of these tools, so we wanted to pinpoint their purpose. According to scientists, reading out loud affects other brain segments and is more objective than reading the text silently. Our minds react to auditory stimuli differently, depending on who reads the material. Thus, we can see the essay from another perspective and identify what is missing.

The key reason to use our Read My Essay to Me is the ability to spot typos and mistakes that slipped through your fingers. For instance, you might have missed a preposition or written the same word twice. When looking at texts, we tend to neglect these errors, which is not the case with speech.

Another advantage of Read My Paper to Me is that it enhances readability. Sometimes, we write lengthy sentences and disregard their complexity. When someone unfamiliar with the topic will read your paper out loud, they might struggle to grasp your points. Long and complicated sentences and paragraphs impede reading, and that’s not what you want to achieve with your writing. Hence, you’ll get the chance to fix the format and emotional impact to make your work legible and easy to understand.

Any written work must sound logical and have a seamless flow of thought. But even if you pay to do your essay , unintentional mistakes can occur. In the case of complex reports, focusing on delivering your arguments and examples can blur the paper’s readability. The TTC will help you improve your transitions and evaluate your explanations.

Finally, the text to speech converter can ease the lives of the disabled. For example, for those who have problems with writing or dyslexia, assistive technology can be of exceptional help. It can make the process more comfortable and facilitate comprehension and fluency.

Online Essay Reader – How to Use?

Advanced essay readers are incredibly practical in this high-tech era. Since this assistive technology is relatively new, we wanted to explain how it works. Below, we list the steps you must take to listen to your essay:

• Open our website and find the blank area provided for your essay. Copy and paste or type your text into the window, and the app will read out loud the written piece. Note that you can insert up to 5,000 characters in one go.
• Select preferred type of voice. You can choose between a few variations, including male and female voices, and adjust the reading speed.
• Locate the button READ MY TEXT and press it. The machine will start producing speech instantly.
• If you want to hear it once again, request another reading. Or paste a new essay and repeat the same procedure. You also have the option to download the audio version.

Read my Essay Out Loud: Key Benefits

Using our Read My Paper to Me aid is ideal for proofreading and editing your words. Here are some of the critical benefits:

Error Detection

Our online essay reader helps writers to spot and correct typos and mistakes. PapersOwl is also a website that writes essays for you on any subject matter you need for college. It is a one-stop-shop place for all your academic worries. Now, you no longer have to beg your friend to proofread your papers so you can polish them.

Coherence and Attractiveness

When working on an essay, distractors such as typing, noises, citing, research, and fact-checking might impede the cohesion of the paper. Focusing on one aspect may produce a poor piece in terms of meaning and readability. Since you’re multitasking when you write, clicking read my essay is an excellent opportunity to polish your text.

Auditory Learners

Many students prefer to use audiobooks in high school and college. These tools are an ideal solution for auditory learners having problems with visual focus. They can insert almost any text into the online texttospeech app and listen to it while cooking or relaxing. Indeed, these learning machines open a whole new world of possibilities.

Foreign Languages

Typically, you can’t learn a language unless you hear it constantly. And besides speaking, the best way to memorize new words and phrases is to listen to them. You can choose the voice in your app depending on your learning style.

READ MY ESSAY TO ME: FAQ

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Read To Me Text

Read text out loud using realistic text to speech voices. Get started free.

For other languages (Narakeet can read words out loud in 90 languages), text to speech reader control options (pitch, speed and more) use our full Text to Audio tool.

Read Text Out Loud

Online text to speech is a great way to quickly and conveniently say out loud text from a variety of sources. Play the video below (with sound) for a quick demonstration of how to use our read aloud text to speech system.

Read Aloud Online

Narakeet can read out loud books, articles and short text snippets in 90 languages, with 700 TTS reader voice options. Narakeet will generate voice from your text, read aloud, and in a few minutes, you’ll be able to download a MP3 file that you can listen to in any audio player.

Read Text Out Loud Free

Read aloud text easily. Get started with our text to voice generator free.

Make 20 voice reader files free, then upgrade to a paid plan to make more text to voice files. Paid plans provide more capacity than free accounts, so you can read out loud text from larger documents, but even on the free plan you have access to all our 700 natural reader text to speech voices, that can read out loud in 90 languages.

Read Aloud Text

Text to speech technology has come a long way, and its applications extend far beyond medical assistance and supporting disabled users. With the evolution of text reader software and the rise of natural reader voices, users can enjoy the convenience and speed of content creation across various industries and purposes. Narakeet is an app that reads text, and here are some typical use cases for our online text to speech:

Listen to course materials

One popular use case for text to speech technology is the TTS reader for learning and education. Students can utilize a text reader online to listen to course materials, which can increase comprehension and retention of information. The ability to have a text read naturally means that learners can immerse themselves in the content while performing other activities, such as exercising or commuting.

Read aloud books

One of the primary advantages of “text to talk” is its ability to save you time. Turn any Word or PDF document into an audiobook just for you. By using our text to voice generator, users can effortlessly have any text read out loud to them. Listen to your favorite articles or documents while you’re on the go or engaged in other activities. Experience the transformative power of our text to speech reader today, and discover the incredible benefits for yourself.

Turn any article into a podcast or audiobook

Another area where text to speech shines is in content consumption. Use Narakeet as an essay reader, and listen to long-form articles and blog posts, making it easier to absorb information without straining their eyes or spending extended periods reading. This can be especially useful for busy professionals who want to stay up-to-date with industry news, but have limited time to dedicate to reading.

Our article reader can act as a voice speaker, reading out loud any documents you copy or upload to it. You can use it to public audio versions of your content, or to provide your audiences with an alternative way to read your text on the go.

Read My Text Out Loud

Our cutting-edge text to speech reader is designed to read aloud online from text in Word documents, PDF files, EPUB ebooks and many more formats. It can read naturally, as a native speaker would speak to text. Read outloud everything from short recipes to full book volumes. Try out the word pronouncer audio on smaller sections using audio previews , to find the best AI speech generator for your needs. Then use that voice quickly as a “read to me text” generator.

Sentence reader

Text to speech technology can be a valuable asset for language learners. By using a tool that can speak a text, users can practice their listening skills, improve their pronunciation, and familiarize themselves with the nuances of a foreign language. This interactive approach to language learning can be more engaging and enjoyable compared to traditional methods. Narakeet can read text in 90 languages, making it a perfect language learning companion.

Read this to me

Authors and editors can leverage our online text reader as a “read my text” tool, to to proofread and review their written work more effectively. Listening to the text being read aloud can help detect errors, inconsistencies, or awkward phrasings that may have been overlooked during silent reading. This can lead to higher-quality writing and a more polished final product.

Read out subtitle files

Another option for reading text aloud is to produce synchronized content from subtitles. This is great for making alternative audio tracks for videos.

Make sure to use our full Text to Audio tool. Get a subtitle file. Translate it to a different language, and keep the original timestamps. Then use the “Upload file” button to load the translated file. Make sure to select the right language and choose a nice voice for your audio. Narakeet will synchronize the resulting audio with your subtitle timestamps automatically.

Narakeet helps you create text to speech voiceovers , turn Powerpoint presentations and Markdown scripts into engaging videos. It is under active development, so things change frequently. Keep up to date: RSS , Slack , Twitter , YouTube , Facebook , Instagram , TikTok

• Read My Essay

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How to Use the Free Read My Essay Tool from StudyMoose

If you are a student who needs to write an essay, you might be wondering how to improve your writing skills and get a better grade. One of the best ways to do that is to use the free Read My Essay tool from StudyMoose . This tool is a text-to-speech online program that can read your essay aloud and help you with editing, proofreading, and memorizing your paper. Here are some of the benefits and features of using this tool and more wondering: Who will read my essay aloud?

Benefit 1: Listen to Your Essay Like Your Audience Will

When you write an essay, you might not notice some of the mistakes or weaknesses in your paper. You might be too focused on the content or the structure and miss some of the details that can affect your readability and clarity. That’s why it’s important to listen to your essay like your audience will. By using the Read My Essay tool, you can hear how your essay sounds and catch any errors or awkward phrases that you might have overlooked. You can also evaluate the flow and coherence of your paper and see if you need to add or remove any information.

Benefit 2: Learn Your Essay Faster and Easier

Another benefit of using the Read My Essay tool is that it can help you learn your essay faster and easier. If you need to memorize your essay for a presentation or a test, you can use this tool to listen to your paper repeatedly and tap into your auditory memory. Auditory memory is the ability to remember things you hear, and it is very powerful and effective for learning. By listening to your essay, you can reinforce your understanding of the topic and remember the main points and arguments better.

Benefit 3: Make Your Essay More Natural and Conversational

The third benefit of using the Read My Essay tool is that it can make your essay more natural and conversational. Sometimes, when you write an essay, you might use sentences that are too long, complex, or formal for your audience. This can make your essay boring, confusing, or hard to follow. By using the Read My Essay tool, you can hear how your sentences sound and see if they are easy to read and understand. You can also check if you are using the right tone and voice for your purpose and audience. You want your essay to sound professional, but also engaging and friendly.

How to Use the Read My Essay Tool

Using the Read My Essay tool is very simple and convenient. All you need to do is:

• Go to our Read My Essay tool here.
• Copy and paste the text of your essay into the box.
• Select the preferred type of voice (male or female)
• Click on the “Read My Essay to Me” button.
• Listen to your essay being read aloud by the tool~ Soon we will add audio instructions like, “read out my essay.”
• Edit or revise your essay as needed.

You can also pause, resume, or stop the reading at any time. You can also adjust the volume and speed of the voice as you wish.

Our tool helps you answer questions like:

How can I get my essay read to me?

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Our Read My Essay tool is a great resource for students who want to improve their writing skills and get a better grade on their essays. It can help you listen to your essay like your audience will, learn your essay faster and easier, and make your essay more natural and conversational. It is also free, easy, and fun to use. So, what are you waiting for? Try it out today and see the difference!

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Read My Essay to Me: Free Tool for Students

Follow 4 simple steps to convert any text into audio:

• Insert your text into the box.
• Choose the reader's voice from the list.
• Select the comfortable reading speed.
• Press the button.
• 🚀 Our Tool's Benefits

💬 What Is Text-to-Speech Technology?

• 🎓 Reasons to Use Our Tool
• 💡 Who Will Benefit from It?
• 🎁 Tips for Auditory Learners

🔗 References

🚀 benefits of read my essay to me free tool.

Do you want to improve your grades? Wouldn't it be awesome to have a handy tool to help you in your studies? We’ve got one just for you! Our Read Me My Essay tool is text-to-speech software that can voice any text so you don't have to read it.

So, what makes our tool stand out?

• It's 100% free and has no hidden paywalls.
• It's customizable : you can choose a reading voice and adjust the speed.
• It's unlimited and can be used as many times as you want!

Text-to-speech, also known as "read aloud," is a type of assistive technology that turns text from a written form into audio.

Text-to-speech apps are compatible with almost all devices, such as laptops, phones, and tablets. They can read out loud any type of text file, including .docx and .txt documents. They’re also capable of voicing web pages online.

A computer generates the voice in a text-to-speech tool, and its reading pace can be sped up or slowed down. Although some of the voices may sound robotic, many of them are very human-like.

🎓 Reasons to Use Text-to-Speech Tool

Text-to-speech apps have numerous functions that make them great tools for students. Here's what they allow you to do:

💡 Who Will Benefit from Using the Tool?

Having a text-to-speech tool will benefit anyone, but it's especially valuable for the following types of students:

• Auditory learners . Auditory learners study better with their ears by perceiving sounds and voices. If you consider yourself an auditory learner, text-to-speech might become one of the most prominent tools in your arsenal.
• Multitaskers . Some people love doing several things simultaneously. Are you one of them? Then you should check out our text-to-speech tool! It frees your hands and eyes and allows you to take on more activities. Just don't overextend yourself!
• Students who lack time . If you’re in a rush and need to finish many things, then a text-to-speech converter is the right tool for you. You can cook, clean your room, or walk your pet while listening to your essay.
• People with reading disabilities . Dyslexia is a learning disability that causes various difficulties associated with reading. A text-to-speech tool can be a great help here. Just paste the text, and let the app read it.
• Readers with visual impairments . Our Read Me My Essay tool will be useful if you have vision problems. Or, if you just went through an eye surgery but still want to read something, just use the text-to-speech converter and enjoy receiving information through sound!

🎁 Helpful Tips for Auditory Learners

If you’re an auditory learner, consider following these simple tips. You’ll notice how your studies become even more successful!

And that's it! We hope you'll enjoy using our Read Me My Essay tool. This free unlimited text-to-speech software will surpass all your expectations! We recommend checking out our other writing tools — they will definitely make your studies easier and more enjoyable.

❓ Read Me My Essay FAQ

❓ is there a website that will read my essay to me.

Yes, there is! Many websites, apps, or programs can voice a text for you. We recommend AssignZen's Read Me My Essay tool. It will allow you to listen to your text online without having to pay or download anything to your device.

❓ How can I get my essay read to me?

You can use any text-to-speech app, such as AssignZen's Read My Essay for Me free tool. Just paste your text and choose the voice and the reading speed you like. Afterward, press the button, and this app will read your text out loud.

❓ Is there a free program to read text aloud?

Yes, there is one! AssignZen's Read Me My Essay is a free program that can read any text aloud, should it be an essay, an article, or anything else. AssignZen's Read Me My Essay allows free and unlimited usage, so try it out!

❓ Why read your essay out loud?

Reading an essay out loud helps in many ways. For example, you can see your own text from another perspective—not as an author, but as somebody from the audience. It also helps you prepare for an oral presentation by checking the coherence and readability of your texts.

Updated: Apr 9th, 2024

• A Guide to How Text-To-Speech Works: Data Science Central
• A Guide to Text-To-Speech on Your Computer or Mobile Device: Business Insider
• Using Text-To-Speech Technology to Assist Dyslexic Students: Forbes
• Auditory Learning Strategies and Characteristics: ThoughtCo

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I reviewed my Yale admissions file to see what the Ivy League school really thought about my application. What I learned surprised me.

• I reviewed my Yale admissions file to see what the Ivy League school thought about my application. 
• Most of my scores weren't that impressive, but they really liked my genuine attitude and excitement.
• Reviewing my application reminded me how far I have come as a student. 

"Brian spoke so fast it was electrifying."

This was the first quote from my Yale interviewer. She wrote those words in my admissions file, a document I finally got my hands on three years after being accepted into Yale University .

I remember that interview like it was yesterday. It was a Zoom call — my application cycle happened at the crux of pandemic remote learning — and I was wearing my father's old, oversize dress shirt. The interviewer was lovely. Some of my answers to her questions probably didn't make sense, and she was right. I definitely forgot to breathe in between my sentences.

But viewing my admissions file years later gave me a peek into what my interviewer was actually thinking that day, and I learned what really got me into Yale.

I reviewed my application as a junior with the registrar

Every student in the US can review their college admissions file under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. I emailed my university registrar, and within 45 days, a member of their support staff reached back out to schedule a virtual meeting. Picture-taking and recording were not allowed, so I jotted notes by hand.

There was very little verbal interaction between me and the staff member. She screen-shared my admissions file and let me read in silence. Something told me she understood the emotional weight of this moment for students, and I appreciated that. It is intimidating for any teenager to package their identity into a 650-word common application essay and a questionnaire — but it is arguably even more so to witness retrospectively how everything was judged.

I got a behind-the-scenes look into Yale admissions when they read my application

Each aspect of my application was rated out of nine points. My readers gave me a six for my extracurriculars and for my first teacher recommendation. They gave me a seven for my second teacher recommendation and my counselor's recommendation. I received an "outstanding" for my interview and a 2++ for my overall rating. The overall rating is given on a scale from 1 to 4, with 1 being the highest, and pluses were a good sign.

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In all, my ratings weren't exactly bad, but they weren't extraordinary either. The numbers on the pages stared back at me — cold, formulaic, and transactional. It felt strange to be reduced to a system of numbers, knowing that something as qualitative as extracurricular activities could still be broken down and scored.

Beyond the ratings, however, what truly stood out were the comments left by the admissions officers . Many of the comments were on my character, my essays, and the possible contributions I would make as a student.

"I teared up reading Essay 1," one reader wrote of my common application essay. Another said of the same essay: "His Chinese New Years are untraditional in that they remind him of his family's financial struggles."

I got emotional. All the memories of writing that essay came flooding back. I remembered how difficult it was to start it. I knew there was no easy way for someone to understand me without first knowing my background. I wanted to prove that I deserved a seat at the table where legacy students and the wealthy continue to outnumber their first-generation, low-income peers like myself.

I kept reading and found more comments from admissions officers that moved me: "He treats his mom well;" "He seems to have a truly good heart;" "One of the most intelligent, sincere, jovial students ever met;" "I have no doubt that Brian would push his peers at Yale to stand up for what's right;" and "I come away with compelling impressions that the student would contribute significantly to the undergrad community."

I searched for a negative comment. There were none.

I didn't deserve this, I muttered under my breath. Here I was, a junior in college, no longer a 4.0 student , my post-grad plans murky, balancing two part-time jobs and hoping to make it out of midterms alive. It felt good knowing that someone had rooted for me to be here.

The process reminded me how far I have come

Coming from an underserved household where no one had gone to college, I had always looked at the Ivy League application process skeptically.

Without the resources to enroll in SAT test prep and the financial safety net to pursue unpaid leadership positions and resume-boosting activities at school, I had doubted the "holistic" admissions process many colleges boast. My critiques about Yale remain numerous.

But at least in their comments, the admissions committee gave me grace in that they reviewed my application in light of my circumstances. I might never know exactly what happened in that reading room. Still, a couple of lessons ring true, based on my own viewing experience and my conversations with others who had done the same: Good character and potential are the key; I didn't need to be perfect.

And finally, I — not anyone else — needed to give me the fighting chance of applying in the first place.

"GPA is outstanding, especially in context," an admissions officer said. "This is a home run."

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

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. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. 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. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Guest Essay

Where Is America’s ‘Rules-Based Order’ Now?

By Spencer Ackerman

Mr. Ackerman is a foreign-policy columnist for The Nation and the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”

No sooner had a nearly unanimous United Nations Security Council passed a resolution demanding an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza last month than the United States and Israel acted as if it were a meaningless piece of paper. Israel, unwilling to accept a U.N. mandate, continued bombing the overcrowded southern city of Rafah and besieging Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Shortly after the vote, Biden administration officials called the resolution, No. 2728, “nonbinding,” in what appeared to be an attempt to deny its status as international law.

It was a confounding approach from an administration that allowed the resolution to go through with an abstention after vetoing three earlier ones. It also triggered a predictable bout of hand-wringing over the value of international law. At the State Department press briefing after the resolution passed, the department’s spokesman, Matthew Miller, said the measure would neither result in an immediate cease-fire nor affect thorny hostage-release negotiations. One reporter asked , “If that’s the case, what the hell is the point of the U.N. or the U.N. Security Council?”

The question is valid, but it’s also misdirected. U.N. resolutions that are written without enforcement measures obviously cannot force Israel to stop what its leadership insists is a justified war necessary to remove Hamas and prevent another Oct. 7 massacre. But it’s just as obvious what entity can make Israel stop and isn’t doing so: the United States.

Whatever the Biden administration might have thought it was doing by permitting the resolution to pass and then undermining it, the maneuver exposed the continuing damage Israel’s war in Gaza is doing to the United States’ longstanding justification for being a superpower: guaranteeing what U.S. administrations like to call the international rules-based order.

The concept operates as an asterisk placed on international law by the dominant global superpower. It makes the United States one of the reasons international law remains weak, since a rules-based order that exempts the United States and its allies fundamentally undermines the concept of international law.

American policymakers tend to invoke the concept to demonstrate the benefits of U.S. global leadership. It sounds, on the surface, a lot like international law: a stable global order, involving the panoply of international aid and financial institutions, in which the rules of acceptable behavior reflect liberal values. And when U.S. prerogatives coincide with international law, the United States describes the two synonymously. On the eve of Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned of a “moment of peril” for “the foundation of the United Nations Charter and the rules-based international order that preserves stability worldwide.”

But when U.S. prerogatives diverge from international law, America apparently has no problem violating it — all while declaring its violations to ultimately benefit global stability. The indelible example is the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which the George W. Bush administration cynically justified as a means of enforcing U.N. disarmament mandates. Iraq, the supposed violator, endured military occupation, while Washington’s unmatched military and economic power ensured that America faced little consequence for an invasion without U.N. authorization. Shortly before invading, the United States passed a law vowing to use “ all means ” necessary to release Americans detained by the International Criminal Court.

A cohort of American academics and once and future U.S. officials at Princeton later advocated what they called in a 2006 paper “ a world of liberty under law .” They framed it as addressing the weaknesses of international law, suggesting that when international institutions didn’t produce the outcomes favored by the “world of liberty,” there be an “alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective action.” In practice, that forum has often been the White House. During the 2011 Libyan uprising, the United States and its allies used Security Council authorization of a no-fly zone to help overthrow Muammar Qaddafi — whose regime killed far fewer opponents than Israel has killed in Gaza since Oct. 7. American troops have now operated in eastern Syria for more than eight years, long enough for everyone to forget that there is no basis in international law for their presence.

That American-exceptionalist asterisk has been on display after each U.S. veto of cease-fire resolutions at the U.N. With Gaza’s enormous death toll and imminent famine , people can be forgiven for wondering about the point of the United States’ rules-based international order.

International law is unambiguously against what Israel is doing in Gaza. Two months before resolution No. 2728, the International Court of Justice ruled that the continuing Israeli campaign could plausibly be considered genocidal and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent genocide from unfolding. Ahead of 2728’s passage, the Canadian Parliament approved a motion, however porous , to stop new arms transfers to Israel. And the day the Security Council approved the resolution, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, recommended that member states should “immediately” embargo weapon shipments to Israel, since Israel “appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered” by the international court.

But after 2728 passed, the White House national security spokesman, John Kirby, clarified that U.S. weapon sales and transfers to Israel would be unaffected. To the astonishment of some Senate Democrats , the State Department averred that Israel was not violating a Biden administration policy that recipients of American weaponry comply with international law. Last week, the White House reiterated that it had not seen “any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law” after the Israel Defense Forces repeatedly bombed a convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen who had informed the Israelis of their movements, killing seven.

The reality is that Washington is now arming a combatant that the United Nations Security Council has ordered to stop fighting, an uncomfortable position that helps explain why the United States insists 2728 isn’t binding.

And that reality isn’t lost on the rest of the world. The slaughter in Gaza has disinclined some foreign officials and groups to listen to U.S. officials about other issues. Annelle Sheline, a State Department human-rights officer who recently resigned over Gaza , told The Washington Post that some activist groups in North Africa simply stopped meeting with her and her colleagues. “Trying to advocate for human rights just became impossible” while the United States aids Israel, she said.

It’s a dynamic that sounds awfully reminiscent of what happened outside Europe when U.S. diplomats fanned out globally to rally support for Ukraine two years ago. They encountered “a very clear negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the global order and forcing countries to take sides,” as Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution scholar, observed in a speech last year.

If the United States was frustrated by that negative reaction, imagine the reaction, post-Gaza, that awaits Washington the next time it seeks global support for the target of an adversary. The dead-on-arrival passage of resolution 2728 may very well be remembered as an inflection point in the decline of the rules-based international order — which is to say the world that the United States seeks to build and maintain.

Rising powers will be happy to cite U.S. precedent as they assert their own exceptions to international law. For as Gaza shows in a horrific manner, a world with exceptions to international law is one in which the least powerful suffer the most.

Spencer Ackerman is a foreign-policy columnist for The Nation and the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”

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A Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse

By Rivka Galchen

On April 8th, the moon will partly and then entirely block out the sun. The total eclipse will be visible to those in a hundred-and-fifteen-mile-wide sash, called the path of totality, slung from the hip of Sinaloa to the shoulder of Newfoundland. At the path’s midline, the untimely starry sky will last nearly four and a half minutes, and at the edges it will last for a blink. On the ground, the lunacy around total eclipses often has a Lollapalooza feel. Little-known places in the path of totality—Radar Base, Texas; Perryville, Missouri—have been preparing, many of them for years, to accommodate the lawn chairs, soul bands, food trucks, sellers of commemorative pins, and porta-potties. Eclipse viewers seeking solitude may also cause problems: the local government of Mars Hill, Maine, is reminding people that trails on Mt. Katahdin are closed, because it is mud season and therefore dangerous. I have a friend whose feelings and opinions often mirror my own; when I told her a year ago that I had booked an Airbnb in Austin in order to see this eclipse, she looked at me as if I’d announced I was bringing my daughter to a pox party.

Altering plans because of this periodic celestial event has a long tradition, however. On May 28, 585 B.C., according to Herodotus, an eclipse led the Medes and Lydians, after more than five years of war, to become “alike anxious” to come to peace. More than a hundred years before that, the Assyrian royalty of Mesopotamia protected themselves from the ill omen of solar eclipses—and from other celestial signs perceived as threatening—by installing substitute kings and queens for the day. Afterward, the substitutes were usually killed, though in one instance, when the real king died, the stand-in, who had been a gardener, held the throne for decades. More recently, an eclipse on May 29, 1919, enabled measurements that recorded the sun bending the path of light in accordance with, and thus verifying, Einstein’s theory of general relativity .

Any given spot on the Earth witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every three hundred and seventy-five years, on average, but somewhere on the planet witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every eighteen months. In Annie Dillard’s essay “ Total Eclipse ,” she says of a partial solar eclipse that it has the relation to a total one that kissing a man has to marrying him, or that flying in a plane has to falling out of a plane. “Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it,” she writes. During a partial eclipse, you put on the goofy paper eyeglasses and see the outline of the moon reducing its rival, the sun, to a solar cassava, or slimmer. It’s a cool thing to see, and it maybe hints at human vulnerability, the weirdness of light, the scale and reality of the world beyond our planet. But, even when the moon blocks ninety-nine per cent of the sun, it’s still daylight out. When the moon occludes the whole of the sun, everyday expectations collapse: the temperature quickly drops, the colors of shadows become tinny, day flips to darkness, stars precipitously appear, birds stop chirping, bees head back to their hives, hippos come out for their nightly grazing, and humans shout or hide or study or pray or take measurements until, seconds or minutes later, sunlight, and the familiar world, abruptly returns.

It is complete earthly luck that total eclipses follow such a dramatic procession. Our moon, which is about four hundred times less wide than our sun, is also about four hundred times closer to us. For this reason, when the Earth, moon, and sun align with one another, our moon conceals our sun precisely, like a cap over a lens. (I stress “our moon” because other moons around other planets, including planets that orbit other stars, have eclipses that almost certainly don’t line up so nicely.) If our moon were smaller or farther away, or our sun larger or nearer, our sun would never be totally eclipsed. Conversely, if our moon were larger or closer (or our sun smaller or farther away) then our sun would be wholly eclipsed—but we would miss an ecliptic revelation. During totality, a thin circle of brightness rings the moon. Johannes Kepler thought that the circle was the illumination of the atmosphere of the moon, but we now know that the moon has next to no atmosphere and that the bright circle (the corona) is the outermost part of the atmosphere of the sun . A million times less bright than the sun itself, the corona is visible (without a special telescope) only during an eclipse. If we’re judging by images and reports, the corona looks like a fiery halo. I have never seen the sun’s corona. The first total solar eclipse I’ll witness will be this one.

The physicist Frank Close saw a partial eclipse on a bright day in Peterborough, England, in June, 1954, at the age of eight. Close’s science teacher, using cricket and soccer balls to represent the moon and the sun, explained the shadows cast by the moon; Close attributes his life in science to this experience. The teacher also told the class that, forty-five years into the future, there would be a total eclipse visible from England, and Close resolved to see it. That day turned out to be overcast, so the moon-eclipsed sun wasn’t visible—but Close described seeing what felt to him like a vision of the Apocalypse, with a “tsunami of darkness rushing towards me . . . as if a black cloak had been cast over everything” and then the clouds over the sun dispersing briefly when totality was nearly over. Close has since seen six more eclipses and written two books about them, the first a memoir of “chasing” eclipses (“ Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon ”) and the second a general explainer (“ Eclipses: What Everyone Needs to Know ”).

“I’ve tried to describe each of the eclipses I’ve seen, and I do describe them, but it’s not really describable. There’s no natural phenomenon to compare it to,” he told me recently. Describing an eclipse to someone who hasn’t seen one is like trying to describe the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” to someone who has never heard music, he said. “You can describe notes, frequencies of vibration, but we all know that’s missing the whole thing.” Total eclipses are also close to impossible to film in any meaningful way. The light level plummets, which your eye can process in a way that, say, your mobile phone can’t.

In the half hour or so before totality, as the moon makes its progress across the circle of the sun, colors shift to hues of red and brown. (Dillard, a magus of describing the indescribable, writes that people looked to her as though they were in “a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages”—the faces seemed to be those of people now dead, which made her miss her own century, and the people she knew, and the real light of day.) As more of the sun is covered, its light reaches us less directly. “Much of the light that you will be getting is light that has been scattered by the atmosphere from ten to twenty miles away,” Close said. Thus the color shift.

He showed me the equipment that he has used to watch six eclipses: a piece of cardboard about the size of an LP sleeve, with a square cut out of the middle, covered by dark glass. “I used gaffer tape to affix a piece of welder’s glass,” he said. There are small holes at the edge of the board, so he can see how shadows change as the moon eclipses more, and then less, of the sun. When sunlight comes from a crescent rather than from a circle, shadows become elongated along one axis and narrowed along another. “If you spread out your fingers, and look at the shadow of your hand, your fingers will look crablike, as if they have claws on them,” Close said.

Each eclipse Close has seen has been distinct. On a boat in the South Seas, the moon appeared more greenish black than black, “because of reflected light from the water,” he said. In the Sahara, the millions of square miles of sand acted as a mirror, so it was less dark, and Close could see earthshine making the formations on the moon’s surface visible. At another eclipse, he found himself focussed on the appearance of the light of the sun as it really is: white. “We think of it as yellow, but of course that’s just atmospheric scattering, the same mechanism that makes the sky appear blue,” he said. When he travelled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his family, in 2017, his seven-year-old grandson said, half a minute before totality, that the asphalt road was “moving.” “It was these subtle bands of darker and lighter, moving along at walking pace. The effect it gave to your eye was that you thought the pavement was rippling,” Close said. He had never seen that before.

The moon doesn’t emit light; it only reflects it, like a mirror. In Oscar Wilde’s play “ Salomé ,” each character sees in the moon something of what he fears, or desires. The etymology of “eclipse” connects to the Greek word for failure, and for leaving, for abandonment. In Chinese, the word for eclipse comes from the term that also means “to eat,” likely a reference to the millennia-old description of solar eclipses happening when a dragon consumes the sun. If the moon is a mirror, then the moon during a solar eclipse is a dark and magic mirror.

A Hindu myth explains eclipses through the story of Svabhanu, who steals a sip of the nectar of the gods. The Sun and the Moon tell Vishnu, one of the most powerful of the gods. Vishnu decapitates Svabhanu, but not before he can swallow the sip of nectar. The nectar has made his head, now called Rahu, immortal. As revenge, Rahu periodically eats the Sun—creating eclipses. But, his throat being cut, he can’t swallow the Sun, so it reëmerges again and again. Rahu is in the wrong, obviously, but in ancient representations of him he is often grinning. To me, he looks mischievous rather than frightening.

The first story I can remember reading that featured an eclipse is Mark Twain’s “ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court .” The wizard Merlin imprisons an engineer named Hank Morgan, who has accidentally travelled from nineteenth-century America to sixth-century Camelot. Morgan, a man who dresses and acts strangely for the sixth century, finds himself, as one would, sentenced to be burned at the stake. But he gets out of it—by convincing others that he is the cause of an eclipse that he knew would occur. As seems only natural for a beloved American story, it’s the (man from the) future that wins this particular standoff, over the ancient ways of Merlin.

To Close, the beginning of an eclipse feels like “a curtains-up statement from the heavens: Science works. Come back in an hour.” He finds it particularly moving that someone, using only measurements and reason, and the laws of celestial motion, could have predicted the April 8th eclipse down to the minute, maybe to the second. The eclipse that surprised the warring Medes and Lydians into peace may not have been a surprise to all; it is said to have been predicted by Thales of Miletus.

I asked Close if he’d ever met someone on his eclipse journeys who wasn’t much impressed. He said no. Still, it’s possible that I and my mirror friend both have the right intuition about this experience we’ve never had. In the last chapter of Roberto Bolaño’s novella “French Comedy of Horrors,” the young narrator witnesses an eclipse while at a soda fountain with his friends; he also witnesses the people around him witnessing the eclipse, including a couple doing a dance “that was somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying.” On his way home, he answers a ringing pay phone and finds himself in a lengthy conversation with a stranger who claims to be a member of the Clandestine Surrealist Group, writers living in Paris’s sewer system. The stranger invites the narrator (who wants desperately to be a poet) to join them, at an appointed time and place, months into the future—but says that they can’t pay for his ticket.

His whole eclipse day is banal (soda fountain, pay phone, the price of things) but also tempting, literally surreal, and like a dream. When our hero finally makes it home, at dawn, he sees Achille, the local drunk. Achille tells him that “the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day.” Nature’s everyday wonders might be the more clandestine ones. ♦

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