It’s a mistake to navigate your insanely large, ridiculously expensive, and you’ve got to be compensating for something yacht towards a storm, but it’s quite common to pilot your new vessel out of one—in this case, a perfect storm that included Covid, which capsized the economy and widened the already wide economic divide, leading many unfathomably wealthy folks with newfound booty to trade in their shabby 150 foot dinghy for something with a little more length and girth. While millions of America’s essential workers were thrown overboard, running aground, or nearly keeling over in miles-long lines at foodbanks, those few at the winning end of the pandemic were three sheets to the wind, yelling Yahtzee in between nibbles of caviar in their stocked galleys as they gave new meaning to the line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The excellent Evan Osnos in The New Yorker (whose editors finally got in on the pun-headline game): The Haves and the Have-Yachts. “If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the ‘greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed’ … One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic … A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy.” If we keep heading in this direction, America will be split into yacht owners and deckhands. The rising tide does naut lift all boats.

+ In other nautical news, monster waves completely wiped out condos in Hawaii, a whale came really close to a paddleboarder in Plymouth and a photographer caught the wild moment, and sharks mistaking feet for fish are likely behind Long Island attacks.