• Putting COVID-19 into historical context, and thinking about how we responded to pandemics and quarantine in the past: Jill Lepore reads plague stories, the Black Death, revisiting Bleak House and Jane Eyre in quarantine, looking at Thucydides’ account of the Plague of Athens, E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” plague-ridden period pieces, the year 1348, Babe Ruth and another curse, factories during World War II, cholera in Zimbabwe, Esther Pohl, and what happens when you are quarantined with your wife and your mistress.

• Read Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and then read about it.

• “W.H. Auden Was a Messy Roommate.” (Paris Review Daily)

• On female fiends. (JSTOR Daily)

• “Archaeologists have now identified an early ball court from the Mexican highlands of Oaxaca—indicating that the pastime was more far-reaching than previously suspected.” (Atlas Obscura)

• Joseph Smith for president? (The New Yorker)

• India’s State Department of Archaeology and Museums is in the process of preserving 1,600 palm-leaf manuscripts dating back to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. (The Hindu)

• On Joseph Pilates, who invented his eponymous workout in a prisoner of war camp. (Narratively)

• “New research is producing a more accurate historical timeline for the occupation of Native American sites in upstate New York, based on radiocarbon dating of organic materials and statistical modeling.” (Olean Times Herald)

• This week in obituaries: Terrence McNally, Floyd Cardoz, Lucia Bosé, Maurice Berger, Manu Dibango, Nashom Wooden, Alan Finder, Richard Marek, Richard Reeves, Julia Miles, Daniel Greenberg, Albert Uderzo, Darius Swann, Malcolm Chase, Stanley Sporkin, Henry Gray, Julie Felix, and Kenny Rogers.