Lit Hub Daily: March 30, 2020

• THESE TIMES: You know your quarantine activity roster needs some 19th-century parlor games · “What if this is the moment for us to practice and develop, in this time of social distancing and quarantine, our moral imagination?” Philip Metres writes a letter to his students · Michael Wiegers’s comfort food in uncomfortable times · Bookstores serve ideas and people: in that way they are essential. | Life in a Pandemic
• Commodifying our hot pink desire: A brief history of the acceptable high school T-shirts of the late 1980s. | Lit Hub Style
• “Building up community memory, humming these fight songs.” Alli Warren translates five books into poems. | Lit Hub
• Can we actually teach artificial intelligence empathy? Meet Ellie, the AI “therapist.” | Lit Hub Tech
• Katie Yee recommends five essential titles from The Feminist Press, the longest-running feminist publisher in the world. | Book Marks
• “Right, yes. Today. In this doomed world. Something beautiful, for her.” Leslie Jamison on parenting (and being sick) during a pandemic. | NYRB
• Bob Dylan surprised fans by releasing a 17-minute song he recorded decades ago about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. | The Hub
• A lot of celebrities are reading children’s books on social media, but none cooler than astronaut Christina Koch, who recently completed one of the longest recorded spaceflights. | KTXS 12
• Rachel Vorona Cote on the “cultural anxiety about exuberant or overly demonstrative feminine behavior” in Lewis Carroll’s stories. | Longreads
• In quarantine, Laila Lalami is reading The Bell Jar and watching “Little Fires Everywhere.” | Los Angeles Times
• “I met a dead corpse of the plague, in the narrow alley just bringing down a little pair of stairs. But I thank God I was not much disturbed at it.” Read from Samuel Pepys’ 1665 plague blog. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• On the long literary legacy of pandemics. | Al Jazeera

Also on Lit Hub: Minna Salami on the Yoruba tradition’s complex philosophical heritage • The songwriting couple behind country music’s biggest hits • Read an excerpt from Laura Bogart’s debut novel Don’t You Know I Love You.