Good morning. Thanks for all the reading recommendations. Here’s the list. If you have a book you’d like to recommend (not necessarily dealing with a pandemic—just a good book), send the title my way.

Bookstores get creative during the coronavirus. “‘We’re going to operate like a pizza takeout place,’ one independent bookstore owner said.”

Revisiting Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation: “In 1974, a film directed by Francis Ford Coppola captured a rising national mood. It took the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It did not, however, win that prize: it lost out to The Godfather: Part II, also directed by Mr. Coppola. The Godfather: Part II is widely held to be Mr. Coppola’s masterpiece, and is considered by film buffs to be one of the greatest movies ever made. His other film of 1974, The Conversation, is not (although it does have a small but zealous critical following who consider it every bit the equal of its more celebrated counterpart). Where the second Godfather film is majestic in its sweep, painterly in its composition and theatrically stylish in its structure, The Conversation is naturalistic, jittery and claustrophobic. Watching it feels like an act of voyeurism, and well it might, for its subject is surveillance.”

During his quarantine, Isaac Newton discovered gravity and began to formulate a theory of optics. What will you do with yours?

Peter Sagal reviews a history of crossword puzzle and its fans in The New York Times: “In a 1924 editorial headlined ‘A Familiar Form of Madness,’ this newspaper expressed its disdain for that vulgar new entertainment, that lowly diversion for idle minds, that pointless display of erudition known as the ‘cross-word’: ‘Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong sets, about the same persons now are committing the same sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letter of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex.’ A year later, this Olympian condescension had gotten a little desperate: ‘The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten.’ How and why this “craze” arose and persisted, and how The New York Times came to not only change its institutional opinion but become the epicenter of American crossword culture, is the story told by Adrienne Raphel in her cultural and personal history of crosswords and the ‘puzzling people who can’t live without them,’ of which she is clearly one.”

A 70-million-year-old clam shells shows that days used to be 23.5 hours long and a year was 370 days.

Movie theaters shut down. Universal to make current theatrical movies available for home viewing on Friday.

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Charlie Warzel writes about a 25-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon with no communication from the outside world. The rafters set out on February 19th, when “cases of the coronavirus were showing signs of decline in mainland China and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first Level 1 travel notices.” When they returned on March 14th, America was largely shut down:

“As they pulled their rafts out of the Colorado, they were met by a man named Blane, who worked for a rafting company out of Flagstaff, Ariz. He had one question: Have you been in contact with the outside world? They hadn’t. Aside from a few one-way text messages sent to family on a satellite phone, the friends hadn’t heard anything in more than three weeks. No cell service. No news. Not even a passing dispatch from fellow travelers.

“‘He gave us a look, sighed, and then launched into it,’ Mr. Edler said. Since they’d left, the coronavirus exploded in the United States and around the world, he told the group. Italy was under lockdown. The stock market was plummeting. Professional sports were suspended. Many schools were closed indefinitely. Infections were growing exponentially. Tom Hanks had it.

“‘Half of us thought he was joking,’ Mr. Edler said. ‘It’s like, here’s an old river guide pulling our leg. I mean, I’ve heard some pretty big tales out on the river.’ Others in the group weren’t so sure. ‘I think the girls believed it right away,’ said Sarah Knaack, a nurse. ‘He said it in this real ominous way but then he just walked away to see about lunch and we were left nervously joking with ourselves totally unsure what was going on.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Luxembourg

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