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In this prophetic science fiction story from 2015, a cooking blogger keeps up a cheerful attitude and makes do while self-quarantining with her family during a global pandemic. Excellent story and a fast read: “So Much Cooking,", by Naomi Kritzer on Clarkesworld.

And from a few days ago, Kritzer follows up: “Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality. Some interesting discussion by Kritzer about the themes she explores in the story, how fans and friends are reacting today, what the author got right and wrong about the pandemic, and how the fictional characters' quarantine struggles maps to reality.

Inspired by “So Much Cooking,” on my next grocery run, I’m going to go out and buy a couple of vacuum-sealed cans of Maxwell House or Chock Full o' Nuts coffee. Just in case the good stuff gets hard to find.

I’m also going to think about what more I can be doing to help neighbors and the community. Confession: So far, not much.

Thanks, Cory.

Carnival kept sending out cruise ships while knowing it was risky. And the chairman of Carnival is on Trump’s back-to-work council. Rearranging dreck chairs - David Pell on Nextdraft

Armed far-right groups are behind anti-lockdown protests in Michigan and elsewhere. They love Trump and Trump is cheering them on. Martyrdom and dumber - David Pell at Nextdraft.

ME: I have 300+ podcast episodes in my queue. I will never listen to them all!

ALSO ME: This looks like an interesting podcast. I’ll subscribe now!

John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at 82.

Siobhan Roberts writes The New York Times’s obit for mathematician and “Magical Genius” John Conway, most famous for inventing the computer Game of Life. Cause of death: COVID-19

Martin Gardner, the longtime mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, said that when the game went viral on the internet, “with addicts programming it at home and at work — one quarter of the world’s computers were playing it.”

Conway’s colleague, Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen, said there are two kinds of geniuses in mathematics and physics, ordinary geniuses. Ordinary geniuses just seem to be people who work hard.

“But then there are the magical geniuses,” he added. “Richard Feynman was a magical genius. And the same always struck me about John — he was a magical mathematician. He was a magical genius rather than an ordinary genius.”

Also:

Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. “He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious,” said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high-school students. “And he didn’t mean that we should be teaching them silly math — to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.”

People like Conway seem to be to be the truly blessed people in the world. They work hard at what they do, they excel at it, and the work is pure joy to them. We’re all advised to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life – it will all be play to you – but very few people can achieve that.

I became fascinated by Conway’s game around 1983-84 or so, and wrote a program in the computer language Basic to play it on an early IBM PC. Each turn took a half-hour!

China Police Censor Tales of Post-Coronavirus Renewal.

New York Times journalist Paul Mozur finds signs of a nation opening up on the streets of the big Chinese city of Hefei, population 8 million.

He also finds xenophobia, and police censorship that’s both laughably clumsy, and effective.

Mozur was expelled from China, along with other Western journalists, shortly after.