“Love in the time of the Cholera” is a book famous in part because of its title. The 1985 novel by the Columbian Gabriel García Márquez traces the complex journey of a couple from their youthful marriage through a lifetime of lovers, beyond any one cholera epidemic.

Cholera, a deadly infectious disease, is spread through contaminated water supplies.

Best if we recognize laughter in the time of the coronavirus now, in the present moment. Even in this worst hard time, to echo the title of Tim Egan’s 2006 award winning history of the Great Plains Dust Bowl during the Great...