In a Time of Ebola, Recalling London’s Great Plague

Until Congressman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, learns how to pronounce Ebola and the president gets up some kind of useful policy (which do you think might come first?), I thought I would stay home and read the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who survived the Great Plague.

“Great fears of the sickenesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us,” he wrote, just before heading to bed on April 30, 1665.