• The internet is calling 2016 the worst year ever, but can it top the year millions of Europeans were wiped out by plague? (Slate)

• Searching for Edith Wharton’s New York: “Reading Edith’s novels, one gets a sense of the claustrophobia within the respectable circles of society in which women of that era lived, and also an idea of the restricted geography of the grids and avenues which formed the boundaries of their world. The only really respectable area was Fifth Avenue, from the bottom to the top, although a few elite families were clinging on to their houses in around Washington Square Park.” (The Independent)

• A 1913 map urges artists not to fall into the River of Failure. (Atlas Obscura)

• The office novel, reinvented by women: “The last two decades have seen a boom in workplace novels written by and mostly marketed to women, from books put out by major publishing houses, to cheaply produced small-press books, to self-published titles. If the author is a woman, workplace fiction is also domestic fiction, easily disguised as ‘chick lit,’ ‘girlfriend literature,’ or even ‘erotica.’ Regardless of the packaging, these books provide mapping, contextualizing, and rich illustration of women’s working lives. They form a kind of counter-tradition of office literature, dealing with the same bureaucracies and white-collar doldrums that have inspired male novelists but reflecting the particular challenges and preoccupations of women in the workforce.” (The New Yorker Page-Turner)

• We might never know what Boris Johnson has to say about Shakespeare. (The Guardian)

• Is exhaustion a moral failing, a symptom of capitalist oppression, or something to be proud of? “Sometime in the eighteenth century, doctors and philosophers stopped blaming exhaustion on the weakness of the individual and started blaming it on changes in society. Ever since, exhaustion has been associated with the demands of modern life. Those who fret about exhaustion epidemics are usually cultural conservatives, calling for a return to older, slower, sometimes more godly ways to cure the disease they so readily diagnose.” (The New Republic)