Vincenzo Campi, The Ricotta Eaters, 1580. Via Wikimedia Commons.

• Gift idea: cheese portraits. The medium is the message here—this cheese is made with bacteria cultivated from your mouth or toes. It’s you, indubitably, microbially. The artist adds, “The bacteria that you find in-between the toes is actually very similar to the bacteria that makes cheese smell like toes.” You don’t say.
• Amazon has purchased another block of Seattle. A technofortress, no doubt, soon to be swarming with drones.
• The Simsis the bestselling PC game of all time. It also has—no mean feat—the most poetic, surreal software-update notifications of all time. “Sims will no longer walk on water to view paintings placed on swimming pool walls.”
• Presenting the Daphne, an award for the best book to have been published fifty years ago.
• Melville the prognosticator: Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and modern-day imperialism.