WE'RE SUPPORTING

Italian illustrator and designer Massimiliano creates vivid, dynamic and richly textured work. We caught up with him recently and asked him what had been keeping him busy of late. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

Disregard the buzz that surrounds those other cupcake shops in New York City. Cheeks Bakery in Williamsburg houses the best cupcakes that I’ve eaten. The clean and understated decor extends to the menu, where being fancy doesn’t rule on the cupcake shelves. Cheeks offers, simply, vanilla and chocolate cupcakes with either vanilla or chocolate cream. But if you do want more, Cheeks has that as well, a limited selection of pies and cakes.

WE'RE WEARING

Love it or loathe it, you’ve got to admit that the ruffled blouses and strict pencil skirts on television series Gossip Girl give you a guilt-free reason to watch. 25-year-old former model Abigail Lorick was approached to ghost design the Eleanor Waldorf Collection by using her budding real life label Loricklady. The press surrounding the show has boosted her profile and her new collection featuring all the Upper East Side trimmings is greatly anticipated.

WE'RE THINKING

By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (’sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading? Read more

WE'RE READING

Philly indie rock group Dr Dog recently compiled a crackling Secret Playlist for us which included props for songs by Cass McCombs, Thunderclap Newman, and the new time rag star, A.A Bundy, about whose track, Vice Rag, keyboardist Zach Miller wrote: ‘Good enough to be a classic old timey melody, except with more contemporary lyrical vices added. Great guitar playing’. And so it is [yup, the proof's in the audio below]. You can read more about Dr Dog’s favourite songs via the My Secret Playlist website.

Micah P. Hinson is like every rustic, broken down, and pieced back together country great that’s ever been. Only hipper and slightly less sombre. This track, Diggin’ A Grave, is a button-up hoe down with a classic pop chorus and a jangly banjo accompaniment. Yup, some folk have all the fun.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

UK-based one-man-band Sieben has a new album out: As They Should Sound. Frontman Matt Howden builds songs with a loop pedal and a violin, which he uses for rhythm and melody. His sound is wonderfully sophisticated and cabalistic, with a particularly British sense of lyricism.