Keep Calm and Eat Cupcakes

In case any of you missed it, last Thursday, British intelligence proudly announced that they were behind “Operation Cupcake,” a cyberattack on the first issue of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Inspire magazine. IMAGE: My strangely appropriate birthday card, from...

Mapping Gangs and Cupcakes

IMAGE: Mission: Gangs and Cupcakes, by Danya Al-Saleh. This map, created by UC Berkeley undergrad Danya Al-Saleh, overlays bakeries in The Mission district of San Francisco with Norteño and Sureño gang territory (for a larger PDF version, click here). As Al-Saleh...

Depressed Cakes

IMAGE: Misfortune cookies by Miss Insomnia Tulip. Miss Cakehead, a publicist specialising in edible stunts (why didn’t that job exist when I was in school?) has organised a network of pop-up Depressed Cake Shops, which will take over bakeries around England in...

Food: An Atlas

What do you see when you map the world through food? IMAGE: Strips from five of the seventy-plus maps in Food: An Atlas. According to Food: An Atlas, a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded, “guerrilla cartography” project led by UC Berkeley professor Darin Jensen,...

Cupcake Gentrification

The unstoppable rise of the cupcake over the past five years has been analysed in terms of retro-food chic and nostalgia, the infantilisation of Western civilization, the triumph of appearance over substance, and even American political culture. After all, a cupcake...