Hit & Run: Like mother, like daughter

Madonna is still top of the pops, and now daughter, Lourdes, 12, is riding high in the fashion charts. At last week's Madison Square Garden gig the singer pinched a look that her pre-teen trendy daughter had worn earlier this year on a trip to the Kabbalah Centre – a pair of sturdy-rimmed Buddy Holly-style glasses.

The Shoreditch Nerd look – or Geek Chic, as the glossies have dubbed it – has been around for a while now, with style mavens Helena Christensen and Chloë Sevigny donning the NHS-style frames in homage to the original Hoxton hipsters. Alexa Chung and Peaches Geldof quickly followed suit, and a trend was born, one that young Lourdes then picked up on.

As well she might. For all her tender years, Lourdes is no newcomer to the fashion and celeb circuit; she even appeared onstage with her mother at the MTV awards at just eight years old.

And she certainly appears to have a natural confidence in the glare of publicity she has known all her life. "In terms of being comfortable with fame, well, no one is more famous than her mum," says Mark Frith, former editor of Heat magazine and author of The Celeb Diaries. "So many celebrity parents feel the need to push their kids out of the way [of the cameras] and protect them, but Madonna has sensed this confidence that Lourdes has, and let her into the spotlight to see how she copes."

But confidence and an eye for trends do not necessarily a fashion icon make – a ubiquitous term, maybe, but one that fits her mother better than any other pop princess. Madonna is not an icon in the way that Victoria Beckham and Nicole Ritchie are, inspiring dozens of copycat high-street pieces and Zeitgeist weight scares, but is admired for her constant acquisition and re-interpretation of images: the glam Goth, the earth mother, the cowgirl – even the strumpet. Madge is a leader of fashion, not a follower. Or, arguably, she was, until she started picking up trends that have already been chewed up and digested not just by younger celebs but by her own daughter.

So will Lourdes Ciccone Leon soon become cooler than her mum? Frith thinks so. "Lourdes has been raised in the spotlight, and public performances are part of her life. She has the best grounding possible to go as far as she wants. It'll be the easiest thing in the world for her when she grows up to do whatever she wants to."

Why Jeremy Piven is the mogul's mogul

Ari Gold: insecure, tyrannical, awful – but somehow loveable. Is this how Hollywood likes to see itself? Jeremy Piven, who plays Gold, the unscrupulous movie agent of HBO's Entourage, seems to be making a career out of playing his masters as compelling grotesques. This week, he opens on Broadway in a revival of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, as the head of production at a major Hollywood studio.

Like so many Hollywood stories, Piven's is one of rags-to-riches. Blink and you'll miss it, but he had a cameo role in Robert Altman's The Player in 1992. He spent the Nineties and early Noughties in relative obscurity, bringing his trademark nervous energy to such films as Heat, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Scary Movie 3, before he rediscovered his niche inside the suit of a Hollywood operative – this time Ari Gold, whom he has been playing since 2004.

When, then, the producers of Speed-the-Plow were casting the role of impressionable Hollywood bigwig Bobby Gould, they decided to give the super-agent a well-deserved promotion. Piven has received lengthy standing ovations at preview performances of the play. Perhaps it's simply industry insiders, relieved that once again, their reputations – as ruthless, corrupt, but, more to the point, charismatic – are in safe hands. Tim Walker

How to p-p-p-pick up a penguin

When a group of migrationally-confused penguins were found in north Brazil this week, the authorities commissioned a Hercules military aircraft to return 373 of them to colder climes. Ferrying penguins around surely presents a logistical problem. How do you, well, pick up a penguin? Can they be wrangled? "They always move as a group, so it's quite easy," says Tim Savage from London Zoo. "If you get one going the right way, they'll all follow. They're a bit like sheep." So does the zoo use specialist sheep dogs trained in penguin herding? "No. We just wave our arms around." Harry Byford

The wheels have come off

Overheard on a Canary Wharf-bound Tube train packed with jittery traders: "My Porsche dealer won't even make an offer on my 911, to take it off my hands, so now I'm stuck with a sports car I paid 60 grand for on finance. The way things are, I'll have to try to sell it on PistonHeads."

PistonHeads.com, I discover, is not some dodgy car auction, but rather a web portal on which classifieds for Porsches et al are up 80 per cent, as cash-strapped traders try to "inject some liquidity" into their finances. No, I don't feel sorry for them either. Jamie Merrill