(Roughly) Daily

Obesity percentages per state (in alphabetical order, running left to right, from the top left): the “fatter” the star, the more obese the average state resident

Through the month running up to the November election, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is featuring the responses of four design firms to the challenge of “re-branding America.”

This week’s entrant, MGMT, started from the observation that the U.S. flag is, in fact, an infographic, representative of both America’s history and its modern identity:  13 stripes = 13 original colonies; 50 stars = 50 states–  good as far as it goes, but what else, MGMT asked, might a flag communicate…

Last year, Americans spent over $10 billion on plastic surgery (white). The federal budget for NASA’s space operations was $3.5 billion (red).

Read more about MGMT’s entry here, and see all 50 of their new flags here.  Last week’s entrant, Jeremy Mende, took a different tack…

Readers can find Mendes entries here.

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As we stand to attention and salute, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that President John F. Kennedy took to television to report to the nation that Soviet nuclear missiles had been stationed in Cuba, and that in response, the U.S. was launching a naval blockade– and the Cuban Missile Crisis began.

Fifty years later, with the benefit of recently-declassified documents, it’s clear that the crisis was even more dangerous than it felt at the time… and as Ploughshares notes, its effects are with us still.

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