Did you know that today is the United Nations' International Anti-Corruption Day? I didn't. (I wonder whose palm got greased at MeadWestvaco Corporation to leave that fact off my desk calendar.) Six out of ten of the 91,500 people polled in 86 countries by the Berlin-based non-governmental agency Transparency International (who make a nice-looking graph, below) say that they believe the world has gotten more corrupt over the past three years. One out of every four say they have paid a bribe to a service provider in the past year. So, let's see, that's [beep-boop-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep] 22,875 people. Today is a day that we take note of the fact that the world is a very corrupt place. Here's that graph. READ MORE

Graphic Designer Bob Noorda died two weeks ago in Italy. He was 82, and, as the Times notes, he "helped introduce a Modernist look to advertising posters, corporate logos and, in the 1960s, the entire New York City subway system." When you consider how ubiquitous and helpful the MTA's color-coded Helvetica signage and maps are, not to mention all the knock-off t-shirts sold on St. Marks, and, now, the custom-made signs available for personal use, Noorda goes down with folks like Milton "I Heart NY" Glaser or Louis B. Tiffany-who designed the interlocking "N" and "Y" that would become the Yankee's logo, in 1877, originally as a medal of honor for the first NYPD cop shot on duty, an officer named John McDowell (that's interesting!)-as a giant of the city's visual history. READ MORE

In the spring of 1939, the UK government's Ministry of Information commissioned a series of wall posters designed to assuage public anxiety. The first poster went into production in August 1939-a month before England declared war on Germany. Its message was stridently chirpy: "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory." The second poster featured the rather deflating "Freedom is in Peril"-and like the first, it was plastered in shop windows and rail stations. The third poster had the largest print run of all-historians estimate 2.5 million copies made-but it was held in reserve, to be deployed only in the event Hitler's soldiers got their boots on English soil. Its slogan was "Keep Calm and Carry On." Seventy years later, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster is back. This week it attained the highest honor a bit of kitsch could aspire to: it was wanly saluted by Rob Walker in The New York Times magazine. READ MORE