There's a whole world outside this country.

Ivo Sanader Gordon Bajnai, former prime minister of Hungary, will be a visiting scholar at Columbia in the Fall. Hopefully, he won’t suffer the same fate as Ivo Sanader, the last former prime minister of an Eastern European country to visit Columbia. (Politics.HU)

Why does Snoop Dogg need us to pay him so much for money for Bacchanal? Maybe because he tried to rent the country of Liechtenstein! Believe it or not, it’s possible to rent the country, but it will set you back a cool $70,000/night. (Atlantic Wire, AirBNB)

Kaley Hanenkrat, BC ’11, just won a Fulbright Scholarship! She’ll be spending most of next year in Ukraine, studying how political activists who supported the 2004 Orange Revolution have dealt with its partial failure and aftermath. (Spec, Carnegie Endowment)

Economics prof Joseph Stiglitz recently penned an op-ed in Vanity Fair condemning the absurd levels of wealth inequality in the US. While we were once the poster-child for social mobility, Stiglitz says, now “America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran.” Ouch! Meanwhile, a Columbia professor of social work explained how Britain has succeeded in sharply reducing child poverty. (Vanity Fair, Economix)

It seems there’s no hope for journalism to ever turn a profit, so two Columbia J-School grads have launched Public Business, a nonprofit organization that funds high-quality business journalism. It’s like a cross between ProPublica and Business Insider. Prezbo would like you to remind you that journalism is important even if it’s not profitable and the governments of many other countries fund investigative journalism. (Reynolds Center, ProPublica, Business Insider, WSJ)

Violet, one of the hawks that has captured NYU’s heart, gave everyone a scare when she got part of a plastic bag stuck around her head. The fear was that her eggs rested on the rest of the bag and would therefore get tossed out of the nest if she tried to fly away. Crisis was finally averted when “without ceremony, Violet withdrew her head from the plastic loop.” (NYULocal, CityRoom)

These United States via Wikimedia Commons.