Daily Bafflements

• Washington City Paper today has a very comprehensive guide to D.C. etiquette, including such entries as “How to Offer—and Ask for—Marijuana at a Party” and “Go Ahead, Ask Someone What He or She Does for a Living When You’ve Just Met,” and, of course, “What to Do When You Know You’re Talking to a Member of Congress, but You Don’t Know Which One.”

• “When it comes to the persistence of poverty and of inequality, it will take all of our resources and capacity for cooperation, along with a more sophisticated, comprehensive understanding of human capital formation, to overcome our domestic squabbling and mount a concerted offensive.” – Thomas Edsall in a New York Times op-ed entitled “What Makes People Poor?”

• Oh, and you may have heard that this guy also wrote a NYT op-ed yesterday.

• From Max Read, here’s a fun map of European colonization through history, showing that only five lil’ countries in the whole world escaped it.