HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Jay got back in and graduated (after a total of seven years of college). But when I talked to him, he was still working food-service and coffee-shop jobs at 28, baffled about how to turn his communications major into a professional job. He felt as if he was sold fake goods: “The world is at my fingertips, you can rule the world, be whatever you want, all this stuff. When I was 15, 16, I would not have envisioned the life I am living now. Whatever I imagined, I figured I would wear a suit every day, that I would own things. I don’t own anything.”

Part of a larger, sadder story.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on toys.

MORE PUSHBACK ON GARRETT EPPS’ IMAGERY: “Jeff Spicoli is a hero. When did liberals go all in on being turgid squares?”

UPDATE: A reader emails that Milbank and Epps’ attitudes toward Alito are summed up here.

MADONNA: Guns Don’t Kill People — People Kill People. “This all comes from fear and ignorance, and people not really raising their children or paying attention to what’s going on.”

YA THINK? Conor Friedersdorf: “Perhaps President Obama’s falling approval numbers are due in part to the fact that no one can trust what he says.”

BUZZFEED: 7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About If Bush Had Done Them.

JAMES LILEKS: Three Random Observations on the Mad Men Season Six Finale.

THE OBESITY ERA: IT’S NOT JUST PEOPLE GETTING FAT.

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. Obviously, if animals are getting heavier along with us, it can’t just be that they’re eating more Snickers bars and driving to work most days.

Hmm. I’m sure that capitalism is to blame. And George W. Bush.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Allen emails: “Like the canary in the coal mine or some animal’s ability to sense an oncoming seismic event, perhaps this is nature’s way of preparing all species for an oncoming ice age.”

HEH: “The response? You can now order a ‘Cease & Desist Burger.'”

AT AMAZON, Digital Deals Galore.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Some Unemployed Keep Losing Ground. “The recession ended four years ago. But for many job seekers, it hasn’t felt like much of a recovery. Nearly 12 million Americans were unemployed in May, down from a peak of more than 15 million, but still more than four million higher than when the recession began in December 2007. Millions more have given up looking for work and no longer count as unemployed. The share of the population that is working or looking for work stands near a three-decade low.” Maybe the recession didn’t really end four years ago.

SCIENCE: Evidence that Tamiflu reduces deaths in pandemic flu.

THE PREJUDICE OF OUR BLINDINGLY-WHITE-AND-WASPY SUPREME COURT PRESS: “Do I detect anti-Italian prejudice? Alito is too visibly expressive. He’s like a movie character with an Italian name (Spicoli). The rule is your face should be a mask? WASP-style?”

Plus: “Want to bet that if emotions played across the visage of Sonia Sotomayor while Alito or Scalia were articulating some nugget of conservatism that media’s Epps and Milbanks would tell us that this — this! — was the empathy Obama said was essential to judging?”

MORE ON THE INSTA-WIFE’S NEW BOOK, MEN ON STRIKE, in Psychology Today.

PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT UPDATE: Copenhagen Suborbitals Successfully Launches Rocket — Next Stop, Space! Full report, with pics and video, at the link.

STUART TAYLOR: Are Racial Preferences Now Entrenched For Decades?

NEAL STEPHENSON’S QUICKSILVER IS A DAILY DEAL ON AMAZON. $1.99 on Kindle.

BEER GOGGLES WITHOUT THE BEER: After getting a shock to the brain, subjects in a recent study rated the people around them as more attractive. It’s like Shallow Hal with batteries.

WELL, YES: Higher Ed Ponzi Scheme Hurts The Poor Most Of All.

REVIEWED: Montague Paratrooper Pro Folding Bike.

Made for paratroopers, but available on Amazon. Put one in your disaster kit if you care about mobility.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Higher education is operated like a medieval guild.”

DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER ABOUT THEIR CONNECTIONS TO NSA AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN? Anger mounts after Facebook’s ‘shadow profiles’ leak in bug. “Facebook said Friday it fixed a bug that exposed contact info for over six million accounts. The admission revealed its ‘shadow profile’ data collection activities, and users are furious.”

FROM PROF. JACOBSON: Ignorant and Confused Reactions to SCOTUS Voting Rights Act Decision. There are a lot of them. Let me just add that I don’t trust the current politicized-and-corrupt Department of Justice to oversee anything involving elections.

UPDATE: MSNBC host ‘physically enraged’ by SCOTUS’ Voting Rights Act decision.

Also: Meltdown of the day: Melissa Harris-Perry laments loss of citizenship after SCOTUS’ VRA decision.

Meanwhile, a more sober take from a lawyer who actually understands this stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “It seems to me that the ‘equal sovereignty’ principle is an important structural safeguard in the federal legislative process, protecting us from the democratic dysfunctions of things like the ‘Cornhusker Kickback.’ This is exactly the sort of thing that ought to shake judges out of the usual deference to Congress.”

More from Althouse here: “This is a case about Congress’s enumerated powers. It’s not about Congress violating rights, but the scope of its power under the 15th Amendment to enforce the right guaranteed by that amendment (the right against race discrimination in voting). This is a power to be used against state and local government, so the scope of that power implicates federalism doctrine.”

THE IDIOT VOTE.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Perils Of Protection. “Congress, predictably, gets foreign aid wrong.”