Fourth of July-ish Links

* Your single chart that explains everything, academia edition:

* The student loan suicides. The graduates of 2012 are already dead. Every Article About Graduate Unemployment Ever.

* This is education in the neoliberal age: a quest not for success, but for survival. You ask what it is that will give your children ‘a better chance’. You find a dispassionately technocratic answer, based on the rigorous analysis of academic achievement data. You discount every factor that might make your children non-average, beginning with their attitudes and desires. While you’re at it, you put out of your mind the very idea of social relationships and of the social good. Remember: your children are drowning. It would be quite absurd at this time to wonder what your friends’ children, what their own friends are up to.

* Literature in the Oil Age.

* “Yesterday—only the first day of the month—was hot enough to shatter 27 records and tie 24 others for the highest ever July temperatures. Here’s the whole last week:

Back to back 105 days in my beloved Durham. Are any scientists working on this trying to figure out what’s going on? Firsthand Accounts: Parts of WV, Ohio “Apocalypse” due to the Derecho. Colorado Wildfires Shutter Climate Lab. Get used to wildfires.

* All your preconceptions confirmed: 69 Politicians As They Were In High School.

* Libertarianism and the Workplace.

* Via Bitter Laughter, Reddit explains ACA. Another great piece from Amanda Marcotte that shows how fact-free right-wing opposition to Obamacare has been allowed to be: Questions for Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and Other Opponents of Health Care Reform: Where Are Your Facts?

* As Supreme Court Affirms Patchwork U.S. Healthcare System, Vermont Pushes Ahead with Single Payer.

* The down and dirty history of secret spending, PACs gone wild, and the epic four-decade fight over the only kind of political capital that matters.

* This short story by Cory Doctorow imagines an encounter between a solitary sentient robot (Robbie the Row Boat), human meat-bodies that serve as avatars for scuba diving, and a recently uplifted-to-sentience coral reef. Sold!

* The truth is out there: U.S. government lies about the existence of mermaids.

* And sometimes Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets it all right. Happy Fourth of July.