Usually, the Mini-Heap contains 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected and numbered for your convenience. However, after last week’s break, many links have accumulated, and so here is a double edition of the Mini-Heap. 

That’s right: 20 links to items of possible interest to Daily Nous readers.

Is it still mini? Was it ever a heap? These, my friends, are questions for the ages…

But for now, if you have suggestions for the Heap of Links, please send ’em in.

1. A philosophy PhD who struggled with depression as a grad student will be giving a talk at their school on it — what should they say?
2. What is it like to be a dog? — a question at the intersection of law, brain science, and philosophy
3. “The surfer is thus something of a new model of civic virtue. The real troublemaker is the workaholic.” — Aaron James (UC Irvine) philosophizes about surfing
4. New philosophy blog of interviews with early-career legal and moral philosophers— from Lucas Miotto (Edinburgh)
5. The “real meaning of life” for philosophers (EC)
6. Lessons from a lack of interpretive charity — and what Nancy Maclean and the public choice theorists she criticizes have in common
7. A twitter feud over race and Roman history, fueled by scientism — Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) explains the mistake
8. On the value of studying “minor” figures in the history of philosophy — how to address those who are skeptical
9. A student draws portraits of philosophers in the style of “cute anime boys”
10. The Franz Kafka video game — now available for your iPhone, etc.
11. “I’m contacting an author whose manuscript was due in 1987. A full 30 years ago.…The rest of you can feel better now for being a little late.”
12. “I know what a philosophy class looks like… I had never seen a class this dumbed down” — refusing to lower standards, one philosophy instructor quit and another was fired (via Debra Nails)
13. Philosophy has “a very high nuance rate in the first few decades of the twentieth century, which then sharply declines, and rejoins the upward trend in the 1980s” — Kieran Healy (Duke) on “nuance” over time in several disciplines
14. At the intersection of metaphysics and political philosophy — David Strohmaier (Sheffield) on the ontology of nation-states, at his philosophy blog
15. “Even philosophers whose work is in areas of real public interest, such as applied ethics, can struggle to get a hearing above the noise of pundits, preachers and politicians” — what should philosophers do to better influence public debate?
16. Nomy Arpaly (Brown) now has her own blog — it’s called “The View From The Owl’s Roost”
17. Two philosophers shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize (via Holly Lawford Smith)
18. Relying primarily on law enforcement to address structural problems tells the disadvantaged: we “don’t really care about them” — Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on calls for tougher policing
19. Daniel Dennett (Tufts) and David Papineau (KCL) debate on the pages of TLS — with an introduction from Tim Crane (Cambridge/CEU)
20. Philosophy journal corrects the official record regarding articles by Bruce Le Catt (via Michael Dougherty)