I’m trying something new here. As you may know, the Heap of Links is updated throughout the day as material comes in and as time allows. That will continue. I’ll now be adding regular posts that collate the links, about 10 at a time, to both give that material a bit more visibility and provide people a space to discuss them, should they wish to. Current rates of Heap growth suggest there will be a new Mini-Heap produced every other day or so. We’ll see how this goes. So, forthwith, the latest 10 links in the Heap:

1. “To grieve and mourn, one does not want those who will too ably measure and make tidy life’s alarming collapses… One wants philosophers who fall apart, who come undone with weeping, talk to graves, and cry out for the return of souls that don’t exist.”
2. The popularity of different philosophical topics — as measured by number of downloads of its corresponding “Crash Course” episode
3. “There is much less of a connection between reasons and rationality than many people assume” — an interview with John Broome (Oxford)
4. “Significant progress has been made in creating a body of philosophical work dealing with and oriented by the Africana experience in modernity… The task now is to de-ghettoize it and get the Euro-American establishment to face up to the challenge it raises,” says Charles Mills (CUNY)
5. There are better strategies for getting rid of people’s cognitive biases than teaching them critical thinking — use “contextual debiasing” to alter “extra-psychic, environmental, and social structures”
6. In defense of fanciful thought experiments — Patrick Lin (Cal Poly) at Forbes
7. Norms in the wild — Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania) talks about group behavior and social norms with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
8. The philosophy tool kit — Alan Hájek (ANU) with a primer for non-philosophers on what philosophical reasoning is like
9. Philosophers on the biology of desire and addiction — a symposium at The Brains Blog
10. Each class is 7.5 hours long. “You will put your cell phone in a box when you enter the class… There will be absolutely no napping.” — a course on “existential despair” at the University of Pennsylvania