Mini-Heap: recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected in groups of 10, here for your perusal and discussion.

If you have suggestions for the Heap of Links, send ’em in.

1. “In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship (or beauty) depend on and encourage our differences” — a rich and wide-ranging interview with Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
2. Is “honorable service at the senior political level under Donald Trump” possible? — an informed and in-depth look at the question from Quinta Jurecic (Brookings)
3. Why is there beauty in nature? — because it’s adaptive? Richard Prum (Yale) thinks we shouldn’t assume so.
4. “Ferocious pleas for comity can also serve as an evasive maneuver—a way to dodge important debates about the favorite habits of a discipline” — Daniel Engber in Slate on recent controversies in philosophy and psychology
5. “Too much moral philosophy operates on the conceit that morality resides in the territory of discrete choice and decision” — but habits, instincts, reflexes play a role; etiquette can “provide a mechanism by which these too can bend toward justice”
6. How to prepare for graduate school while poor — a wiki guide
7. A philosophy professor will be biking coast-to-coast to raise money for Habitat For Humanity — go Jose Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M)! (via Kathryn Pogin)
8. Old Plato was reckon’d Divine / He wisely to vertue was prone / But had it not been for good wine / His merits we never had known — a 1710 precursor to the Monty Python “Philosopher’s Song”? (via Daniel Brunson)
9. Philosophy instructor arrested for striking a Trump supporter in the head with a bicycle u-lock — his most recent class? “Introduction to Ethics”
10. “There’s no evidence that anyone was fooled into believing that this paper was real” –James Stacy Taylor (College of NJ) on how the only folks hoaxed were the so-called “skeptics”