Once again, here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected and numbered for your convenience. Feel free to discuss.

The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap.

1. “The very numbness that can be so adaptive to survival, can also erect walls that stand in the way of human attachment and trust.” — Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) on stoicism and the military
2. “An increasingly isolated Pythagoras was left by his wife and four children around 515 B.C., shortly after he accused they themselves of being triangles” — the Pythagorean conspiracy theorems
3. “Meritocracy was once a progressive force… but its historical moment has passed” — against merit: a reading list
4. Should you try to have sexual relations with people over whom you hold professional power? — the moral significance of what the relevant parties do not know
5. “You just have to sit and think about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can” — a profile of Jeff McMahan (Oxford) and his current work, at Quartz
6. Science doesn’t need more mavericks — but it does need to become more speculative and risk-friendly, argues Adrian Currie (Cambridge)
7. “Professional philosophy is—like most academic disciplines—a gift-giving credit economy” — in which “the more one can give, the more one receives, indirectly, in return”
8. “Comparing teachers and scholars criticizing sexism and racism to perpetrators of violence and hate speech closes down discussions necessary to address… those very harms” — Kelly Oliver (Vanderbilt) on outrage in academia
9. “Pointlessness is terrible. Life is pointless, and that is really not ok.” — an interview with Rivka Weinberg (Scripps)
10. “The ways in which those who try to make themselves invulnerable… undermine what makes us most human” — reading about the philosophy of vulnerability during a hurricane