Here’s the latest edition of Mini-Heap!

1. “I have to find a new question now” — Urmila Mahadev, a graduate student who recently solved the fascinating quantum verification problem
2. “How can we get better at talking civilly to people who are very different from ourselves?” — maybe we need billy goats, says Agnes Callard (Chicago)
3. Does Harriet Taylor get too little credit for her role in Mill’s writings? — or too much?
4. “Even if right-leaning authors appear on syllabi as frequently as left-leaning authors, students remain at risk of receiving an unbalanced presentation of the views.” — one reason Christopher Freiman (William & Mary) argues for “viewpoint diversity”
5. “Democracy depends on the capacity of citizens to sustain their commitment to the political equality of even those who they regard as their most benighted, vicious, and depraved political opponents.” — It ain’t easy, observe Scott Aikin & Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
6. “What is more practical than thinking hard about how to live one’s life?” — in a local Texas paper, a defense of philosophy’s “messing with minds,” by Robert Baird (Baylor)
7. The optimal number of academic hoaxes is not zero — Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris, Diderot) offers some examples to show why
8. Is the United States on its way to having something “quite a bit like law, in several respects, but not actually a legal system”? — In a few ways that seems to be the case, says Les Green (Oxford)
9. A good look at the show-nothing hoax — by Daniel Engber in Slate
10. “Narratives seduce you into thinking you really understand what’s going on and why things happened, but most of it is guessing” — Alex Rosenberg (Duke) is interviewed about how narrative thinking leads historians astray

Mini-Heap posts appear when about 10 new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, the ever-growing collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.

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. Thanks!