Mini-Heap
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!
Silvia Foti’s grandfather is a national hero in Lithuania. He also worked with the Nazis to kill Jews. His story has echoes across Eastern Europe
He did stand up to the Nazis, not by saving Jews but by trying to stymie recruitment for the SS. In March 1943, he was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. He was released in January 1945, then conscripted by…
Waheed Hussain (1972-2020)
Waheed Hussain, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, has died. Professor Hussain joined the University of Toronto Department of Philosophy in 2014. Just before that, he held a visiting position at the University Center for Human Values…
The Decades-Old Classic That Became the Ultimate Pandemic Poem
Complement with Bishop on why everyone should experience at least one long period of solitude in life and James Gleick reading her monumental poem about the nature of our knowledge, then revisit Amanda Palmer reading “Spell to Be Said Against…
Mass, Energy, and How Literature Transforms the Dead Weight of Being: Jeanette Winterson on Why We Read
And later, when I had left home at sixteen and was living in a Mini, I had my favourite books stashed in the boot and whenever I could be in the library, I was there. This wasn’t a fantasy world…
Murmuration: A Stunning Animated Poem About Our Connection to Nature and to Each Other
2*At the midnight of the yearutter darknessa million compasses failand the starlings don’t comeempty skyno swallows, no swiftsno summer nests in the eavesthreads looped in the bluea blackbird that isn’t thereopens his throatinto silence, thin airno golden noteWith an eye…
Confucius on Good Government, the 6 Steps to a Harmonious Society, and Self-Discipline as the Key to Democracy
Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that “the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius (551–479 BCE) recognized the indelible…
The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin Hubble Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe
It is there, looking through the colossal instrument night after cold night, that Hubble becomes obsessed with the Andromeda Nebula, then believed to be a swirl of gas and dust within our own galaxy. He begins suspecting it is not.…
Einstein on the Political Power of Art
When he returned to New York with a wounded body and a scarred soul, he spent six months recovering at the VA hospital, then poured his surviving spirit into a stirring narrative suite of fifty-five drawings titled The Parade —…
Dotspotting Expressionist Science: What the Mysterious Color-Markings on Storm Drains Have to Do with Rachel Carson’s Legacy and the War on a Deadly Virus
They are science. They are war paint on humanity’s countenance as we combat our great eternal enemy: the mosquito. But Carson’s most visionary proposition, decades ahead of science, was the development of biological controls that would curtail the reproduction of…