Sorry for being out of touch.  End of teaching! Finals time! A bit crazy-making. If you're an academic, you know whereof I speak.

Are philosophical "intuitions" innate?  For the past century, thought-experiments especially in Anglophone philosophy have often been grounded on claims of what seems "intuitively" obvious to "us".  These have always been challengeable on multiple fronts, not least parochialism, whether individual or cultural.  In the past  couple decades, "experimentalism" in philosophy has tried to quantify how idiosyncratic these intuitional claims are. Now there's a debate about what the results of those studies entail.  

Some helpful advice on writing for a public audience. This is all good advice.  Especially the bit about "avoiding hedging"--that's actually an academic vice that we think is an academic virtue.  We confuse "appropriate care for nuance" (which is good) with "ensuring we can't be held accountable for saying anything very determinate" (which is bad). 

Mr. Rogers, companion in and vanquisher of adult despair/

Is this the end of the Chinese student boom for US and UK universities?  A new report suggests so.   

Alan Furst is one of my favorite writers of historical fiction thrillers. He's a bit formulaic, but I think the formulaic nature of his books is actually due to his own personal obsessions, which is actually worse for him, but better for his readers. Anyway, he has been mapping out the psychological terrain of the 1930s for twenty years now, and every time I read one of his novels, it feels like a prophesy of today. Here he gives some tips on a few good books of the 1930s; very much worth your time.

And Max Headroom! E-E-Enough said.