The Hedgehog and the Fox
The Hedgehog and the Fox
Some of these interviews may present bold new theories (in the spirit of the hedgehog) while others may focus in detail on something quite small, even overlooked (in the spirit of the fox). The driving forces are curiosity and the desire to communicate original thinking in an engaging, accessible way.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
All episodes
Best episodes
Top 10 The Hedgehog and the Fox Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Hedgehog and the Fox episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Hedgehog and the Fox for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Hedgehog and the Fox episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Danny Dorling on Slowdown
The Hedgehog and the Fox
05/10/20 • 37 min
This week, we have a returning guest to the podcast, Oxford professor of geography Danny Dorling, who spoke to me recently about his new book Slowdown. Danny has given his book one of those subtitles that clearly map out the terrain he intends to cover: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives.
You may currently be feeling at best ambivalent about the idea of slowdown, with so many of us are enduring a Covid-19-enforced pause and desperate to know when we might get back up to normal speed.
Danny’s message is not that humanity collectively needs to slam on the brakes, but that slowdown in many aspects of modern life (though not quite all) is already happening, and we need to think about its consequences, and potential.
In our day-to-day lives we may fail to see it, he suggests, but look at the patterns in the data and slowdown becomes visible. As he puts it in his opening pages, “An era is ending.”
But he’s not out to paint a picture of societal collapse or some dystopian regression to barbarism. In his first chapter, he writes:
There are good seasons to come, but not fertile seasons in which our numbers, inventions, and aggregate wealth grow exponentially; in fact, our numbers will very soon stop growing at all.The past few generations have seen great progress as well as great suffering, including the worst of all wars in terms of fatalities, genocides, and the most despicable of all human behaviors —including the planning and construction required for the mass nuclear annihilation of our species.It may take us some time to accept that we now face a future of fewer discoveries, fewer new gizmos, and fewer “great men.” But is this such a bitter pill to swallow? We will also see fewer despots, less destruction, and less extreme poverty.And we will never again worship the “creative destruction” that twentieth-century economists so stupidly lauded at the height of the great acceleration.So for Dorling, slowdown is (potentially) a good thing: not only better than headlong acceleration, but our only hope of continuing to inhabit this planet. Not a guarantee of utopia, but a prospect of some sort of stable, sustainable life.
Danny Dorling, at home and podcast-ready, April 2020
But if slowdown sets the context, it doesn’t determine the political choices that will have to be made. And so much of what we believe about our lives and our world is still about quickening change, the need to keep up or be left behind, the obligation to produce more or be found wanting. We’re not imaginatively well-equipped to deal with the idea of slowdown. Canadian premier Justin Trudeau put it like this in 2018:
Think about it: The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.That’s the strongly ingrained perception that Danny is challenging in his book, and that’s where we started our conversation.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Conversations with Publishers: Amy Brand, MIT Press
The Hedgehog and the Fox
11/22/19 • 32 min
This week we have an interview with Amy Brand, who for the past four years has been director of the MIT Press. In a recent Q&A that appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen, Amy said of her role at the MIT press:
The job is a perfect fit for me because it builds on my experiences beyond publishing in academic science, university administration and research startups.In our conversation, we talk about the changes Amy has made at the press and how she sees them against the wider context of the publishing and scholarly landscape. Amy's appointment in 2015, in fact, marked a return to the MIT press, as she'd been their executive editor in cognitive science and linguistics from 1994 to 2000. Between those appointments, Amy's career included a number of years at Harvard University, first as program manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication and then as assistant provost for faculty appointments and information.
When I spoke to Amy on the phone, I began by remarking that I'd noticed she was producing a documentary, so she was clearly interested in a wide range of ways of presenting knowledge beyond the traditional university press categories.
Amy BrandVery, very much so. You know, that dates back to the experience I had as an editor at the MIT press in the '90s. The director of the press at the time, Frank Urbanowski, was, I would say, ahead of his time in terms of thinking about the potential for digital media in relation to scholarship. We were one of the first presses – along with Columbia University Press – to begin to really invest in online communities and specific subject areas. For us, it was cognitive science, which was my area as a PhD and also as an editor; for Columbia was political science. And I became fascinated with how we could translate the work that was going on in the academy for a broad audience and build in opportunities for immersion beyond your typical journal article or monograph in terms of the genre of the information. So that set me down that path. I had been an acquisitions editor here for about seven years before I left in 1999/2000 and that experience is what led me away from MIT initially, because I became so interested in digital publishing.
Hedgehog & FoxGoing all the way back to undergraduate work, you studied linguistics. Am I reading too much into it to see that interest in deep structures and connections that that linguists are involved in as something that's a thread running through your interests subsequently?
Amy BrandNot at all. I think that I've very much stayed true to this interest in how language conveys information, how the mind structures language. And I see what university presses do and what publishers do is about that very path from text to knowledge. And so I see a great deal of continuity between my earlier interests and what I do now.
Hedgehog & FoxBut unlike some directors of university presses, you stepped outside the university press world. You were for a number of years an assistant provost at Harvard University. So I guess there must have come a point where you had to decide, do I want to step back into the university press world? Or, given that there are lots of questions about what his future holds, you might have decided, no, there are other areas that will absorb and retain my interest outside that world. But you made the conscious, very specific decision to come back.
Amy BrandYes. You know, I again see a lot of continuity in that. The Harvard story is a little bit different. What happened was, I left the MIT Press where I'd been an editor. I went to work at Crossref, which I am is an organization I'm still very involved in as a board member. And I feel very strongly about how it's transformed scholarly information. But when I was working at Crossref, that was sort of the start of the open access fervour. And a friend of mine, someone that I had known for my academic days, who was a professor at Harvard, reached out and said, ‘I'm starting this office for scholarly communication.’ That's when I left Crossref to go help start up the off...
Robert Irwin: in praise of the camel
The Hedgehog and the Fox
05/08/18 • 17 min
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dur’s beer fer dogs: the joys of Liverpudlian English
The Hedgehog and the Fox
01/11/18 • 36 min
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Conversations with Translators: Meredith McKinney
The Hedgehog and the Fox
04/05/20 • 47 min
This week, another interview in the series of Conversations with Translators. My guest is Meredith McKinney, a translator from Japanese whose anthology of classical Japanese travel writing was published in Penguin Classics at the end of last year.
I was alerted to her book by an excellent review of it by PD Smith in the Guardian:
‘In this remarkable work of translation and scholarship, filled with wonderful vignettes of Japanese life and sensibility, McKinney introduces readers to the nation’s rich and unique literary tradition.’The anthology takes the story of Japanese literature up to the late 17th century and the poet Basho, who wrote The Narrow Road to the Deep North, having begun around a thousand years earlier. In this interview, Meredith explained that the Western reader needs to set aside certain preconceptions of what travel writing is in approaching her book:
We think of travel writing really as writing about adventure; the traveller going off and witnessing new things, discovering new things about themselves and other people and other places. Newness is probably the essence of what we think about in travel writing, whereas this travel writing is hugely about its own tradition: going back and touching the things that earlier travellers had touched was really the touchstone, as it were, of so much of this writing.Meredith lived and taught in Japan for around twenty years, then returned to Australia in 1998 and now lives near the small town of Braidwood, in south-eastern New South Wales. She is currently an honorary associate professor at the Japan Centre, Australian National University.
The post Conversations with Translators: Meredith McKinney appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
American GeHographies
The Hedgehog and the Fox
03/09/20 • 37 min
After a three-month hiatus, the Hedgehog and the Fox is back with a new spring season. To get it under way, in this latest podcast we explore the role of pigs and pork in shaping American history, in the company of historian Joseph Anderson, who told me:
Swine, like so many species, are very opportunistic and they are able to exploit a niche. That was one of the things that made them such a great source of calories for thousands of years. When you put them in an estuary, or you put them in hill country, or in a forest or savannah, they will find a way [to thrive]. They're incredibly tough, so terribly fast, and they're able to exploit lots of different ecosystems. It makes them great colonizers.J.L. Anderson
In his book, Capitalist Pigs, Joe reproduces a humorous map of the United States from 1876 entitled a ‘Porcineograph’, in which the outline of the entire country has been lightly tweaked to take on the appearance of a pig: snout to the east, tail to the west, Florida a fore trotter, Baja California co-opted as a rear one.
The legend on the map listed pork dishes associated with each region: ham sandwiches in California, salt pork in Arkansas, scrapple in Pennsylvania, pickled trotters (appropriately enough) in Florida. ‘The message’, Joe writes, ‘was simple. Swine and pork were omnipresent from coast to coast.’
How pork came to be ‘the meat that built the nation’ is the theme of Joe’s book, and also of our conversation. He writes, ‘Bacon was the most commonly consumed meat on the Oregon and California Trails. Immigrant Helen Carpenter complained about the monotony of overland trail food:
“About the only change we have from bread and bacon is to bacon and bread.”
‘Authors of guidebooks for overland immigrants advised packing 25 to 75 lbs of bacon per person for the 110-day trek, which meant as much as over half a pound per day.
‘Pork fuelled the gold rushes, the logging frontier, military posts, and the canal and railroad boom across the continent.’
It also fed the enslaved people of the American south, their calorie intake carefully calculated to maximize productivity without enabling dissent.
The post American GeHographies appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Monica Cure on the power of the postcard
The Hedgehog and the Fox
12/11/18 • 31 min
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Christie Henry: ‘Shaping knowledge, shaping communication’
The Hedgehog and the Fox
09/10/19 • 33 min
This week we have an interview with Christie Henry, who’s director of Princeton University Press. She joined PUP two years ago in September 2017, after twenty-four years at the University of Chicago Press, where she was Editorial Director for Sciences, Social Sciences, and Reference Publishing. In the course of our conversation, Christie mentioned that she thought university presses had some ‘reputational work' to do. I asked her to expand on this:
Christie HenrySpecific to PUP, the reputational work I feel that is important to us extends from the cultural work we're doing internally to become a more inclusive environment where we have empowered a wide range of staff in all departments to be active contributors to who we are and what our brand is. And we will be soon releasing a new website that will showcase that: telling more of our story and explaining why we think the collaborations that we have and that are entrusted to us are so powerful.
I think university presses in general need to be thinking about being less reactive and less in service to universities and really being powerful forces in shaping knowledge and shaping communication. And I do think many of us do that, but in a role that is quieter, in much the way that editors play a role that is often unnoticed and subtle and very purposeful at the same time. So I think it might take us doing a little bit more public communication around the role that we're playing than we we do now – with doses of humility, of course. I think that's really important.
I've been overseeing a taskforce on gender equity and cultures of respect for the AU presses, which we'll be turning over to the board this week. We, like many publishers in the UK, are struggling to reach equity along a number of axes. We have a dominance of women in positions, but not in leadership positions. We have pay inequities. (This is speaking across the university press world.) We've conducted a survey of the lived experience of the community to learn where people feel we have work to do on equities. I think that's where we can also effect some important reputational change.
We can do things like look at the author demographics of our list; as proud as every publisher is of their list,there is room to grow and to adapt. I also think it's really important for us to think about ourselves as an industry and how we present to the new generation of colleagues and collaborators; we're switching from an environment that was dominated by baby boomers to one that is by millennials. And what does that mean we have to change in terms of our management style, in terms of our team dynamics?
University presses, I think, I have been known to be a little bit more conservative and slow to change; going back to evolutionary terms, maybe operating in a more kind of punctuated equilibrium model. I think we need to do more punctuation and with intention, and that will help lend a currency to our reputations that we don't always have. Many of us have very storied histories, but trying to connect those histories to the here and now and also to the future impact is really important and I know a lot of my peers directors are spending a lot of time thinking about that.
The post Christie Henry: ‘Shaping knowledge, shaping communication' appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Paul Luna on typography
The Hedgehog and the Fox
12/21/18 • 35 min
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Christopher Lloyd on Guy de Maupassant, teller of tales
The Hedgehog and the Fox
07/29/20 • 33 min
This week we explore the life and work of the master of the 19th-century short story, Guy de Maupassant, in the company of his recent biographer Christopher Lloyd, who’s emeritus professor of French at Durham. (The TLS called Chris's book ‘a crisp, witty, balanced and well-informed guide.’)
Depending on your age and background, you might have read some Maupassant at school, or maybe encountered him on a literature survey course at university. He’s much anthologized. But that has proved to be a mixed blessing. The same pieces crop up again and again, representing just a tiny fraction of his 300 short stories. In France, by some estimates, he is the best-selling classic author, thanks to continuing educational sales. So his name is well known. Many people feel they know him, without really knowing him.
As Christopher Lloyd’s book shows, most of us have barely glimpsed the full extent of Maupassant’s writing, which includes half a dozen novels as well as the short fiction, and a wide range of themes which one French edition meticulously catalogued. It included ‘devil’, ‘divorce’, ‘double’, ‘duel’, ‘strangling’, ‘fantastic’, ‘madness’, ‘drunkenness’... which maybe already gives some insight into the often dark and dangerous world Maupassant’s characters inhabit.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Show more best episodes
Show more best episodes
FAQ
How many episodes does The Hedgehog and the Fox have?
The Hedgehog and the Fox currently has 92 episodes available.
What topics does The Hedgehog and the Fox cover?
The podcast is about Podcasts and Education.
What is the most popular episode on The Hedgehog and the Fox?
The episode title 'Laura Clancy: Running the (royal) family firm' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The Hedgehog and the Fox?
The average episode length on The Hedgehog and the Fox is 32 minutes.
How often are episodes of The Hedgehog and the Fox released?
Episodes of The Hedgehog and the Fox are typically released every 13 days, 22 hours.
When was the first episode of The Hedgehog and the Fox?
The first episode of The Hedgehog and the Fox was released on Oct 12, 2016.
Show more FAQ
Show more FAQ