What it is.
Why did I choose to name my personal blog "Foxy Hedgehog"? Partly as a statement of intent, and, to be honest, partly because I liked the sound of it. I first became aware of the fox/hedgehog taxonomy of personalities through the song "Hedgehog" on Luna's 1995 album, "Penthouse". Not my favorite song on the album, but it does have the line "He's a liar / she's annoying", which always makes me smile.
I listened to that album a lot in the late 90s, and around the same time I was gifted a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which is where I learned about Isaiah Berlin's essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox'.
That essay's subject is Tolstoi's War and Peace, a book I haven't read and frankly don't plan to anytime soon (I think I may be done with long novels in general). So take my interpretations of the essay with that grain of salt. Nevertheless, the gist is that Tolstoy was a hedgehog pursuing one big idea but was trying to be a fox pursuing lots of little ones. It also applies the same distinctions to characters in the novel, leading to the question of how much individuals influence history.
So the idea of calling this blog 'Foxy Hedgehog' took shape around imagining it as a place for publishing all the little ideas I have about diverse topics and a way to see if there's "one big idea" in all of them. But also because I liked the sound of it.
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