Sources and Methods

Our guest this week is Marianne Long, Education Director of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and Co-Founder of the Gills Club. Marianne works to foster the engagement of young girls in the study of sharks, and I was curious to talk to her about the outreach and education events they offer. We also get into a little bit about the funding of research on sharks and the latest kinds of research methods.

Our guest this week is Matthew Cassel, an independent multimedia journalist and filmmaker based in Istanbul, Turkey. As a writer, photographer and videographer he has reported from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. His most recent work was a six-part documentary film about Syrian refugees making the trek to Europe which has been featured in the New Yorker. Show notes are available, as always, at http://www.sourcesandmethods.com

This week we talk with Dr K. Anders Ericsson about his pioneering work advancing the science of expertise. Key question: how do we get better at specific skills and learning? We get into everything covered in his latest book, 'Peak', and discuss how writers and researchers might put some of his insights into practice. Full show notes are available at http://www.sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Alex Mullen. He’s currently a medical student at the University of Mississipi, but also the current reigning World Memory Champion. He can memorise the order of a pack of cards in 17 seconds and was inspired to start training to improve his memory after reading Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein.Shownotes can be found at http://www.sourcesandmethods.com/

Our guest this week is Samuel Maruta, the co-founder of Marou Chocolate in Vietnam, and an increasing presence on the artisanal chocolate scene. He walks us through the production, ethics and big picture thinking around the chocolate industry.Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Ben Anderson, a British journalist, television reporter, and writer. A winner of the Foreign Press Award, he has produced documentaries for numerous television outlets throughout his career, and currently works for VICE. He also wrote “No Worse Enemy” based on his reporting of the war in Afghanistan, and his documentary films are available online.Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Matt is back this week! Our guests this week are Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves of beeminder.com. They’re a husband and wife team that have put together a productivity app that thousands of people use regularly to track their performance towards their goals.Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Jonathan Brown, an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in places such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, India and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (Brill, 2007), Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009), Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014). He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic Law. Dr. Brown’s current research focuses on modern conflicts between Late Sunni Traditionalism and Salafism in Islamic thought.Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is someone who has done a lot of thinking about notes and note-taking. Lion Kimbro now works at Pokemon but he has written chapters in books on note-taking as well as his own book, entitled “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think”. I first read his book a couple of years ago and think about it fairly regularly. I changed a number of things relating to how I take notes since reading it through and I thought getting him to come on the show would be a unique opportunity to talk through some of the practical implications of the various systems he describes as well as to see how his approach has evolved. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Stephen Krashen, an academic, linguist, and educational theorist who has been active on the front lines of the academic and media debate about how people learn languages, how children are taught in the United States and the on the value of reading. He is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and has published over 480 papers and books. Full show notes and links to everything we talked about in the show are available at sourcesandmethods.com.