Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to have dinner chez Rachael Kendrick, blogger and cook extraordinaire. (I’ve also interviewed her for the Killings podcast, which you can find here.) We were chatting about her varied extracurricular activities – I feel like I can say ‘extracurricular’ about an academic – one of which is powerlifting. As she showed us her favourite powerlifting shirts (neither, sadly, was made of lycra), one of the other dinner guests professed himself astounded by the exotic range of activities Kendrick did in her spare time.

Although we were talking about hobbies (perhaps the favourite word of second-language teachers), the conversation reminded me of one of my favourite author bios I’ve read lately – that of Arthur Phillips, author of The Song is You, The Egyptologist and Angelica. It begins:

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. Read more

There’s nothing like the hospitality of a food blogger on an autumn eve. Cradling a little glass bottle of chinotto in my gloved hands, I spoke to Rachael Kendrick of Thus Bakes Zarathustra, Motor Coconut, The Vine (click on that last one for sure – I ate of that cake, people) about blogging and social media. We leapfrogged from how blogging and her PhD research on obesity interact to the ethical concerns of Twitter, how to manage attention with all the stimulation that social media offers us, Masterchef (of course) and the wild and woolly issue of how to monetise a blog.

Download podcast here. Podcasts appear fortnightly. You can download previous podcasts or subscribe via iTunes here.

Music is by Pompey.