Masha Gessen’s essay “The Dying Foxes” is a textbook example of two varying theories and methods of social science both attempting to solve the same solve the same problem; in this case the trying to identify a cause for the alarmingly high death rates and low life expectancies in Russia, as well as the unusually low birth rate in the country. Gessen summarizes the work and theories of Michelle Parsons and Nicholas Eberstadt as they navigate this conundrum. The methods used by Parsons and Eberstadt perfectly align with the two categories of writers outlined in Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Parsons, an anthropologist who lived in Russia during the height of the population decline, is a quintessential hedgehog. Parsons focuses solely on “what she calls ‘the cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis.'” She interviews survivors of the crisis in an attempt to get inside the mind of a Russian citizen at the time. She also examines the upbringings of her subjects, as well as economic shifts in the country brought on by the rise and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. However, while Parsons examines many different aspects of the lives of Russians during the time of the crisis, her research focuses solely on the psychological condition of those Russians. She views the crisis only through that lens, and doesn’t necessarily entertain the notion that there could be other factors involved in the crisis. Eberstadt and his methods, on the other hand, align perfectly with Berlin’s definition of a fox. As Gessen notes, “Eberstadt is interested in the larger phenomenon of depopulation, including falling birth rates as well as rising death rates.” Also, Eberstadt focuses on “Russia’s half-century-long period of demographic regress rather than simply the mortality crisis of the 1990s,” as Parsons does. Another difference between the two is that Eberstadt is not necessarily theorizing on potential reasons, as Parsons does at times. Rather, he takes somewhat more of a scientific approach, in that he tries to find “hard data” that clearly identifies a specific reason or reasons as to the cause of the mortality crisis. While Eberstadt admits that he can’t pinpoint a culprit, he examines a long list of potential cause of the demographic regression, and he “is thorough in examining each of them.” So while Eberstadt is unable to solve the problem of Russian demographic regression, his methods are much more effective and examine a much wider range of potential causes than Parsons does.