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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Five ways to help musicians think like entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship for musicians need not be mysterious. It’s really just a different way of looking at your world and capitalizing on opportunities. How do you develop that kind of mindset? Here are five things you can start doing that may help you think like an entrepreneur.

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The state of black cinema in 2019

This year’s Academy Awards presentation takes places at the end of Black History Month. The congruence of this fact with the increased profile of heretofore minority cinema is more than felicitous. Since the Twitter campaign #Oscarsowhite following the announcement of the 2015 nominations, both the Academy and the motion picture industry have made visible efforts to promote work by Asian, Latino, and African-American directors, writers, actors, and musicians.

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Philosopher of the Month: Plato [infographic]

This February, the OUP Philosophy team honours Plato (c. 427–347 BCE) as their Philosopher of the Month. Together with Socrates and Aristotle, Plato is recognized as one of the most influential figures of ancient Greek philosophy.

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Some value safety, others value risk

No one has ever crossed the Antarctic by themselves and without help from other people or engines. To me, this is very unsurprising and uninteresting. No one (outside of superhero movies) has ever shrunk themselves to the size of an ant, or turned back time by causing the earth to rotate backwards either. Big deal. […]

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Ice Cube and the philosophical foundations of community policing

The recent “First Step Act” is the most significant federal criminal justice reform in decades. Still, it is a modest first step. The law eases the sentences of some inmates in federal prison, but it will not impact the problem of mass incarceration significantly because it does not address the many inmates incarcerated in state and local facilities.

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Congratulations to Cyberwar

Oxford University Press has won the 2018 R. R. Hawkins Award, which is awarded by the Association of American Publishers to a single book every year to “recognize outstanding scholarly works in all disciplines of the arts and sciences.” 

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Black History Month: a reading list

February marks the celebration of Black History Month in the United States and Canada, an annual celebration of achievements by Black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S history. Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life, which initiated the first variation of Black History month, titled, Negro History Week in 1926 during the second week of February. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History expanded the February celebration in the early 1970’s, renaming it Black History Month, however, it was not until 1976 that every president designated the month of February as Black History Month.

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Photography and sex in Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore

The Baltimore photographer Amos Badertscher has been cataloguing queer lives in his city since the 1960s: male sex workers and their girlfriends, the 1990s Baltimore and Washington club culture, transgender people, crack and heroin addiction, and the impact of AIDS. His is the largest extant photographic record of the short lives of hustlers (male sex […]

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Simone de Beauvoir at the movies

Does it make you less of an intellectual woman, any less of a feminist, to derive insight and even pleasure from films where women appear as instruments in the service of male desire?

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How to do fact checking

The actor Cary Grant once said of acting that, “It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.” That’s true for writing as well—concrete details can paint a picture for a reader and establish credibility for a writer. Details can be tricky, however, and in the swirl of research and the dash of exposition, it is possible to get things wrong: dates, names, quotes, and facts.

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Happy Chinese New Year!

This year, the Chinese New Year begins today, February 5th, and people all around the world will be ringing in the year of the Pig.  Oxford Chinese Dictionary editor, Julie Kleeman, shares some insight into the traditions associated with the Chinese New Year celebrations.

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Based on a true story [podcast]

In the world of film, members of the audience perceive what they see on screen as realistic, even if what they’re seeing is not actually real. The role and influence of academic consultants has been debated as the impact of historical films in the lens of educating a populous is in question. On this episode, […]

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The challenges of representing history in comic book form

When I wrote my first graphic history, based on the 1876 court transcript of a West African woman who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court, in 2012, I received a diverse and gratifying range of feedback from my fellow historians. Their response was overwhelmingly but not universally positive.

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Are our fantasies immune from morality?

Immoral fantasies are not uncommon, nor are they necessarily unhealthy. Some are silly and unrealistic, though others can be genuinely disturbing. You might fantasize about kicking your boss in the shins, or having an affair with your best friend’s spouse, or planning the perfect murder.

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Philosopher of The Month: William James (timeline)

This January the OUP Philosophy team honours William James (1842-1910) as their Philosopher of the Month. James was the founder of pragmatism, an influential Harvard philosopher and scholar on religion and was arguably considered one of the dominant figures in psychology of his day, before Sigmund Freud.

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