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Nearly as astonishing as Nawahi's achievement is his obscurity. He is not to be found among the 3,300 musicians listed in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. A thrilling new 23-tune set, Hawaiian String Virtuoso (on the Yazoo label), gives ample aural proof that King Bennie deserved his royal honorific as much as jazz gents named Duke and Count. One listens to the set, culled by Armstrong and Sherwin Dunner from rare originals, and the '30s guitarist in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown comes to mind--the one who was right up there with Django Reinhardt...
Pity the fate of the prolific German composer Georg Philipp Telemann. Never heard of him? Here's why. During his heyday in the 1700s he was quite the pop star on the church-music scene, but according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, "his reputation later declined because he was not an innovator." He has fans today who think he got a bad rap, but it shows how history judges people. The reference work gives far more respect to anyone who really innovated, ranging from fashion guru Elsa Schiaparelli (for the use of shocking pink) to bridge engineer Robert Maillart...
Appiah says that textbooks--he wrote one on philosophy and edited an encyclopedia on Africa--are not meant as an algorithm for generating a lecture and thus do not present a compromise to Harvard's integrity when sold to the outside world...
Sources: Plain Dealer, Encyclopedia Americana (phone); Detroit News, Times-Picayune (lottery); AP (coaster), Houston Chronicle (India...
...growth of short forms has not, in my observation, been balanced out by a comparable growth in long forms. Instead of subjects shifting nicely into levels of depth--here's the soundbite answer, here's a longer answer, here's the encyclopedia version--only the soundbite survives in circulation. It seems that our tolerance for information of all kinds has shrunk dramatically, demanding constant refresh and rarely holding still for the previously reductive 800-word form. (Have you really read this far in the column without skipping ahead or skimming...