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Between the years when Sir Isaac Pitman and John R. Gregg devised their competing shorthand systems (as any stenographer knows, Gregg's is now predominant in the U.S.), a man named Andrew Graham developed a Pitmanish shorthand scheme that resembled, as much as any script, Arabic. By the time he was 17, Woodrow Wilson had all but mastered the Graham system, in 1874 dashed off a note in Graham to Graham. For the rest of his life, Wilson kept improving his Graham to a degree where present historians almost wished for a shorthand Rosetta stone that would provide a key for translating Wilson's ultra-Graham into good Wilsonian English. Last week in Washington, anachronistic Graham Expert Clifford Gehman, 84, had all but cracked the Wilsonian cipher after more than a year's effort. As proof of his success, Gehman displayed a cogent translation of Wilson's acceptance speech for the 1912 presidential nomination. Said Gehman wryly: "Mr. Wilson learned his Graham thoroughly—too thoroughly, I would say. He projected its theory beyond Graham's intentions, to about the same point I did."
Taking the speaker's podium at a meeting of the U.S.S.R.'s Composers Union, famed Soviet Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky (TIME, Nov. 23) advised his musical comrades to redirect their suites to the sunny side of the street. "Our songs suffer from a tone of despondent melancholy," declared he. "Under the guise of lyrics appear the cries of the weak man complaining of his own private life." After the meeting, one of Kabalevsky's colleagues, Composer Aram (Sabre Dance) Khachaturian, whose music is anything but self-piteous, winged to the U.S., looked like any tired businessman when he landed in New York City on his way to conduct some concerts in Havana.
"The day this idea first hit me," said Steve ("the thinking man's comic") Allen, "I got that certain instinctive chill. The hair on the back of my neck almost stood up. The idea was that good." Allen's brainstorm: a 19-minute "Meeting of the Minds" inserted in his hour-long TV variety show, featuring Allen and actors playing Aristotle, Dostoevsky, Montaigne, Hegel, Freud and Clarence Darrow, the lot of them hashing over the wisdom of the ages. But NBC, unable to see in such a cerebral panel the laugh riot customarily expected of Comic Allen, summarily vetoed Thinker Allen and his sham philosophers. It was, allowed the network, perhaps a fine idea for some other spot, time and moderator. Whimpered Steve Allen: "I feel like Edison might have felt if they turned down the electric light while they were sitting in the darkness."