Word: protean
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...demonstrate anew the daring and flexibility that were once its hallmarks. Plainly, capitalism is not working well enough. But there is no evidence to show that the fault is in the system ? or that there is a better alternative. Though neither comfortable nor easy, free enterprise contains the protean potential that will be needed in the coming diffi cult years. For all its obvious blemishes and needed reforms, capitalism alone holds out the most creative and dynamic force that any civilization has ever dis covered: the power of the free, ambitious individual...
Nobody takes Playboy magazine's philosophy of the good life more seriously than Hugh Hefner, the man who started it all on his kitchen table back in 1953. He rules his empire and maintains his image as a protean ladies' man from a fieldstone fortress in Los Angeles. It is equipped with battlements in the backyard, outdoor Jacuzzi baths built into a stone grotto and sprawling lawns where flamingos and pet peacocks roam. Mansion West, as the place is called to distinguish it from Hefner's 54-room Chicago playpen now on the block for $2.5 million...
...with such formidable passion and intelligence as to conjure up Goethe's "eternal feminine" as the root impulse of creation. Wisely, touchingly, Playwright Dennis Mclntyre treats of the artist's self-arming ego and his nightmares of self-doubt. In the title role, Jeffrey de Munn is protean, a mercurial mixture of earth, air, fire and water...
...many centuries after the sophisticated culture of the Hittites disappeared? Richard Gilman can be granted his central point: "that 'decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate...
...season of the festival, and a festival nowadays is a protean feast. It is a group of local notables trying to put clothes on live chickens in a contest at the Hamilton County Fair near Cincinnati. It is a baseball game at the New England Clown Convention in Salem, Mass., where no one knows who won because the bases kept moving and the umpire used a fire extinguisher to settle disputes. It is Cincinnati's Don Cook, who takes pride in being able to grow an instant beard by letting bees swarm to his chin. It is 102 vintage...