Word: soberness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...talk is rich in good-ole-boy phrases like "that dog won't hunt" or "it's better than a poke in the eye with a stick," Pickens is every inch the businessman. In place of the pointed boots and Stetson hats that many independent oilmen wear, he favors sober gray suits, button-down shirts and striped ties. He rarely smiles, but when he does, the grin spreads slowly, almost reluctantly, across his face. Says a friend: "He deals with everyone, from Senators to bank presidents, as if he's telling them fishing stories." Yet he can be flint hard...
...high-rise completed in 1965. They also charge that it is too frivolous for a government office. Although its inverted-bowl silhouette evokes the traditional rotunda, Jahn has transcended the two styles that dress most government structures: neoclassicism, with its air of judicious civic doings, and modernism, with its sober grids that speak of rectitude and rationality...
...course, have long been partial to contemporary and often controversial social issues. But families in crisis have become especially hot topics since last January, when Something About Amelia, an ABC movie about incest, won both critical applause and big ratings. In October, viewers proved again that they will watch sober-minded dramas dealing with unpleasant family matters: NBC's The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett as a battered wife, drew the fourth highest ratings of any TV movie in history...
...theatrical adaptation of his book, it was not merely about the incompatibility of East and West. It was about "the difficulty of living in the universe." In other words, it was, among other things, a David Lean movie waiting to be made. And now we have it, sober and witty, subtle yet eminently approachable. It is a movie both true to its source and true to the highest imperatives of its own medium. Above all, it is true to our sense of the world as it echoes in the common consciousness of our times...
...fill up half an hour on a midday Sunday talk show. These programs are both opportunity and trap to a politician who feels the need to get public exposure. The shows get relatively low ratings, but the ratings would be even lower if the programs were only sober discussion of the issues; viewers hope that Roger Mudd, George Will or Sam Donaldson can draw blood. Secretary of State George Shultz can be droningly evasive and still be asked back; lesser fry do not dare. (Andrei Gromyko doesn't have to face the problem at all.) No American politician could...