Word: spartanism
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Sometimes a spartan one. CNN bolsters its profits (an estimated $60 million last year) through a minimal use of high-cost graphics and glitz, and by maintaining a notoriously low-paid nonunion staff. Shaw does not divulge his salary ("It's between me and the IRS"), but insists that it is not comparable to the millions paid to his network rivals. In any case, the exemplar of CNN spareness takes a dim view of such excess. Says he: "Beware of anchormen who ride in limousines...
...time that Lyndon Johnson launched his immense rescue mission, the Great Society, more than a quarter of all old people lived below the poverty line. In the popular imagination, being old usually meant a frail and lonely dependency, in which old women lived on cat food in spartan apartments and relied on busy children or social workers for a ride to the doctor...
...troubled U.S. corporations. Right now, the unflappable Icahn (estimated net worth: $700 million) is simultaneously juggling three daunting turnaround projects: the born-again TWA, the bankrupt Texaco and the resurgent USX. Icahn's demonstrated management know-how has made him perhaps the most credible of U.S. raiders, one whose spartan style of running a company is both inspiring and chilling for corporate America...
...simply tired of being prodded toward virtue by a self-styled gadfly. Retired Journalist I.F. Stone, something of a gadfly himself, has a different, iconoclastic answer. In this engaging ramble through Hellenic history and philology, Stone argues persuasively that the beloved Socrates was in reality a coldhearted, elitist, pro-Spartan snob who was openly contemptuous of Athens' vaunted democracy and favored totalitarian rule by a philosopher-king. Bloody political coups led by two of his best-known students, Alcibiades and Critias, overthrew democratic governments in Athens in 411 and 404 B.C. The threat of a third coup in 401, Stone...
...skins seem hardcore in their music tastes, some them adhere to equally spartan political or moral ideals, which they sum up in the moral philosophy called "Straightedge." But unlike what one might expect from a fringe group, "Straightedge" connotes exactly that...