The Times was less preoccupied then with mere social merriment than it is today.
Armed with this larger sense of purpose, I became less preoccupied with cajoling Jared into silence.
As artist-mother (and artist's mother) Siri seems less "preoccupied," as some reviewers have written, than deeply tired.
It's less preoccupied with emotional escalation than some of director Hirokazu Koreeda's more acclaimed works, and more moving for it.
Ms. Ghatti is more of a singer than Kilo Kish, though she too is less preoccupied with technique than feeling and mood.
But their expatriate counterparts — those taken out of the country as children and those living abroad by choice — seem no less preoccupied with their homeland.
He's a buoyant lyricist less preoccupied with flash than with sly wit and self-aggrandizement, modes he giddily employs through most of this mixtape.
Plenty of people hate hipsters, but if more of us lived like them, the world could be greener, more left-wing and less preoccupied by greed.
As "Parts Unknown" has evolved, it has become less preoccupied with food and more concerned with the sociology and geopolitics of the places Bourdain visits.
They see news media less preoccupied with the news than with boosting their own status in the entertainment firmament that now literally owns most of them.
They say the Pakistani leadership appears less preoccupied by the longstanding fear that Afghanistan could become an Indian client state that would contribute to Pakistan's encirclement.
