His near-perfect score on the LSAT helped him fulfill a dream of going to Harvard Law School.
.. Melissa Hart agreed to give Cruz a ride from New York, where Cruz was at the end of the summer, back to Cambridge. She didn’t know him well, but he sought her out after she had been given a prestigious award for first-year students.
“We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ,” Hart said. “When I told him I didn’t know, he asked, ‘Well, what’s your SAT score? That’s closely coordinated with your IQ.’ ”
.. A former roommate told the magazine GQ recently that Cruz preferred to study only with graduates of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, dismissing the rest as “the minor Ivies.”
.. If the game was hearts, his signature move was to “shoot the moon,” the game’s riskiest, showiest, and most aggressive maneuver.
“It’s hard to execute,” said Charles Morse, a law school friend. “Ted was fond of that.”
If the game was poker, he put all his chips on the table.
“He would go all in sometimes . . . and you’d never know if he’s bluffing,” said Alexander Acosta, another friend. “He’s someone who’s willing to take risks.”
.. Cruz’s beliefs are no different now, and when it came to taxation classmates recall him arguing that the government was stealing money from the rich and giving it to the poor.
.. Ted Cruz was, and in many ways still is, an actor.
In high school, he says, he considered dropping out and moving to California to pursue an acting career. His parents talked him out of it.
.. Cruz was so driven to secure a clerkship that he resolved to learn tennis, since Rehnquist, an avid player, was known to organize weekly matches with his clerks.
Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography
What was weird is that, in Guralnick’s book, Goldman’s more sensational gossip was, on the whole, quietly confirmed—Elvis was a junkie with occult preoccupations, who did die of an overdose, and was toured to death by “Colonel” Tom Parker, in part because Parker really was an illegal immigrant, from Holland, who couldn’t get a passport and was frightened to take Elvis abroad—while being simultaneously deprecated as inessential.’
The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Elvis was, to put it bluntly, as a dumb fuck with a drug problem; Guralnick showed that he did have a drug problem, but was far from dumb, with keen spiritual yearnings that, through bad management and bad luck, got sidetracked into those grinding tours and substance abuse. The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Sinatra is as a bad guy with a big voice. Kaplan shows that the bad-guy stuff was, in truth, pretty bad, about as bad as one had imagined and a lot worse than one had hoped. He did hang out with and cultivate mobsters, real killers, though more in a semi-hostile, semi-affectionate fraternal manner than with the pitiful, feudal devotion pictured in “The Godfather.”
.. Worse, Sinatra beat people up, or had others beat them up for him, often in shameful acts of bullying—picking on casino employees or less successful, dependent entertainers.
.. Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation, and in its (often imagined) presence his temper tipped over in an instant. This was followed, usually, by remorse, once he had sobered up and stopped seeing red. But, in the interim, real damage was done to real people: he threw a telephone at a businessman once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fracturing his skull and very nearly killing him. The other cause of his rage may be oddly taboo to tell. Sinatra was a bad, mean drunk, and, since he was often drunk, he was often bad and mean.
.. Nor is Kaplan simply an idolater. He sees how genius sits in a fortunate network, offering character sketches of Sinatra’s arrangers, who were as essential to Sinatra’s art as George Martin’s production was to the Beatles.
.. Shouldn’t this push aside the malicious gossip? Why does the other crap matter at all? It matters because if art and the lower reaches of journalism and biography converge on a single point of common purpose, it is in being truthful about human beings as they really are and not as we would have them be. History is what we have to struggle to remember even when legend is more pleasing. It would be nice if Sinatra had been a good guy with a few regrettable friendships rooted in Jersey simpatico—it was a lot worse than that. It would be nice if J.F.K. were a family man with a sometimes-wandering eye—the truth there, too, is more ravenous and complicated.
.. Sinatra’s painfully bipolar nature is exactly the pattern of his best music, with “swinging” records continually succeeded by sad ones, again and again, and though this is obviously partly a response to the oscillating commercial demands for dance music on the one hand and make-out music on the other, it isn’t just or mainly that. No one else even attempted it quite this relentlessly. We have “Songs for Swinging Lovers” and “Only the Lonely” because Sinatra was a desperately driven man with a melancholic depth.
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber may have been the finest violinist of the seventeenth century. He was also a highly innovative composer whose works — most notably his sonatas for violin — are gaining new prominence in the performing repertory.
.. Biber’s compositions stand as some of the most startlingly advanced music of the Baroque era. Biber’s manuscripts and publications record violin improvisations in unprecedented detail; in his Sonata Representativa, one will find Biber’s instrumental impressions of cuckoos, frogs, cats, and marching musketeers. These are supplied with a simple ground bass that provides plenty of room for the soloist to stretch out and show off, but are written at such a high level of difficulty that few violinists attempt to master them. In his “Mystery”, or “Rosenkranz” sonatas, Biber makes extensive use of scordatura, violin re-tunings that change the tonal character of the instrument and make “impossible” figurations possible.
In ‘Steve Jobs,’ Tolerating Tech’s Unpleasant Visionaries
“Steve Jobs” is not very kind to Steve Jobs. He is presented as a man who spent years denying paternity of his daughter and who later only grudgingly paid for her support. At every turn, he treats employees and colleagues as expendable cogs in his corporate game, often without understanding the damage he inflicts on those around him.