Manuela Hoelterhoff

Frank Gehry, Gustavo Dudamel and -- hold on to your suspenders of disbelief -- the Rodarte sisters of “Black Swan.”

While Tunisians sort out their future after a distraught vendor sparked the Arab protests in December 2010, the country’s past continues to attract the World Monuments Fund.

Drive up to your Manhattan apartment. How cool is that.

New Yorkers, weep.

Muse editors and writers hosted lively lunches with three of the stars who shape the varied worlds in which we live: Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, the new chief of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s; Terrie Sultan, director of Southampton, Long Island’s Parrish Art Museum (whose new building by Herzog & de Meuron opens this fall in Water Mill); and Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist and contrarian author whose new book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” examines the mysteries of group evolution.

You may not know this, but Paul Andreu is very big in China.

I can’t recall ever hearing anyone, even the craziest opera nut, say: “I am just dying to see ‘Manon’ by Massenet!”

Over the last ten years, the price of mapping the human genome has gone from $1 billion to less than $1,000 and will surely drop more.

Caracas has lots of musicians, but now and again as you stew in agonizingly slow traffic staring out at heaps of refuse lining many avenidas, you might wish for a few traffic cops and energetic garbage men.

Soy la novia legal. Te maldigo Hagen! Brunilda era su amor verdadero.

Every summer, Gustav Mahler shut the door on his hut by Austria’s Worthersee far from the snake pit of the Vienna opera, determined to compose symphonies that contain the world.

Looking like a Christmas ornament that has come to befuddled life, Placido Domingo lumbers into view at the world premiere on New Year’s Eve of “The Enchanted Island” at the Metropolitan Opera.