Bieber is 15! How good could he possibly be? Pretty good, it turns out. In watching him embrace his sudden fame, I’ve been very impressed. Not with his talent so much. Nope, I’m floored by his media savvy.

Gosh, I wish I’d seen Adam Lambert’s performance at the American Music Awards. Instead, I woke up to an uproar — faces in crotches, girls on leashes, big, fat, same-sex kisses! Oh my.

I got a tweet from André Rieu, the well-known violinist and Johann Strauss Orchestra conductor. He was aghast at Michael Jackson’s deathand felt what many did of course. Because André is a musician and performer, however, he felt an especially profound loss. So am I and thus, so did I. Jackson was a prodigious talent and his effect on culture is permanent. As Obi-wan said, “I felt a great disturbance in The Force.”

I’ve been learning about “el sistema,” the Venezuelan music-training program that has been offered to over 300,000 impoverished Venezuelan children.The brainchild of Jose Antonio Abreu, a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering who received musical training while growing up, el sistema, or “the system” as it is known, has been such a force for good, it’s difficult to understand why something similar hasn’t caught on here the United States.