Overnight on Friday, Israeli planes, drones, and missiles attacked Iran’s nuclear sites and tried to assassinate the country’s military leadership and top nuclear scientists. Media reports say Israel seriously damaged Iran’s main nuclear facility, in Natanz, and killed more than 20 senior military and civilian officials, including the head of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Hossein Salami. Iranian authorities say 78 people were killed and more than 300 wounded in the airstrikes.

Israeli missiles continued to hit Iran throughout Friday. That night, Iran retaliated, saying it had fired 100 drones at Israel, targeting military sites. Israeli hospitals reported 17 wounded people. But for several weeks now, Iran and the U.S. had meanwhile been engaging in apparently serious negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program, and media reports said both sides had made concessions to move closer to a deal.

Now what?

—Michael Bluhm

This past week, we lost two giants of 1960s music: Sly Stone, the bandleader and composer for Sly and the Family Stone, and Brian Wilson, the primary songwriter and composer behind The Beach Boys. Both cast long shadows.

What’s so important about Sly Stone and Brian Wilson?

—Brendan Hasenstab

Playing in the gray. In the 1990s, London was the number-one destination for corrupt businessmen from the former Soviet Union, most of whom had made their fortunes by leveraging their political contacts when their country’s state-owned enterprises were privatized. Russians bought Kensington mansions, Mayfair townhouses, and all kinds of business interests. Perhaps most famously, the oil magnate Roman Abramovich bought the legendary Chelsea Football Club. In time, London was home to so many ex-Soviet billionaires that it became known as “Londongrad.”

Why London?

—Gustav Jönsson

‘Unidos (with Daphni).’ Sofia Kourtesis, the blazing, Berlin-based queen of European club music, has teamed up with Dan Snaith (AKA Caribou), as his dance-music alias, Daphni, for a new album, Volver. It comes out August 1. What we get in this track: a foundation of disco house with the Salsoul Orchestra strings, big chunky beats, and high hats.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Welcome to the machine. It was a shocking operation. Ukrainian officials say they spent almost a year planning it. They smuggled drones deep within Russia, many just a few miles from the country’s most important military airfields. And then, on Sunday, they all took off together, destroying more than 40 Russian planes capable of carrying nuclear and ballistic missiles.

With video of the operation available everywhere on social media in the days since, it’s a major, spectacular success for Kyiv—and a profound embarrassment for the Kremlin.

But how much difference did it make? Just two days later, Russia launched a ballistic missile and 103 drones at targets throughout Ukraine. Overnight on Thursday, Russian bombs demolished the state administration building in the major Ukrainian port city of Kherson.

Russia still has another 80 strategic bombers like the ones destroyed on Sunday. This year, Russian armed forces have detonated more than 27,000 bombs and more than 20,000 drones in Ukraine—much higher numbers than in the first half of last year. And Ukraine’s stunning drone operation didn’t alter positions on the war’s front line by an inch.

So what’s the actual state of the war?

—Michael Bluhm

‘Signs.’ The Icelandic composer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds has a new record coming out July 11, A Dawning—cut with Eion French, the late Irish singer-musician who worked as Talos. This early track is cinematic in scope, with swelling synths and a processed handclap beat. A beautiful little present from the beyond.

—Brendan Hasenstab

‘Malibu.’ Yussef Dayes is a British jazz drummer known for exploring polyrhythms far outside the American-jazz frame of reference—here, with a second percussionist in the mix. A lot of that exploration has been in South London, where he’s from, collaborating with artists in the area’s drill-rap scene.

What’s drill rap—and what happens when you mix it with American jazz?

—Brendan Hasenstab

Introducing Out of Control. There are all kinds of ways life might conspire to make other people’s experiences difficult for you to imagine. When I was a kid, my friends and I would spend hours at a time fighting off the Nazis who kept invading the abandoned forts of Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia—decades after the end of World War II. It didn’t get funner than fighting Nazis. My grandmother, who lived through the Depression, saved wrapping paper, collected rubber bands, and washed aluminum foil. Weird.

Today, for all the anxiety about democratic society giving way to autocratic corruption in the United States—and all the general anxiety gripping democratic societies around the world—our frames of reference for life under dictatorship tend to be limited. The very idea that peacefully taking issue with your government might get you not just in trouble, or not just in jail, but completely wiped out financially, to the point of having no resources to keep yourself going or even feed your family—I mean, how does that happen? It’s a shocking concept.

By the way, what do you think about Bitcoin? I’ve read it’s a scam—just an inflated digital asset with no inherent value that people make money on by selling to greater fools. It’s super-volatile, vulnerable to price manipulation, and consumes a lot of energy, at that. “Crypto bros” are into it; make of that what you will. But now someone’s telling me Bitcoin is somehow indispensable to dissidents in autocratic states—a “freedom technology” for getting around dictatorial surveillance and confiscation. Not sure what to make of that.

I also just heard something about central banks across 98 percent of the global economy starting to work up their own digital currencies. China’s is apparently the big one—the digital yuan— enabling unprecedented government command over people’s money. Beijing can program it with expiration dates and monitor transactions through a centralized database of users’ financial activities, all while creating the largest repository of financial information in the world. Can you believe that? Seems incredible.

—John Jamesen Gould

‘Swimming Pool.’ The Australians-moved-to-London indie rockers HTRK are bringing new life to the tradition of Mazzy Star and the dream-pop genre as a whole. They pronounce their name, “hate rock”; but don’t expect this track—which sounds like a lazy, care-free summer day—to help you understand whatever they might mean by that.

—Brendan Hasenstab