On Friday morning, an explosion shook the Dubai International Financial Centre, the United Arab Emirates' equivalent of Wall Street. According to Dubai authorities, air defenses shot an Iranian drone, which struck a building on the way down. The blast was about 1,200 yards from the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and close to the Israeli consulate. It was close enough to my apartment that it sounded like someone was out on the balcony practicing the cymbal crash from the climax of Mahler's Second Symphony. The government of Dubai says no one was hurt. But Dubai's status as the hub of Middle Eastern commerce has sustained a palpable hit, and some finance types will probably prefer to do business in a city outside the range of Iranian drones. One of the revelations of this war is just how many people outside Dubai are delighting in the thought that the city-state might be humbled. Dubai has worked for decades to earn a reputation as a fun, safe place to make and spend money. Until recently, the most harrowing scene near the Burj Khalifa was the fictional one where Tom Cruise climbs its exterior in the fourth Mission: Impossible movie. Many wanted to partake in this life (preferably on the inside of the buildings), and some prominent influencers'such as the manosphere's high priest of misogyny and homosociality, Andrew Tate'have moved here and seem ready to naturalize. But quite a few others loathe Dubai and are savoring its comeuppance....

Montserrat Roig's classic novel, The Time of Cherries, captures a sort of still point in the history of Barcelona' a moment that came before great change. When the novel ends, no one has any idea that within 18 months, Francisco Franco, the old dictator, will be gone. The Time of Cherries was originally published in Catalan in 1976, the year after Franco died. Half a century later, Roig's excavation of family life in a period of historical flux is now available in English in the United States for the first time. The Time of Cherries became an essential book in post-Franco Catalonia. It appeared at a time when there were few images of the culture whose youth had cast off Franco long before 1975. The novel is infused not only with an array of vivid characters but also with a sharply detailed vision of middle-class Barcelona before democracy was restored. The book revolves around Natalia, once a student activist and now nearly age 40, as she deals with unfinished business: her conservative brother and her fearful and neurotic sister-in-law, her father, her old friends, and, more than anything, the stifling political atmosphere that she had abruptly run away from 12 years earlier. Soon after its publication, the novel became available in a cheap paperback and was on sale in the newspaper kiosks that dotted downtown Barcelona....

China is pledging to use 'extraordinary measures' to support the country's bid to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge technological fields, according to its 15th five-year plan. Many researchers noted an air of confidence in the plan. 'Five years ago, the sentiment of the Chinese science policymakers was still very much like, we don't want to be too far behind the US, we are still doing the catching up,' says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 'Now, there is this more palpable sentiment that there's a real chance we can be a true leader,' she says. The government has promised to boost its research and development (R&D) expenditure over the next five years. And the country's science budget is also expected to increase to 426 billion yuan (US$62 billion) this year, a rise of 10% from 2025. The Chinese government now considers science to be as important as other top-level national goals, such as boosting defence, economic growth and the country's international influence, says Stefanie Kam, who researches Chinese politics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore....

The run-up to the Academy Awards is a fun, ridiculous, and loopy monthslong stretch. It also encourages something vital to Hollywood's artistic ecosystem: Movie studios, in the hopes of achieving Oscar glory, put money toward more stylistically challenging projects, rather than consistently aiming for the broadest common box-office denominator. But when the ceremony itself finally nears, I find myself desperate for it to be over'especially in a year like this one, when the Winter Olympics have pushed the Oscars into mid-March, extending what already feels like an endless trail of precursor events ahead of the ceremony. My primary note after this awards gantlet: Please hold the Oscars earlier next year. My exhaustion with awards season itself, however, is mitigated by my appreciation of the films'2025 was an exciting year for cinema; the two Best Picture front-runners (One Battle After Another and Sinners) generated serious fanfare in a time otherwise fraught with industry drama and the politics of corporate mergers. One Battle has enjoyed overwhelming praise since its September release, but Sinners'which was in theaters nearly a year ago'has never faded from the conversation. The result is some down-to-the-wire races in several major categories....