Having now moved into a tower of about 20 floors … this story has a bit more resonance with me on a personal level. A tower in one of the finest neighborhoods of the Dubai went up in flames, and it appears to be because of shoddy construction. Here is video of the 34-story building […]

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If your average American were parachuted into the UAE, he or she would feel as if they had landed in a very alien place. (Which it isn’t, particularly, but that average American would need a month or three to grasp that.) But one cultural commonality would be recognizable and transferable almost immediately, especially if that […]

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I really don’t know how this works, but the UAE seems to have about a thousand major hotels. Big hotels. Name-brand hotels. They … are … everywhere. So this latest story about the UAE and hotel building? No surprise.

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We get these stories now and then. The ones about some astonishing number of men living in a small space, and an inspector catching them at it and fining the landlord. In this case, it was 20 men sharing a one-bedroom apartment in the Dubai International City neighorhood. How did they manage it?

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We should have a new journalism catchphrase. Similar to “if it bleeds, it leads” and “the definition of news is man bites dog …” The new one? “A monkey makes every story better.” Take, for instance, our latest sensational True Crime story here in the UAE. Under the web headline: “Man walking pet monkey kills […]

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As the east coast of the United States braced for the onset of megastorm Hurricane Sandy, we had our own impressive — if ultimately harmless — storm roll onto these shores. In no way was this weather front the crisis Sandy posed to New York and New Jersey, but it was interesting in that it […]

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This called for a Samuel L. Jackson exclamation. An Air India flight destined for Dubai was delayed most of an hour after a beehive was discovered near the tip of one of the wings of the plane. Which, of course, brings to mind Samuel L.’s memorable declaration during an otherwise forgettable movie:

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This is not vaguely as nutty as it sounds. Every Dubai mall must stay open 24 hours a day for three consecutive weekends, by order of the emirate’s ruler. Why is it not nutty?

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Down here around Abu Dhabi and Dubai, approaching the outer edge of the Empty Quarter, nature is boring. What we have is hard-baked sand and miles and miles of flatlands. On some of that, buildings have been constructed. The whole country is not like that, however. The northern emirates, especially, have hills and mountains and […]

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I believe we did a good bit of sports journalism earlier this week when we reported on the practice of UAE soccer clubs paying fans to attend their games. It seems fantastical, at first blush, but if a person has a sense of how things work here, and traditions and history, it is less bizarre. […]

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