Links

i leave for beijing in a few hours for a glimpse into the future and to better my cooking and to seek out happenings like this Maison Martin Margiela 798 Exhibtion.

rami khouri has some interesting ideas on what makes a great city: multinational populations, expanding economies, efficient infrastructure, cultural production, intellectual and scientific output and pluralistic politics. i think the first five will be ticked off in doha, dubai and abu dhabi by the end of the decade. pluralistic societies (it's bigger than pure politics) will probably take a little longer. possible triggers (descending order of likelihood) : leadership succession planning (or crisis), bottom-up pressure as society achieves critical mass, enlightened autocracy, intelligentsia / media-led awakening.

a window into another egypt and a fun read.

Abu Dhabi's unusual but intriguing future.

sounds like Charles Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes should be required reading for those investing in dubai (and in particular its real estate). Samuel Brittan: 'New opportunities for profit are seized and overdone “in ways so closely resembling irrationality as to constitute a mania”. Once the excess is realised “the financial system experiences a sort of distress, in the course of which the rush to reverse the expansion process may become so precipitous as to resemble panic”. In a panic the reverse movement takes place “with a crash in the prices of commodities, houses, buildings, lands, stocks, bonds – in short whatever has been the subject of the mania”.'

the new economist.com homepage looks sweet (high-time for a nip+tuck!). i'd say its quite slate-inspired. they finally got round to most commented / read etc and blogs / columns / rss etc get the prominence they deserve. they're still way behind on the audio/visual offerings compared to the new york times, ft etc but all in good time no doubt.

it's unfortunate that the Kuwaiti example is often cited as proof that democracy and arabs don't mix. the democratic 'experiment' as it is referred to in the gulf is blamed for hindering the ridiculously wealthy state's development by the majority of locals i speak to in saudi and the uae. it's an understandable reaction. Kuwait should in theory be one of the most exciting, dynamic places in the arab world (wealthy, educated, progressive in parts with a big developmental head-start on the neighbors). in reality it's a mega-laggard. oil wealth is a curse as much as a blessing.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - more from Clay on 'Here Comes Everybody' and a spirited defense of world of warcraft and more (cheerful) concerns about the slow death of television.

jessica ferri's awesome ny / arts blog.

nick tosches (vanity fair 2006) in what is still the best article ever written about dubai: "The Dubai skyline is like no other. Silhouettes of cities come into being over the course of centuries. Here, where a few buildings rose from the dirt 15 years ago, countless structures now crowd the land and gasp for what space remains. Here there is no sense of accrued form, no sense of architectural strata, no sense of past become present. Here there is no sense, period. It changes every day, every night. Looking out one evening, I see Manhattan. The next night, it's a boundless industrial fantasia, a tenfold Newark-by-the-sea. Then, another night, it is what it is: Dubai, shapeshifting, hammering, and grinding madly, and somehow silently, toward the sun and stars. There is no architectural rhyme, no cohesion of design, no defining style. It is the visual equivalent of a bunch of speed freaks babbling incoherently to one another. Las Vegas is a sputtering 20-watt bulb compared with this fire in the desert. Forget about babbling speed freaks. Forget about everything. This is a skyline on crack." (thanks for the link simone).

genius.

wharton's howard pack on the opportunities and challenges facing the arab world.

abu dhabi's impressive higher education plans once again ups the competitive ante in the region. although stanford and berkeley are heading to saudi, carnegie, a&m, vcu + georgetown are in qatar and lbs' doing exec ed in dubai, the scale and ambition of nyu “the university of the other” in ad is pretty awesome.

define ny : patti smith | sonic youth | jeff koons | suicide | arthur russell | cindy sherman | bruce nauman | wu-tang | velvet underground | talking heads | norman mailer | rem koolhaas | mingus | susan sontag | letterman | laurie anderson | martin scorsese |

a visual representation of the history of sampling.

i love tuning into the arabic worldservice's nightly talk shows. it's one of the few opportunities for me to tap into what the 'arab street' feels about the world. tonight callers were up in arms about a dance festival taking place in palestine. incredibly the callers' predominantly scathing opinions were focused on the audacity of arab females dancing in public! i parked my car feeling like an alien in arabia. the arabic worldservice often has that effect on me.

highlights: i) The native-born want to enjoy the profits and products that immigrant labour makes possible. But they do not want to face the competition immigrants bring. ii) The GCC is guilty of a “me-too” approach ... which raises the risk of over-capacity iii) According to McKinsey: the Gulf needs to create 280,000 jobs a year to employ the young ... a quarter of native employees in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE fail to show up for work... many emerge with few marketable skills iv) If the Gulf is now a financial superpower... it has had its greatness thrust upon it. Its surpluses accumulated more by accident than design v) According to a study by three IMF economists, a doubling of the oil price results eventually in a 50% rise in the price of non-tradable goods (such as housing), relative to tradables. This shows up as inflation. But the price rises should peter out once they have served two useful functions: diverting demand to goods from abroad, and increasing the supply of those goods and services that must be produced at home. Office space in Dubai now costs almost as much as in midtown Manhattan.

if done right, this really could be awesome for the music industry and for myspace. they'll have to extend it to unsinged bands in the future, it can't be too technically demanding and myspace is ideally positioned to take advantage of the long tail.

search god udi manber in a rare interview. third to last question is an intriguing possible answer or shortcut to google's middle east conundrum: the dire dearth of arabic web content (compelling or otherwise). as translation algorithms keep improving this could really open up the web worlds, significantly multiplying and enhancing content globally. breaking through the language barrier would have a massive effect on the web way beyond search (social networking, blogosphere etc).