4 essays filed from Middle East.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is the most engineered city of the modern era — built almost entirely since the 1990s, from a small Trucial Coast pearl-trading port into a 3-million-person globally connected emirate. The city is best read as the architectural laboratory it is.
March 24, 2023
Muscat, Oman
Oman has chosen, deliberately, a different path from its glittering Gulf neighbours. The buildings are low-rise. The architecture is regulated to traditional Omani style. The tourism numbers are smaller. The country is, in every meaningful sense, the antidote to Dubai.
April 26, 2022
Petra, Jordan
The Treasury at Petra is the iconic photograph; the city itself is much larger and much weirder than the photograph suggests. The Nabataean Empire carved an entire capital out of the sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan, and most visitors see less than a quarter of it.
September 22, 2021
Jerusalem, Israel
Jerusalem is, for the visitor, two things at once: an extraordinary historical city of stone and light, and a place of unresolved political conflict that no honest writer can ignore. A guide that tries to do both.
March 8, 2021