I kept waiting to get something deeper out of the article, but I didn't. A rehashing of descriptions we have seen a lot of in the last year or so: lazy, bored Emiratis; rootless expats; South Asian serfs; vulgarity. No real insights.

I've worked in Dubai. I found the article pretty accurate. So much, that I was surprised to read on it the same analogies I've been doing myself to describe the country to my friends (an adult Disneyland, a soul-less country, a spoiled generation of young locals).

Agreed, to repeatedly trivialise the Dubai situation as "penis envy" is lazy. To then continue to spit out angry generalisations that would not look out of place on Fox News (without citing anything) is tedious at best. There's an excellent story waiting to be told about what happened in Dubai and what may happen in the future, but this isn't it.

Thanks for saving me time I could hav otherwise wasted.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting to find racist slurs in Vanity Fair. (Non-native English speakers: see http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=towelhead for clarification.)

The "tower is a penis" analogy is indeed disturbing. And the author seems rather bitter. But all in all, it's not a bad read.

Cut them some slack, print publishing is going through a bigger crisis of its own.