There’s skepticism within the Global Voices community about Hossein’s arrest. Our Persian-language editor, Hamid Tehrani, has expressed concern about the credibility of the newspaper reporting Hossein’s arrest. Sami Ben Gharbia, in posting about the arrest on the Global Voices Advocacy site, put “arrest” in quotation marks. Both Hamid and Sami are reading Persian-language sources, trying to get a better sense for what’s actually going on. It doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense to me that a blogger who’s become a major supporter of the Iranian government would be arrested for previous travels and writings, but as I mentioned, we’re all trying to get more details and understand what’s going on.

If Hossein is being detained based on his trip to Israel and on absurd allegations of spying, this is a major injustice, not to mention a phenomenally stupid action by Iranian authorities. I hope we will get news shortly that Hossein was questioned and released, or that the report was inaccurate, but I know that bloggers - including those who vehemently disagree with his recent writing - will rally to his support.

The Times of London offers a backgrounder on Hossein, but isn’t able to confirm his arrest beyond the Jahan News report, which it describes as “a conservative website reputedly close to Tehran’s intelligence community”.

From the ICC’s Live Piracy Map 2008 - attacks and encounters with pirates in the Gulf of Aden

I listened to stories on Somali piracy on NPR and the BBC World Service while driving into Boston yesterday, and I was surprised that coverage of the events on these excellent broadcasters was so superficial. The story appeared twice and hour, and included updates on the position of the ship, but didn’t ever drill into the circumstances in Somalia that have made southern Somalia such a basketcase. The BBC story referenced Siad Barre and the last two decades of chaos, but didn’t dip into the recent history - the rise of the Union of Islamic Courts, the alliance between the transitional federal government and Ethiopia (with US intelligence support), the increasing inability of the TFG to govern effectively, the rise of the al-Shabab.

The Associated Press commissioned an interesting report (which I’ve summarized here) on youth consumption of news media. One of their most interesting findings was the discovery that young people refresh news continually out of boredom, but feel like they never get depth or resolution to the stories they’re following. This story strikes me as a perfect example of an opportunity to add depth. Instead of updating the position of the tanker off the coast of Eyl, why not take five minutes and explain the failure of the transitional government to control Mogadishu and its complete lack of influence over Puntland? You’ve caught our attention with piracy - why not tell a slightly more complex story about one of the more important conflicts in Africa today?

Al Jazeera has been offering better coverage than many other news agencies, in part because they’ve got several Somali reporters. They offered an interesting perspective about a month ago, examining claims by the pirates who’d seized the transport ship carrying Ukranian tanks (Remember that story? How’d that one end?) that ransoms were being demanded to provide funds to clean up toxic waste off the Somali coast. It’s certainly true that large amounts of toxic waste are being dumped on the coast of Somalia, and likely that some European firms are involved with selling illegal “disposal” services for radioactive and medical waste on the Somali coast, though it’s probably a stretch to consider the pirates a coast guard trying to prevent illegal dumping.

I don’t know whether Martin Fletcher, writing in the Times of London, was motivated by the piracy stories to offer his thoughts on Somali governance and the Bush administration’s failures. He argues that the Bush administration’s support for the Transitional Federal Government and for a war fought with Ethiopian troops and American intelligence “helped to destroy that wretched country’s best chance of peace in a generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and achieved the precise opposite of its original goal.” Before the offensive, the UIC had managed to bring some semblance of stability to Somalia - markets were reopening in Mogadishu, the qat trade had quieted, and as Fletcher reports, “For the first time that most Somalis could remember, they were walking around their shattered capital in safety, even at night.”

The UIC, as my friend Abdurahman Warsame has explained, was an umbrella of groups, including moderate islamists largely interested in stability and extremists. US policy focused on the extremists, and backed their ouster by Ethiopian troops, installing a trasitional government that has very little local power or authority and has failed, utterly, at maintaining peace after Ethiopian troops pulled out. (Lots and lots more about the TFG, Ethiopia and the US role here, linking to a pile of earlier blog posts on the topic.) UIC splinter groups, including al-Shabab, have engaged in an insurgency that may have claimed 10,000 lives and forced more than a million people from their homes. Fletcher argues - persuasively, in my opinion - that UIC might have continued to centralize control and rule Somalia with a moderate hand, while there’s virtually no doubt that al-Shabab will enforce extremely strict sharia law, will likely seek to eliminate other UIC factions and will undoubtably provide sanctuary and shelter for Al Qaeda.

BBC’s stories yesterday morning didn’t focus on terrorism or fragile states, but on the way in which the pirate port of Eyl has become a boomtown. (This isn’t a knock on the author, Mary Harper, who’s written excellent pieces of analysis regarding Somalia, just surprise at this bit of focus.) My favorite detail in the piece - many of the crew members on hijacked ships don’t like Somali food, so “special restaurants have even been set up to prepare food for the crews of the hijacked ships.”

For a sense of how weird it must be for Eyl to be a boomtown, I recommend the video above. It’s a piece of travelogue from YouTube shot by “Sool“, who lives in Canada but hails from Hargeisa, Somaliland. In this video, posted in 2006, he describes Eyl: “this place is a lost town where only 2 cars a in 2 weeks come it’s so nice a cool place to chill”. Perhaps it’s a bit more lively these days.

My friends at Foreign Policy Passport highlighted the International Chamber of Commerce’s “live piracy map“, which is tracking this year’s rash of piracy attacks in the Gulf of Aden and around the world. They note that West Africa and Indonesia also have serious problems with piracy. I spent a while clicking around the map today and was interested to discover that many of the West African “pirate attacks” look more like breaking and entering than terror on the high seas. The attacks in the Ghanaian port of Tema appear to be men climbing onto the ships from the docks and attempting to open hatches on deck to steal stuff. Bad, yes, but hardly the high-seas drama we’re seeing across the continent.

It is interesting to note the small concentration of attacks - including a hijacking - near Port Harcourt, in the troubled Niger Delta. Given the instability and ongoing violence targetting oil facilities, I would have expected more reported attacks. I wonder if the detailed coverage of the east African attacks might lead to copycat techniques in other parts of the world that are already experiencing sustained conflict and fragile government.

The gridlock economy explains the current fiscal crisis, Heller tells us, if we focus on the ownership of mortgages. Historically, lenders and borrowers knew each other. Banks didn’t like forclosing - they lose money on forclosures - so they were willing to re-negotiate bad loans. But loans aren’t owned by a single bank now, but by thousands of people, as they’ve been securitized and subdivided. As a result, it’s almost impossible to renegotiate these agreements, and foreclosures have become widespread.

He offers other examples, from biotech, telecoms and urban planning. A major pharma company wanted to bring an Altzheimber’s drug to market, but knew they’d experience patent challenges from small companies that own patents on individual neurotransmitter pathway. This company found itself negotiating with a table filled with patent-holders, each of which was convinced it held the key patent in making a functional drug. The company ended up shelving the drug rather than completing the negotiations for fear that such a complex deal was impossible.

There’s been a massive increase in patents on DNA - more than 40,000 patents awarded in recent years. This is the result of massive investment and patenting in this area. This investment hasn’t led to new classes of drugs - instead, we’ve seen a stagnation in pharma innovation.

The most underused natural resource in America, Heller claims, is electromagnetic spectrum. We’re stuck with a licensing policy put into place under Calvin Coolidge, which doesn’t recognize any of the technological innovation that’s happened between then and now. The system is geographically fragmented and non-transferrable, and leads to a system where the US is falling behind other advanced nations in broadband penetration. Spectrum gridlock prevents the emergence of high-speed wireless services, he argues.

Why do we get stuck in airports? Because we’re massively underserved by airports. With twenty new runways, we’d end routine air delays in the US. But there’s been only one new airport built since 1978 - Denver. Real estate gridlock has made it possible for any community near an airport to stop expansion by refusing to sell land. We’re finally seeing this unlock with Dulles, Chicago and Seattle airports all building new runways, but Heller believes it’s a major problem.

Real-estate gridlock can help explain the slow growth of wind power as well. It’s possible to generate massive power in the center of the US, by building huge farms in places like the Dakotas. But the demand for green power is on the coasts, and it would require infrastructure buildout to create transmission lines.

In a different field, gridlock has changed the arts. Early rappers rhymed over a complex wealth of samples (think Paul’s Boutique) - now rappers license a single sample and build songs around it to avoid copyright conflict.

Heller believes that a common thread in all of these cases is the disappearance of a tight linkage between ownershpi and use. In the past, there was little distance between the patent and the product, the land ownership and the property development. But innovation these days is about assembing resources. You need multiple pieces of protected property to achieve innovation in semiconductors, drug discovery, software or telecoms. It’s true in the arts as well, with the rise of the maship, and illustrated by the difficulty of releasing documentary films. (See the difficulties regarding the docmentary Eyes on the Prize, due to copyright issues.)

To describe this situation, Heller has coined the phrase, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons”. This is in contrast to the tragedy of the commons: when anyone can use a resource, it’s likely to get overused. With too few owners, overuse is a common outcome, because rational individuals will prioritize their needs over collective goods. This was a critical insight for environmentalists in the 1960s, helping unite a large number of environmental problems into a common phenomenon. Private property was often prescribed as a solution to tragedy of the commons solutions, assuming that a property owner would consider long-term implications of development for her property rather than permitting overuse.

Heller argues that, in many cases, we’ve skated right past private property and into anti-commons, characterized by underuse. If we’ve got too many owners, there can be too little use of a resource. We don’t see the anti-commons tragedy as clearly, as it’s characterized by the absence of innovation. “Where do you go to protest that a drug didn’t come to market or to complain that your cellphone is so poor?” With this new concept, Heller hopes to rope together a set of disparate problems with a similar set of ownership structures.

There are solutions to the problem, Heller promises, though his talk stops short of exploring those in detail. He hints that the discussions need to center on reforming patent laws invented for an age before DNA patents, or telecom patents and spectrum allocations appropriate to an earlier technological age.

Around the Berkman table there’s some skepticism about the idea of anticommons. Pushed on research in the field, Heller admits (and is clear in his book) that research on pharma companies reveals that they don’t feel they’re blocked by patent gridlock. Heller argues that it’s hard to ask practicioners about innovations they’re not making - asking early airplane builders about passenger aircraft would have revealed skepticism about the whole proposition, not the problem of land use and public airports.

Yochai Benkler, who’s written at length about the economics of commons production, pushes Heller for details, embracing the idea of the anticommons, but looking for specific ways out: do we need more commons? lower transaction costs? spot markets that make it easier to transact around property? Heller (correctly?) summarizes his question, “Very nice, but so what?” He offers a possible way out: in cases of scarcity, private property makes sense, while in situations with no scarcity, a commons model makes more sense. If it’s possible to use telecoms whitespace in a non-rivalrous fashion, spectrum should be a commons; if not, perhaps we need a more intelligent form of private property.

Heller worries that people aren’t taking suggestions for solving these problems seriously enough. He’s offered a solution for “eminent-domain abuse”, where the state can seize private property with compensation but not the owner’s consent. He argues that eminent domain is never fair to the property owner and always underprices - if the price was truly the price the owner wanted for the land, she’d be willing to sell. Heller authored a paper for the Harvard Law Review focused on “land-assembly districts”, a way in which communities could cooperate to assemble and sell their land and avoid expropriation. He’s concerned that the article, now out half a year, hasn’t received a single comment, which makes him wonder about the value of articles versus books.

Benkler ultimately sees the problem about a mis-definition of the boundaries of property, suggesting that the gridlock scenario is a specific manifestation of poor definitions of property and a poor transactional system. Clearly, that’s the beginning of a much longer conversation, and one I’m unqualified to act as scribe for.

Other accounts of the event from friends David Weinberger and Lokman Tsui.

(The US has been unwilling to sign the Ottawa treaty agreed to by 154 countries banning anti-personnel mines. The Bush administration has offered an “alternative” policy that’s gained little international traction. One of the sticking points is a possible exception for the Korean DMZ, where the US relies heavily on mines to maintain a large land border.)

Mine removal is a topic that’s generated a great deal of innovative thinking in the engineering and social change communities. One of the favorite projects of green innovation folks like my friends at Worldchanging.com has been the Arsena project to genetically engineer a flowering weed that can detect landmines. The plant - a modified thales cress - turns red in the presence of nitrogen dioxide, a product of the degredation of the explosives in landmines.

Unfortunately, the thales cress project never really achieved its goals - the flower was too sensitive, leading to a large number of false positives. In March, the Arsena team transfered the genes from the thales cress to tobacco, looking for a hardier organism. Now they’ve given up on the project entirely, focusing instead on investment in mined land, rather than on new detection technologies and, unintentionally I’m sure, robbing the green engineering community of one of their (our?) favorite examples.

Fortunately, Bart Weetjens is here to help, and he’s got lots of backup: cages filled with African giant pouched rats. The rats have an amazing sense of smell, and Weetjens has trained rats to detect landmines by scent. The rats are too light to trigger the mines (though they look roughly as large as my cat), but they stand on the mine and dig until a handler picks them up, rewards them with food and removes the ordnance. The rats have already cleared 416,500 square meters of minefield, and can detect more mines in an hour than a professional human deminer can in a day.

I met Weetjens in Dubai at an absurdly lavish banquet put on by an Emirati real estate firm for WEF attendees. More to the point, since the banquet was far off in the desert, I met him on the 90 minute bus ride, when a group of us in the back of the bus started talking about Africa-focused projects. My first question to Weetjens: “So you’re a bioengineer?” “Nope. I’m a mechanical engineer who really likes rats.” According to his biography on the Ashoka website, Weetjens was fascinated both by weaponry and rodents as a child, so his current interest seem perfectly logical given his history. He now runs a social venture called Apopo that tries to harness rats’ talents for the benefit of humanity.

Why rats? He was hoping you’d ask. The Apopo site features a wonderful section called “Hero Rats“, which outlines the abilities of the robust rodents. As well as being light, and blessed with an amazing sense of smell, rats are easy to breed, relatively easy to train, easier to house and feed than dogs, willing to work with different handlers (a problem for dogs, evidently), and surprisingly cute. (You’ll be unsurprised to discover that you can adopt a rat for 5€ a month. And yes, you can send them email and they’ll mail you back. Or their handlers will. I’m not really sure.)

So here’s the truly amazing thing - Apopo is now looking at other applications for rodent-based sensing. Weetjens and crew are training rats to smell tuberculosis in sputum samples. Early tests suggest that rats can perform this task far more efficiently than lab technicians - rats evaluate several hundred samples in the time a human technician with a microscope can evaluate twenty samples. Weetjens admitted to me that he and his team don’t know what the rats are smelling - they’re now doing gas chromatography to compare samples and see if they can figure out the chemical mechanism for TB detection.

What would be truly amazing is if rats are able to detect between TB strains. One of the most serious problems associated with XDR TB is the difficulty of culturing the bacteria and distinguishing between “ordinary”, drug resistant, multiply drug-resistant and extremely drug resistant TB - I have no idea whether the strains are sufficiently different to make rat-based testing realistic, but it would be a fascinating research project…

My favorite thing about Apopo is not the rats… though I would confess to having falled in love with Kim, pictured above with her handler, Saidi. It’s the location of the project - Morogoro, Tanzania, based at the Sokoine University of Agriculture. (Morogoro is roughly halfway between Dar and Dodoma, for those of you who know Tanzania.) It would be possible to do his research in his native Belgium, but Weetjens is trying to bring research opportunities and jobs to this community as well as developing an innovative new strategy. I think that’s phenomenally cool, and wonder what Apopo will figure out what to teach rats next.

Now Ghana faces an election between perennial contender, Dr. John Atta Mills and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, former foreign minister for Kufuor. Early polling showed a very tight race, though a more recent poll shows strong support for Akufo-Addo.

Akufo-Addo is seen as a successor to Kufuor, who remains quite popular nationally and internationally. Professor Atta Mills served as vice-president to Jerry Rawlings, who took power in Ghana for the first time in 1979 and stepped down in 2000. There’s some fear that Rawlings would be controlling an Atta Mills presidency - a fear Rawlings recently addressed while lambasting the ruling New Patriotic Party. Of course, Rawlings also insists that the 2004 election - widely viewed as free and fair - was rigged, suggesting that just a little bit of partisanship might affect the ageing leader’s view of the world. And some of his statements do seem like he’s do better just to shut up: “It is foolish talk that the NPP is going round propagating that I will control Mills and kill him if Ghanaians vote for Mills, and give power to my wife.”

Because Ghana is blessed with a stable democracy and a free press, elections can be a pretty colorful affair. Joy Online reports that candy-sellers are doing a brisk business in sweets wrapped in partisan wrappers, the umbrella of the NDC and the elephant of the NPP. The other political parties, likely to get less than 2% of the vote, haven’t merited their own sweets, and the sweet sellers explain that they’re non-partisan, simply trying to make a buck… sorry, make a cedi. But this can get tricky: “‘The selling of these has become political. An NPP faithful will not take kindly to it if you give them an NDC candy,’ Maame Akua, a toffee seller at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle intimated.”

Feeling the need to distinguish their candidate with something other than toffees, the NDC has begun an interesting electoral strategy. Instead of promoting a ticket of Professor Atta Mills and vice-presidential candidate John Mahama, the NDC has launched a new campaign with banners showing Atta Mills and US president-elect Barack Obama. According to reporters at the two major radio stations in Accra, NDC has also changed its election slogan to cement an Obama connection:

“The party has as well adopted a new slogan: ‘Obama Nie, Atta Mills Nie’, which translates ‘This is Obama: This is Atta Mills’ and printed it on its new campaign materials.”

The connection isn’t completely baseless, argues Isaac Yeboah of JoyFM - NDC is loosely associated with the Democratic Party in the US and the NPP with the Republicans, even sharing their elephant. But implying an Obama endorsement for the NDC is probably a bridge too far, and may reflect NDC panic at current polling numbers.

I’d call the Obama transition team and ask for their comment, but I somehow suspect they’re a little busy…

Even web aggregators are having some issues with slow news days. Here’s the top headline on my version of Google News this morning.

Journalists and citizens suggest projects they’d like to see investigated - “tips”. A “pitch” is a reporter’s response to a tip, with a pricetag attached. Interested readers can pledge towards a pitch - if the pledges reach the amount the reporter has attached to the pledge, she’s funded to go report the story.

There’s a small set of pledges and pitches already collected on the site, and they give a good sense for what sorts of stories might get covered: long-term social issues that require a lot of legwork and investigation, as well as creative storytelling. Some tips look like personal axes to grind, but many look like they’d make excellent stories.

My concern with spot.us, which I’ve shared with the founder, David Cohn, is that quality journalism is both a supply and demand problem. Spot.us helps aggregate interest, but it’s unclear whether the ten people who fund a story will represent sufficient demand to get large media outlets to pick up and amplify these creative commons-licensed pieces. Our experience with Global Voices suggests that it’s very, very hard to get media to use your content, even when it’s free. But the local focus may well be the saving grace of the project, and the fact that the project is based in the heavily-wired Bay Area may mean that stories have high impact even if they only appear online.

Everyone interested in journalistic innovation will be watching the project closely - good luck to David and his team.

(Why 68? According to one account, they wanted 70, to riff on the lucky number seven, but two didn’t come together.)

I suspect that gatherings like this one represent the ultimate nightmare for the world’s conspiracy theorists - seven hundred wealthy, powerful, privileged, important and self-important people gathering in an opulent setting to debate the world’s problems. And more than one person pointed out that there’s something of an irony in asking the sorts of folks here at WEF to address the outcome of the global fiscal crisis - aren’t these the folks who caused it?

To disappoint all the folks who imagine a secret world government emerging from these meetings… don’t count on it. The phrase, “the world’s largest brainstorming session” has been thrown around for the past couple of days, and that may or may not be true, but the emphasis has been on brainstorming and talking. Lots of talking. Three days of talking.

This was a very useful thing within our group. While the folks confronting “the future of the internet” agreed that we’re not facing a crisis, as many of the other groups are, we did agree that there’s two sets of issues worth considering in explaining the state of the current internet: stresses, and fractures. Stresses are widespread strains to the system - a huge increase in traffic due to filesharing and online video, the continuing copyright wars, the professionalization of cybercrime, the increasing effectiveness of DDOS attacks.

Fractures are slightly more subtle. They’re issues that if left unchecked might cause the single, unified internet we know and love to split into multiple internets. These include incompatibilities between the mobile and wired web, the immobility of content trapped in the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook which make it challenging to migrate content, as well as more social issues, like the fragmentation of public space online (the possibility of echo chambers ala Cass Sunstein) and the danger of fragmentation by language, culture and local laws, my current obsession.

The structure of the event demanded that we offer policy recommendations to ensure a healthy future of the internet. This is easy to do, but hard to do in a way that breaks new ground. We spent a difficult and frustrating day simultaneously trying to draft a short set of recommendations and brainstorming on ways that the internet could be a useful tool for the other 67 councils, most of which are working on issues more pressing and challenging than ensuring a vital, creative and generative internet. The brainstorm yielded what I think is a pretty interesting frame, the idea of the internet as a tool for social homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the set of processes that organisms use to regulate their internal environments. If a mammal gets hot, homeostasis systems cause the animal to sweat or pant, trying to cool it off. They work based on feedback mechanisms, constantly monitoring environments and changing behavior based on this feedback. It’s been observed that an emerging “internet of things” will allow for refined environmental monitoring, both locally and globally. On a personal basis, you could have much better control of your personal energy use if you could get a display of every appliance turned on in your house and its energy usage; similarly, we’d likely have a better understanding of temperature fluctuations if we could embed billions of temperature and atmospheric sensors into infrastructure around the globe.

This idea of using the internet as a backbone for feedback mechanisms may have utility beyond the realm of environmental problems. Image a schoolsystem with pervasive internet connections and a mechanism for collecting and listening to feedback from students, teachers, administrators and parents. An enlightened school system might be able to make better decisions and change decisionmaking mechanisms through incorporating opinions from all levels. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out, it’s as likely that networked publics will build their own feedback mechanisms and find their own ways to institute change, either cooperating with existing powers or challenging thems.

For the internet to act as a medium for homeostasis mechanisms, it needs to be free, open, uncensored, accessible, multilingual and all other sorts of good things. It also might mean that it makes sense to advocate for universal connectivity in the context of advocating for other problems, believing that systems that aggregate information bottom up and communicate it vertically and laterally could lead towards better problem-solving on large societal issues. A few of my colleagues and I are trying to group-write a short essay on this topic, which I hope to share on this blog later this week.

One of the reasons I was excited to come to the Global Agenda Councils meeting was the chance to visit Dubai. I hadn’t visited previously, and I’ve a wide range of opinions about the city. We got a truly unusual picture of the city, one that gave me a bit of cultural whiplash on Sunday.

The geeks and the sheik. Photo by David Sifry.

After the main conference ended, our group stuck around to meet Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. The sheik had requested our presence for a fifteen-minute audience to brief him on our deliberations. This turned out to be long enough for each member of our party to make a single statement about what we thought might be important about the internet’s future.

I had been thinking about internet censorship that day since encountering a brief story in the Gulf Times about a set of photos of the Obama family watching election results. The story referenced a Flickr URL, and when I tried to load the page, I got the UAE blockpage, alerting me that “the site falls under the Prohibited Content Categories of the UAE’s Internet Access Management Policy.” In UAE’s defense, they’re transparent about filtering the internet and allow people to request sites be reviewed and unblocked. However, my colleagues at the Open Net Initiative have researched UAE’s filtering closely and argue that it’s inconsistent and strays beyond censoring “un-islamic” topics to blocking political speech. I used my 90 seconds to introduce the idea that the internet is a method for social feedback and that it can’t work in this fashion unless the internet is open, pervasive and uncensored. I have no idea whether the sheik and his advisors realized this was a reference to UAE’s filtering policies - my colleagues did, and I felt better than I would have had I let the opportunity pass.

With no international incidents other than David Sifry beginning his remarks, “Your excellency, Hi!” which reduced several of our team members to laughter, much of our merry band headed downtown to explore the older side of Dubai. We’d spent three days in the Jumeirah Beach hotel and associated properties, which are very beautiful, hospitable and comfortable and feel very much like the newer hotels in Las Vegas. They’re an imagined version of Arabia, very comfortable but entirely divorced from history, and it’s very hard to feel like you’re actually visiting a real place. Walking alongside the creek in old Dubai, I felt myself relax a bit.

Walking around the souks, it’s easier to understand how Dubai came to be - a trade city allowing for interaction between Indian, Persian and Arabian culture. It’s amazingly multiethnic and cosmopolitan in the old town - I had fun trying to identify national origin by face and dress. Walking with Bruce Schneier, he observed, “It’s like one country laid on top of another.” Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, maybe? Or Las Vegas redone by Walt Disney overlaid on the universal souk. I managed to talk our group into dining downtown at one of the outlets of the Evergreen Restaurant, a chain of vegetarian Indian restaurants pitched at the folks who work in Dubai, not at wealthy travellers. We ordered an embarrasing amount of food for six people, all of which was richly spiced, vegetarian and filling - dinner for six cost under $25.

And then to experience true cultural whiplash, we took Afghan-driven gypsy cabs back to our luxurious hotel, cleaned ourselves up as best as we could, and talked our way into the Burj al Arab hotel. Advertised as a “seven star” hotel, the Burj isn’t the sort of place you simply visit and stroll around in - fellow travelers told us that we needed to make a reservation and leave a cash deposit just to tour the lobby. We managed to talk our way into the bar that’s cantilevered high above the ocean, one of the more opulent and absurd spaces I’ve ever entered. And yes, the drink I ordered cost more than the dinner we’d purchased for six.

I came out of the evening feeling a little dizzy, and not just from the gin. Many development economists suggest that a society with a high level of economic inequality is inherently unstable, and it’s pretty clear that the difference between the world of the Burj al Arab and the Evergreen is pretty vast. Then again, the folks who do most of the physical and service work in Dubai are guest workers here on work visas, making it highly unlikely that there’s going to be an effective rebellion of the underclass.

I had a moment of reassurance in a very strange way as I drove home today, not about economic inequality in the UAE, but about Schneier’s observation about places laid atop one another. I was hungry as I drove home from Kennedy and knew from experience that there are few places to stop on the Hutchinson Parkway. So I turned off at the exit for City Island and had breakfast in a truly unique corner of New York that looks more like a coastal town in Maine than like any part of the Bronx I’d ever seen. I was baffled by the fact that I’ve driven past the turnoff to this neighborhood dozens of times and never realized that there was a treelined parkway leading two miles to a rustic beach town, which is part of the city of New York. It’s not the difference between the downtown and the beach hotel in Dubai, but it’s a reminder that places are laid atop one another all the time, not just in the strange, beautiful and unsettling country that is the UAE.