Oh, dear readers, it seems as though we've been away from you for eons. We know how difficult it is to return to normal after a long break, so you'll probably eager to kill a few minutes reading something of interest while you readjust. So we turn to this great piece by architect and firm founder David Marks in Building, "My Dubai Hell," which talks about his experience working in the country. From the opening, Dubai for Marks is "a sort of surreal version of Las Vegas -- the city that was one vast casino where everybody wins." By then end, his firm hasn't been paid for 15 months and is owed hundreds of thousands of pounds. We've all read about the rise and fall of Dubai, including the most recent report that they still plan to finish the world's tallest building, but it's incredibly fascinating to see how it all looked from the inside, painful as it may be (though, if anything, the country's decline probably means many lives spared now that David Fisher's crackpot building likely won't see the light of day).