The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as ’the Vegas of the Middle East’ or ’the Venice of the Middle East’ or ’the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert’ - have been built in the last ten years.

Saunders’s sentence uses a piling-up of nicknames—each a Western, entertainment-driven analogy—to capture Dubai’s deliberately manufactured spectacle. By calling these attractions “the cool parts” and stressing that they were built “in the last ten years,” he highlights the city’s extreme recentness and the speed with which capital can fabricate an image of glamour in an inhospitable setting. The parenthetical “if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert” sharpens the satire: the scale is both impressive and faintly absurd, suggesting a theme common in Saunders’s nonfiction—unease about consumer fantasy, boosterish rhetoric, and the human costs or hollowness that may underlie dazzling surfaces.