The final issue

Dubai Mornings goes out through beehiiv, and most of the features I rely on to run it as a one-person newsletter sit on its paid plans: welcome emails, polls, custom layouts, a referral program. On 1 October, beehiiv changed its pricing, and the cheapest paid plan went up. That's their call to make. I write this alone and it's always been free to read, so paying more to keep doing the same thing doesn't add up. I'd rather end it properly, with a real goodbye, than let it fade into an email that turns up whenever it turns up.

Before I go, I want to tell you what this was. It was never quite the newsletter I set out to write, not until the very end.

I picked the name on 27 February and registered dubaimornings.com the same day. The plan was simple: three mornings a week, five minutes each, about rent, money and life in this city. Something with the unhurried feel of a Sunday paper, for people who actually live here. Under our name went three lines: what happened, what it means, what to do. I even wrote down how it should feel: 7am on a Friday in January, on a terrace in JBR with a hot karak.

The next morning was 28 February. You know what happened next, because you lived it too.

For a couple of days I shelved the whole thing. Sending rent tips that week felt tone-deaf. On 4 March I changed my mind, because if people here needed anything, it was one calm read each morning that they could trust. So Dubai Mornings started life as a daily crisis brief, and I wrote one line into the plan: when the skies clear, we go back to what this was always meant to be.

The first issue went out a week into it. Every issue had a status box, a "what to do" box and a day counter, and the counter tracked the city's days from 28 February rather than the newsletter's. In the first week I showed both numbers at once, they disagreed, and twice I got the day of the week wrong.

Most of what I wrote was practical. Which schools were remote, and for how long. Which flights were back. What Eid looked like this year. A rare storm in late March. The Dubai World Cup going ahead anyway. At the end of March I wrote that "normalcy keeps arriving in fragments." On 20 April, schools went back in person after 48 days of distance learning. A few days before, I'd written that the first morning back would "feel strange at the school gate, and also completely ordinary in a way that 47 days made you forget was possible." I think it was both.

On 5 May I sent you a note saying we were going back to property, business, money and life. "That chapter isn't closed," I wrote, "but it's no longer the only story worth telling." Three days later came the first Weekend Pick: La Mer on a Saturday, before 9am, while the boardwalk was still pleasant.

It took six more weeks to stick. The counter reached 110 on 17 June, and I retired it. Two days later I kept the promise from March. Dubai Mornings went back to what it was always meant to be: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with Friday kept for your weekend. It got to be that newsletter for a little over three months.

Before 17 June, six in ten of our top stories were about the conflict. After it, about one in eight, and almost half were about the city itself.

For a few weeks in the summer, I needed that calm, steady voice again. But by August the top stories were about driverless taxis, paying rent monthly and the new school year. Kind of normal, and I'll take it.

Through all of it, those three lines under our name never changed: what happened, what it means, what to do. That's the part I'm proudest of.

Most of you found Dubai Mornings in those first few months, a lot of you through Reddit. On 28 March I wrote that we were close to 100 subscribers. If you were one of them, you signed up for a crisis brief, rough edges and all, from someone who'd planned to write about rent. I told you then that it meant more than you'd think to know this landed in your morning, and it still does.

Issue after issue, I asked you to forward this to one person. If you did, thank you, whether it went to a family group, a building chat or a colleague who'd just landed in Dubai. Every forward was someone deciding this was worth a place in another person's morning, and I never took that lightly. And to the person on Reddit who publicly picked apart one of my posts in May: you were right. Thank you.

I'll miss hunting for the one number that explained a whole story, and picturing you reading this over your first coffee, or in the back of a taxi on Sheikh Zayed Road. I never did get to write the January edition. If you're on a terrace somewhere this January, early on a Friday, have a karak for me.

Thank you for reading, and for letting me into your mornings. If you want to say goodbye, hit reply and I'll read every one.

— Stephan