about Caravanserai

It’s good to reflect on the political moment, to react to its eccentricities with thoughtful analysis—but, this time, how about we do it with some flair?

Caravanserai is our forum for an open discussion of policy and political culture. It’s our canvas for honing our understanding of the world around us—separate from the imprimaturs of our work.

It’s heterodox in content, and in form: Our selected writers receive invitations to address “prompts” selected by the editorial board and prepare 500-word anonymous responses. This format leaves writers free to sketch out their reactions to salient political and cultural questions, exercising their individual voices and free of professional entanglement. By targeting brevity, Caravanserai encourages writers to push colorful arguments ahead of exhaustive diagnoses. And we’ll publish responses to prompts in sets—three responses per prompt—to encourage a conversation between readers and writers centered around the content of the responses and agnostic to their authors. The writers won’t know the other writers—they’re part of this conversation, too!

Also, it’s worth mentioning: Everyone the editorial board has asked to write for this publication is someone who we maintain knows what they are talking about with respect to the prompt they have been given. Consider this our “ethos promise.”

editorial board

Advait Arun, Daevan Mangalmurti, and Aastha Uprety.

(These are not pen names, they’re really us, and you can look us up if you’d like.)

why Caravanserai?

A caravanserai, pronounced “caravan-sir-eye,” was a resting place and meeting place for travelers and traders across the Silk Road. While the camels rested, their humans exchanged luxury goods and perhaps even more luxurious stories. This website is our caravanserai—our meeting place for exchanging insights as well as our resting place away from the demands of how our work might have us present ourselves. We want this to be an interesting stop for our writers and our readers on the long road to wherever their work and thinking are headed.