Volume 1: Introduction

Welcome to 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 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 free of professional entanglement. By targeting brevity, Caravanserai encourages writers to push colorful arguments ahead of exhaustive diagnoses. We’ll publish these 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!

Volume 1 of Caravanserai is our first attempt at putting this format into practice. This fall, we’ll release sets of responses on a regular schedule; these sets of responses will form “issues” in the volume. We will also include issues for cultural and media criticism, interspersed among the issues focused on policy-related topics.

Please subscribe below―we’re confident you’ll enjoy what you see. Our first issue comes out October 8.