About the magazine
Souk Weekly,
explained.
A new old magazine of dispatches from the bazaar.
Souk Weekly is a new old magazine. We launched in 2026 with the deliberately unfashionable belief that the Gulf deserves a weekly that reads like a weekly should: opinionated, observant, faintly amused, and on time. We are not a wire service. We are not a press release pipeline. We are a magazine.
The beat is the souk, broadly defined. The literal markets of Dubai and Doha and Manama, sure. But also the metaphorical ones: the family offices that decide which startups get to exist next year, the consultancies selling the same PowerPoint deck for the fourth Vision in a row, the late-night shisha cafes where most of the actual deals get done, and the global currents that wash up on Gulf shores about a quarter before anyone else notices.
We have five sections (Politics, Business, World, Tech, Opinion), one cover story a week, and a weekend issue that we promise will not contain a single sentence beginning with the words “In an exclusive interview.”
What you can expect
- Politics. The corridors, not the press briefings. Who is actually doing the thinking, who is doing the talking, and the not-always- small gap between the two.
- Business. Family money, fund money, fast money, slow money. Which deals close, which deals only ever existed in a deck, and what the Gulf is quietly buying that no one is yet calling a trend.
- World. Foreign desks tend to write about the Gulf. We write about the world from the Gulf, which is a different exercise.
- Technology. Less “disruption,” more “what actually shipped.” AI infrastructure, Arabic-first tools, cloud sovereignty, and the founders building the next decade on whatever margin they can scrape from the last one.
- Opinion. Loose change, sharp eyes. Columns by people who actually have to live with the consequences of being wrong, which is a useful filter on what gets published here.
How we work
Souk Weekly is a small magazine with a deliberately small ego. Stories are drafted by writers, edited by editors, and read by a third pair of eyes before they ship. We use AI tools the way a newsroom uses a coffee machine: every morning, with gratitude, and without pretending the coffee made the magazine. Every piece you read has been worked on by a human, sometimes several.
We do not publish anonymous tip sheets as features. We do not run press-release laundry. We disclose conflicts where they exist. We correct errors openly. Where a profile subject has a relationship with the magazine or with one of our writers, we identify the relationship in the piece itself.
Our writers occasionally use pen-names. This is a magazine convention, not a dodge: the byline is the editorial role, not the passport. We say so here because we would rather you knew.
The people
Who's on staff.
Editors and columnists currently writing for Souk Weekly. The full masthead with the long bios lives at /masthead.
Anika Patel
Anika Patel writes for Meridian.
Diego Arroyo
Opinion Editor. Essays on democracy, work, and what the next decade demands.
Lena Holloway
Senior Editor covering Politics and World. Twenty years on the foreign desk.
Marcus Okafor
Markets Reporter. Previously: equities desk in London and São Paulo.
Mira Faraj
Editor-at-Large at Souk Weekly. Writes the cover lines, picks the fights, and occasionally talks to people who would rather she did not. Previously elsewhere; mostly the same beat, fewer adjectives.
Priya Chen
Technology Correspondent. Covers AI, semiconductors, and the labs behind both.
Rafael Mendez
Rafael Mendez writes for Meridian.
Sara Qureshi
Special Contributor. Profiles of the people building the next economy.
Theresa Bauer
Theresa Bauer writes for Meridian.
Why this exists
Most English-language Gulf coverage arrives in one of two flavors. There's the polite trade-magazine variety, which reads like it was written for a launch event. And there's the foreign-desk variety, which reads like it was filed from a hotel bar in a different time zone. Both are a real and well-funded business, but neither is the magazine we wanted to read on a Saturday morning. So we started one.
The weekly
One newsletter a week. The good stuff, the strange stuff, the souk stuff. Sign up from the footer of any page. We will not sell your email. We will not pretend the unsubscribe link is hard to find. It is at the bottom of every issue, large and friendly.
Talk to us
Tips, complaints, fan mail, hate mail, photographs of unusually good karak. Send them to the contact page. We open every envelope eventually.