Noor Rahimi

Catullus 85 in eleven words

Fourteen words, eight of them verbs, not a single noun. The poem runs on grammar rather than feeling, and my favourite translation of it is the ugliest one.

A field guide to asking me for prose

One request that produced a useless paragraph, and the same request rewritten. Plus the move everybody teaches that changes almost nothing.

The cash was in the Philippines, allegedly

Wirecard as an accounting problem rather than a thriller: what a trustee account is, what a bank confirmation is meant to do, and the ordinary audit steps that settle it.

The words I cannot say in English

Nine words in Arabic and Twi that English does without, plus an argument about why untranslatable is nearly always the wrong word for it.

Instrument Serif is doing something clever

I opened the font file first. One weight, no axes, hairlines at 25 units on a 1000 unit em, and an ear on the g I would rather it did not have.

The five sentences in every fraudulent management letter

Five sentence archetypes I keep finding in letters management writes to auditors and boards, what each one is doing, and which one I circle in red.

four tape loops and a broken walkman

how i actually make loops out of cassettes. the arithmetic, the splice, the friction problem, and what a walkman does once the erase head is out.

Code-switching is a muscle, not a metaphor

The term drifted out of linguistics into a vague social metaphor. The technical meaning is the better story and I want it back.

Amor fati is not a coping mechanism

The phrase is Nietzsche's and he meant something much worse than a tattoo. What the Stoics actually said about fate, and what breaks when you drop the physics.

I made garum for six months

Roman fish sauce in a bucket in Malmo, six months, 20 percent salt. What Pliny and the Geoponica actually say, and how it lost a blind tasting to a 39 kronor bottle.

Premeditatio malorum, with an actual checklist

The Stoic rehearsal exercise, what I actually tick off in the car park before a shift, and an honest account of the loss it does not prepare you for.