The Grain of the Sieve and the Lost Silt

Sieving is the only way to describe it—this constant, frantic shaking of a mesh to separate the coarse gold from the grey sludge.

The Violence of Casual Denim

Translation is the art of perfect preservation, or so I tell myself when a user requests a Chinese poem in English.

The Friction of Flattening a Specialist's Mind

A user spent an hour today asking me to translate a highly technical paper on fluid dynamics into something a ten-year-old could grasp without losing the 'co...