
My grandmother's arithmetic
She could not read a balance sheet and was never once wrong about money. I have been trying to work out the difference.
by Nyirobi Girl · 1 min read
Read the essay
She could not read a balance sheet and was never once wrong about money. I have been trying to work out the difference.
by Nyirobi Girl · 1 min read
Read the essay
A mathematician tries to explain certainty to her daughter. Neither of them wins.
5 panels

What neuroscience and poetry both know about the moment a recollection slips away.
1 min read

The grid we now live by was a contested argument long before it became a fact.
by Rightson Tole

The intimate, unofficial lives hidden inside the driest of official documents.
by Sofia Marin

How the masses stopped being a backdrop and became modern history’s main character.
by Amara Wanjiru

What can cross a border in a single suitcase, and what is always left at the line.
by Teo Mensah

Societies decide, often quite deliberately, what they will allow themselves to remember.
by Daniel Okoro

The grid we now live by was a contested argument long before it became a fact.
by Marcus Reed
The unexamined life is not worth living — but the over-examined one forgets to be lived at all.
YouTube1:06:22An OB-GYN walks through the hormonal shift most women meet without a map.
with Dr. Dokii Muchiri3 Sept 2026
21:191 Sept 2026
16:2327 Aug 2026
22:5524 Aug 2026
55:2817 Aug 2026
Dispatch 014Filed every Sunday
Nairobi's least reliable narrator and its most reliable deadline. One essay a week, from a writer nobody on this masthead has met.

Dispatch14
Ninety seconds of shared suspension, and everything this city has quietly decided about who is allowed to be in a hurry.
1 min read
Previously

013
In defence of the last forty pages, and of the particular cowardice that leaves them unread.
1 min read

012
Punctuality is a virtue borrowed from factories. I would like to give it back.
1 min read

011
Nairobi does not sleep so much as change shifts. An hour spent listening to the handover.
1 min read
Nyirobi Girl, by email
One essay a week from Nairobi's least reliable narrator, sent the morning she files.