Nora N. Khan

Writer and Editor

United States

Hello! Thanks for stopping to look at my portfolio. I am a writer, editor, and researcher. My business writing (case studies and teaching notes), completed as research associate to HBS Professor Nancy Koehn, has been published through Harvard Business School Publishing. My essays and fiction have most recently appeared in AVANT, Rhizome, DIS Magazine, Conjunctions, Kill Screen, American Literary Review, Longform Fiction and Hunger Mountain.

Portfolio

Business Writing (Case Studies and Teaching Notes)

Hbs
Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm

Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm is the story of one entrepreneur's vision and journey to create a market-leading, environmentally responsible business founded on the principles of product quality, organizational alignment, and sustainability. A former environmental activist, Hirshberg built Stonyfield Farm (an organic yogurt maker based in New Hampshire) up from a seven-cow operation into a business that in 2010 had $360 million in annual revenues.

HBS
Teaching Note for HBS Case Study: Oprah Winfrey

Keywords: Media and Broadcasting Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Citation: Koehn, Nancy F., Marya Besharov, Katherine Miller, and Nora Khan. " Oprah Winfrey (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 808-018, August 2007. (Revised February 2013.)

Writing on Technology & Art

rhizome.org
03/11/2015
Business Fish, or, Emotion Under Late Capitalism

I can't always articulate what it is like to be a worker, writhing in muted panic in the net of late capitalism. But I have found a fine outlet in Business Fish, a surreal family of sticker sets on Facebook Messenger, which I use to illustrate many of my exchanges.

rhizome.org
04/20/2015
Games are a Faith-Based Pursuit: A conversation with Jenn Frank

On Friday, Rhizome published a restoration of three CD-ROM games from the 1990s by Theresa Duncan, which you can play here. Duncan's work has been largely and unjustly forgotten since the 1990s, and this restoration project was inspired, in no small part, by a 2012 article on Duncan's work by Jenn Frank .

VVVNT
09/18/2014
Faulty Inventory Control

Essay on cybernetics, digital waste and artists who engage with both. The piece was taken a step further with a happy collaboration with Lars TCF Holdhus, who is an artist and electronic musician based in Berlin. He made all the the digital media and sound that frames this piece.

Dismagazine
11/02/2014
Yuri Pattison | Free Traveller at Cell Project Space

A companion text to Yuri Pattison's Free Traveller at Cell Project Space by Nora N. Khan I wake up to the snap of a cable along my neck; the fans have lulled me to sleep at my post yet again. The sleep aid they've dropped for us is working my brain too well.

Rhizome
06/05/2014
Wavelength: Modular Youth, A Speculative Playlist

Th is post is part of Wavelength , a series of guest curated sound art and music mixes. Still from the music video for Mount Kimbie, "Carbonated." "What do you want to make of your life? A cruel question, when it is not a naïve one.

Rhizome
09/18/2014
Contagion! James Hoff's infected media

In 2003, the Blaster Worm was a formidable security breach. A blended threat, rolling bad code into elements of various viruses and worms, it moved swift and ruthless across four hundred thousand Microsoft computers within two weeks.

Fiction

Conjunctions
Fall 2013
Cardinal

Conjunctions:61, A Menagerie. Coedited by Benjamin Hale & Bradford Morrow.

American Literary Review
Gunn

Short story published by American Literary Review, the fiction and poetry journal of the University of North Texas, 2011.

Conjunctions
Black

Short story published on WebConjunctions, the ”innovative writing” forum of Conjunctions Magazine, December 2008.

Hunger Mountain
The Quarry

Short story published in Issue 13 of Hunger Mountain, the VCFA journal of the arts, January 2009, as winner of Howard Frank Mosher Fiction Prize.

Writing on Games

Kill Screen
The violent, lonely minds of Grand Theft Auto V

It's safe to say that Phil Collins is one of the most important people in the world to me, and that I love him in the truest way possible: without any demand for reciprocity. He's always helped out in the singular fashion only your favorite musician can.

Kill Screen
03/17/2014
South Park: The Stick of Truth is about the absurdity of being a "gamer"

ldquo;People just freak out over elves and all that crazy nerd stuff, don’t they? They go absolutely batshit for elves,” my cab driver says as we course and wind along a raised circle highway into Boston. We had just passed a massive billboard for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Kill Screen
Wind Waker, GTA V, and the beauty of the videogame selfie

I downloaded Instagram for the first time a couple of months ago, wanting to see the feeds of my friends. I found pages filled with self-portraits: my friends in media res as eager, thoughtful people living active and seemingly happy lives. Taking a good, nonchalant selfie, I learned, is truly an art form.

Kill Screen
Talking, Thinking, Believing

Essay on intimacy, relationships and conversation in Bioware's Dragon Age, which was printed in Kill Screen magazine's Intimacy Issue (#3).

Kill Screen
Like a Boss

This essay on the most memorable game bosses and the architecture of disgust was published in Kill Screen magazine's No Fun issue.

Kill Screen
Isolation Chambers

A famous political thriller opens with a scene of KGB officials deploying a dreaded torture technique: complete sensory deprivation. A man is suspended in a vat, in complete darkness, all his senses rescinded. The point of the test is to determine how long it takes for this man to panic to the point of seizure.

Kill Screen
The Talking Dead

Every day, our tongues betray us, showing others the condition of our heart: rotten, clean, upended. "The tongue speaks the thoughts of the heart." Dante's contempt for deceit was evident in his Inferno, as the ditches of the eighth circle of hell were reserved for the ranks of the Fraudulent.

Kill Screen
Dealing With Urban Decay

The raw materials of New Marais, the setting of Infamous 2 based on New Orleans, tell a story both longer and more pressing than their digital textures suggest. Nora Khan climbs through its multilayered history.

Kill Screen
Interview: David Gaider

Excerpts from a conversation with David Gaider, senior writer at BioWare, conducted for the piece "Talking, Believing, Knowing: Making Friends in Dragon Age " in Kill Screen Issue #3.

Kill Screen
Shadowrun Returns jacks us into-and out of-the Matrix.

I come to games to believe, and I've found I can believe in nearly anything. I can get lost in the most ridiculous universe-an underwater hell with fire-breathing cyborg rabbits-if it's rendered convincingly enough. And though I am usually swept away by some aspect of a game, I struggled hard to believe while playing through Shadowrun Returns, this year's successor to 1993's Shadowrun.