The Segway also reminds me of my fallibility. To this day, thinking about it fills me with dread. That’s because in 2001, I was a young literary agent—and Dean Kamen’s book was my first-ever big deal. The cascading series of miscues that tanked the Segway began with that book proposal, its leak, and the ensuing hype. And I’ve always had a sick sense that the leak was somehow my fault. So I set out to report the story, to wade back into the mess I made when I got in way over my head, and to figure out once and for all the answer to a question that’s eaten at me for 20 years: Did I kill the Segway?
It is not uncommon for people to misspell an unfamiliar name—yet 99 times out of 100 people misspell mine as “Milton.” That is the name that shows up on everything from my university gym card to emails from colleagues.
It might seem trivial, yet this misspelling actually illustrates a key feature of how cultural practices emerge and stabilize.
Before she became a vegan, Molinaro was fairly new to cooking. She’d never made some of her favorite comfort foods, like kimchi jjigae or jjajangmyun. She started going through traditional Korean recipes, consulting both food blogs and her home-cook mother, finding substitutions for meat and dairy as she went along. Far from weakening her connection to Korean food and culture, veganism, she says, has brought her Koreanness into focus. She even makes her own kimchi, a labor-intensive practice many of our second-generation cohort seems happy to leave to our parents.
Here we have a work where the life and calling of the protagonist, our titular Agatha, young Catholic sister living in and running a sobriety home with her three companions in the church, is perfectly reflected in the coherent plot, denuded prose, and empathetic morality of the novel she inhabits.
When the poet Kaveh Akbar was a young child, his father taught him to recite Muslim prayers in Arabic, a language Akbar didn’t understand, and which his family spoke only during worship. Mimicking those incantatory sounds, he briefly embodied a foreign tongue. He could inhabit the lyric beauty of the words, he discovered, even without grasping their meaning. Akbar, who was born in Iran, arrived in the United States when he was two, a transition that imparted another lesson in linguistic gain and loss: while he picked up English, Farsi began to fade. In a poem called “Do You Speak Persian?,” Akbar writes, “I have been so careless with the words I already have. / / I don’t remember how to say home / in my first language, or
Poetry requires the opposite of such carelessness, and Akbar is exquisitely sensitive to how language can function as both presence and absence.