Articles by Julia Tompkins
12 articles found.
The Railroad Lie
Trains and nostalgia
In a May 1867 letter to the San Francisco Alta California, Mark Twain wrote: “A railroad is like a lie—you have …
Week in Bittersweet Bites
A Star Dies in “Holy Wood” Hugh Hefner is dead. He died of chronic old age on September 27 at the …
Week in the Munchies
KIDDIE MEAL It was 7PM, supper had come and gone, and our hero’s tummy had the rumblies, the phantom taste—his favorite …
Impatience
Negotiating time in the clinic
In February 2015, seven months before his death, the late neurologist and author Oliver Sacks published an essay in the New …
Marching Toward Inclusivity
Can we have a Women’s March for everyone?
“We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us,” reads the Mission Statement for …
Week in Overreactions
Precious Memes The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thought it would simply be another case of swiftly repressed political satire. …
Empire, Limited
Writing in Transience
Amtrak’s Empire Builder train departs from Chicago Union Station, arcing northwest along the border with Canada and passing through Milwaukee, St. …
Week in Bureaucracy
Cable Cabals In the early 1950s, as the Cold War began to chill, the US laid thousands of miles of cable …
Week in Transposition
Bud, Not Buddy For anyone who grew up in the era of the 1978 book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, …
Week in Extraordinary Measures
Look Ma, No Hands You’re done with One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. If we’re being real, you were …
Make Me a Lemon Tree
Death Goes Green, All Are Welcome
Katrina Spade wants death in good company. In 2013, Spade, then an architecture student at UMass Amherst, began to think about …