The couple who lived in a mall

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:40:00 +0000

Monday night, millions gathered around the television to watch an event years in the making. No, I'm not talking about the Olympics. Rather, Monday night was the premiere of "The American Mall," MTV's "High School Musical" rip-off in which teenage dramas unfold under the dizzying fluorescents of a food court. It's a story, so says the promo, about a place we all love, where everything is for sale but love and dreams.

Like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Mallrats," "The American Mall" presents the enclosed shopping mall -- America's most iconic, infamous and replicated retail phenomenon -- as the ultimate gathering place (which was, in fact, the intention of inventor Victor Gruen, the Holocaust survivor who created the first indoor shopping mall in Edina, Minn., in 1956). Funny thing, though: We all love the mall a little less right now. Retail vacancies have hit 6.3 percent in regional malls, the highest number in six years, and not a single new, enclosed shopping mall was built last year. As we hold tighter to our wallets, what's going to become of all that empty consumer space?

Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto have an answer.

Actually, hell is other people

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:25:00 +0000

Earlier this summer, I spent a week vacationing with some of my oldest and dearest friends, suffering most of the time from paranoia after one of them pronounced me "addicted to worrying" and another accused me of being relentlessly negative (I responded to her T-shirt, printed with the question "What Would Nature Do?" by asserting that nature is a whole lot more violent than Jesus). I resented being known so thoroughly and longed to be surrounded by intimacy lite: acquaintances and cocktail party banter buddies from whom I'm distant enough to ensure a conflict-free interaction, as opposed to friends who have compiled empirical evidence about my character defects over the years.

While I was busy questioning the benefits of intimacy, three sociologists from Duke and the University of Arizona were releasing a study called "Social Isolation in America." The researchers found that Americans have one-third as many close friends as they did 20 years ago, and nearly three times as many said they don't have a single confidante. This, by the way, is how close friends are defined in the study: people with whom one discusses important matters, though one person listed "getting a haircut" as an important matter. I count myself lucky to have more than the study's average number of friends and confidantes. In fact, I am a serial confessor and discuss important matters with anyone who'll listen; by the haircut standard, my postman Ronnie is a close friend. But like many other Americans these days, I find close friendships maddening and admit to the occasional onset of good old-fashioned misanthropy, a subscription to Sartre's observation that hell is other people.

Salon.com > Lisa Selin Davis

The couple who lived in a mall

Actually, hell is other people