The Mall of America - "The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., turns ten years old [Aug 2002]. Host Madeleine Brand talks to author Ian Frazier about his surreal vision of the massive shopping center." You can read Frazier's Atlantic piece here.Re-Creating the Mall Online (12-15-08) - "New companies are trying to replicate real-world shopping environments on the computer. Shopping at the new virtual 3-D mall is a little like shopping in Second Life and a little like the actual mall in Seattle."
Mall Makeover (5-20-07) - "Shopping malls are an icon of American pop culture, but they face extinction unless they modernize. Debbie Elliott visits a Washington, D.C., area mall that's getting a makeover for the 21st century."
Musings
- Compare any two of the three NPR pieces above.
- What's your response to David Segal's piece in New York Times, "Our Love Affair With Malls Is on the Rocks" (1-31-2009). Check out background piece on malls at Wikipedia.
- It seems that everyone has a mall story. What's yours? If you want, relate it to thus City X mood piece that also serves as a commentary on the place of the modern shopping mall in a “real, yet unnamed, city”: “Using a sound rich audio mosaic of observations and ruminations, all scored to Muzak, the universal mall experience comes to life, for better or for worse.” It was first broadcast (in a shortened form) on NPR’s Living on Earth (15:52) in November, 2004., and is also available in its original full length at the Third Coast Festival (22:32).
