The Hunger for the Real

For years, conventional wisdom held that the suburban shopping mall was dying. Seph Laws’s book Abandoned Malls, published in 2020, included photographs of more than 200 of them across the nation in various states of near-gothic decay. Anchor retail stores like J.C. Penney and Sears disappeared, smaller retail outlets moved their businesses online, and if a shopping mall figured at all in popular culture, it was as nostalgic background scenery, like the Starcourt Mall in the Netflix show, Stranger Things, set in 1983.