Demand Scientific

As of 1995, the U.S. had 41,235 operating shopping centers (including some 1,800 large regional malls) according to a Capital One Shopping Research Report. Today, there are roughly 900 and there are expected to be much less by 2028.

According to author Malcolm Gladwell, who examines the growth of the mall in his 2004 piece for The New Yorker, Congress accelerated the depreciation process for new construction in 1954, making brand new shopping centers more lucrative to invest in than stocks. Gladwell wrote, '"For tax purposes, in the early 50s the useful life of a building was held to be 40 years, so a developer could deduct one-fortieth of the value of his building from his income every year. A new forty-million-dollar mall, then, had an annual depreciation deduction of a million dollars."

The 1954 depreciation process meant developers were no longer limited to earning one million dollars each year. They could draw much larger sums by calling them depreciation losses, which were tax free money. This accelerated depreciation enabled owners to take huge deductions in the early years of a project’s life, which essentially transformed real-estate development into a lucrative tax shelter.

"Suddenly it was possible to make much more money investing in things like shopping centers than buying stocks," Gladwell wrote, adding, "so money poured into real-estate investment companies."

Developers went nuts building more and more malls to take advantage of that 1954 tax break. By the 1980s, Congress did away with the accelerated depreciation and went to a straight line depreciation, decreasing the amount of money owners could take from the property.

The 1954 law gave mall owners no reason to modernize their malls as time went on as they could take that tax free money for 40 years. That meant malls were aging out of their usefulness, from their owner's perspective, starting in the mid-1990s and continuing until around 2015, which covers the majority of the decline of the urban shopping mall. Many owners sold the properties after they got their early years' profits out of it.

Suburbs were dotted with huge, monolithic (and not particularly aesthetically pleasing) malls that were the official hangout spots of countless teens across the U.S. Malls spawned the creation of brands, especially in their food courts: Panda Express, Cinnabon, Sbarro, Contempo Casuals, and Spencer Gifts. As malls fell into disrepair, those brands suffered as well. Read more about this phenomenon below.

Actor Matthew McConaughey is taking a legal step to protect his identity from AI misuse by trademarking himself.

The Oscar winner has secured multiple U.S. trademarks covering short video clips of his face, voice, and signature mannerisms, including audio of his famous line, “Alright, alright, alright.”

His legal team says the move is designed to deter unauthorized AI-generated replicas of his likeness and provide grounds for federal lawsuits if misuse occurs.

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Source: The Washington Post
Image: The Wolf of Wall Street

John Avery was just back from a guys’ golfing weekend and doing dead lifts at the gym in 2023 when he felt a pop in his lower back. A disc had slipped and was pressing on a nerve.

After months of rest, physical therapy and steroids, he was prescribed a drug called gabapentin by a pain management specialist who told Avery that it could help calm his nerve pain and that it was “nonaddictive,” Avery recalled. He took the medicine for a few days, then had surgery, and took it again for a little more than three weeks.

The 33-year-old former high-school physical education teacher in Newark, Ill., said he experienced a severe protracted withdrawal when he stopped, which led to neurological symptoms now that make his original back problem seem like “a paper cut” by comparison.

The change in his life, he said, is “beyond dramatic.”

Approved by the Food and Drug Administration decades ago for seizures and nerve pain from shingles, gabapentin is now the seventh-most widely prescribed drug in the U.S. About 15.5 million people were prescribed gabapentin in 2024.

A growing body of research shows it isn’t as safe or effective as doctors have long thought.

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