TOW #19: Are Malls Over by Amy Merrick

As new generations begin to form, people's way of living starts to change. This change is also redefining how people shop. No longer do Americans trek out to outdated malls to do their shopping, since they are able to make all of their purchases online comfortably in their homes. Amy Merrick, a writer for The New Yorker, wrote “Are Malls Over?” to describe the decline of popularity that Americans have with malls. Merrick uses anecdotes as well as analogies to relay how malls are becoming less popular and how they must be reinvented in order for them to avoid becoming obsolete.                                                                                                                                              
Merrick initiates her essay by using an anecdote that provides background about the typical American mall. Merrick recalled, “when the Woodville Mall opened, in 1969, in Northwood, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, its developers bragged about the mall’s million square feet of enclosed space; its anchor tenants, which included Sears and J. C. Penney; and its air-conditioning—seventy-two degrees, year-round!” She then follows by describing how this same mall is being demolished this year along with many other malls due to their outdated qualities. By providing this anecdote Merrick is able to show how malls were once the hot new trend in America, but are now quickly becoming outdated and unneeded. After proving that the typical American mall is becoming less popular, Merrick is able to suggest the idea of reinventing the American mall.

Merrick’s analogies allow her to show the opportunity for success if malls were reinvented. “As any cubicle dweller knows, people like natural light and fresh air and, when deprived of them, feel oppressed. So are people alienated by those older malls, with their raw concrete, brutalist architecture and fretful, defensive air?” By comparing a cubicle dweller to a shopper, Merrick is able to determine the key details, like natural light and fresh air that may reinvent the mall. Her comparison allows her to then provide others’ research and draw to the conclusion that outdoor malls with more than just shopping experiences may reinvent the mall, and make the mall popular once again. 

            Nowadays many typical American malls are being closed and in order for malls to thrive once again, they must be able to adapt appeal to what shoppers want. I believe that Amy Merrick does a good job at proving this point by using anecdotes and analogies to show how the typical American should be reinvented before malls become obsolete. The audience is able to follow what is being said and connect to how the need for malls is slowly dwindling. Developers need to pin point the desires of shoppers that will make a mall desirable to be frequented by the shopper to help malls thrive once again. 

TOW #18: Go Ask Alice (IRB Part 2)

As the diary Go Ask Alice, written by an anonymous girl, progresses the audience is able to take a deeper look into the downward spiral that the main character goes into. Alice begins her diary because she has no one else to talk to, and she spends her energy searching not for drugs, but for someone who understands her. Once she is introduced, the drugs only create a temporary illusion that she is in touch with people, nature, etc. Her purpose of illustrating the growth of what it is like living as a teenage drug user and the outcome of her life that her addiction caused is shown through her use of parallels and expressive prose.
       One of the positive aspects of this diary is that Alice is a very good writer allowing her to lace her unhappy vision of the world with poetic and sensitive language. Through this Alice puts a focal point on the parallels between the two different worlds that she lives in, one being the real world and the other being the fantasy world. The real world is surrounded by her home with her parents, her home with her grandmother, the homes of parties she attends with her friends, the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley, and eventually a psychiatric hospital ward. The fantasy world is everything she sees and believes in when it comes to her hallucinations. Due to the use of drugs, a parallel is created between the real world and everything that she used to know. When showing that parallel between these two different worlds, we can see that Alice thinks and acts differently when she lives in each place. 

        Most of all, Alice wants someone to talk to and because of her longing to do so, she uses the diary to fulfill her need to talk about things, promoting her expressive prose style. From the beginning, the audience notices that Alice feels like she has to hide her identity with others, however when it comes to her Diary, she can be her true self. As she goes deeper into the counterculture, drugs replace the diary as the center of her attention, but even so she still maintains her devotion to it. The diary's use finally comes to an end when when Alice gets rid of it because she feels she wants to share herself with other people, the tool that once allowed Alice to better communicate and understand herself has served its purpose and is no longer being used. 

         The author does a good job of achieving her purpose because the diary is able to highlight her initial innocence which soon progresses into into a character much different than she had ever expected. The book may have been confusing at times because of the constant ups and downs that were apart of Alice's life, also the fact that in the end it seems as though there is hope for her but it is revealed since the beginning that Alice died 3 weeks after she stopped writing in the diary. However, this does not take away from the purpose of the book because it exposes the audience to the harsh realities of drug users.