My latest ...
Mall of the Future
Malls are dying. So why is this one thriving?
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On a May afternoon at Westfield Montgomery shopping mall, a group of teenagers with shopping bags races across the tile floor before deflating into chairs by the escalator, checking their cellphones and sipping Starbucks Frappuccinos. For Olivia Andreassi and her friend Vanessa Pontachak, both 13-year-olds from Bethesda, this is a weekly ritual. While Friday nights are for meeting up with friends in downtown Bethesda, weekend afternoons are for getting together to prowl the mall, just as they were for their parents’ generation, when shopping malls meant video arcades and Orange Julius. “We’ve been here for, like, four hours,” Olivia sighs, before sipping from her straw.
But step past the food court and through the exit door and the scene transforms. Rather than teenagers laughing against a backdrop of piped-in music and the smell of soft pretzels, you’ll see a frenzy of construction. Workers in yellow hard hats bang nails. Power tools whir and pound. From the mall’s old parking garage, a new wing is emerging, looking like a massive modernist sculpture of shiny rails, rusted steel girders and concrete walls.
Though Olivia and Vanessa may not realize it, indoor shopping malls are on the decline across the country.
Read the rest at Bethesda Magazine.
Jumping the Velvet Rope
I have been starstruck as a journalist only once.
Working as a reporter in Aspen gives even rookies a chance to brush up against A-listers they probably wouldn’t run into as cub reporters in Poughkeepsie. I interviewed politicians I admired (and those I didn’t), writers whose work inspired—and inspires me—and a handful of celebrities, I guess, but not as many as you might think.
The only time I felt like a silly teenager in the presence of the person on the other end of my notebook was the time I interviewed Robin Williams. read more…
Down on the Farm
Students who graduate from Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School, where SAT scores are typically among the highest in the county’s public schools, often end up pursuing jobs in high-paying careers after college. Greg Glenn had a different idea: He came home to be a farmer. read more…
Baseball with Mister Way
The boys were raised in little wooden houses with palm frond roofs, some of them, and floors of dirt or concrete, lit by oil lanterns. The electric lights that glittered on the sequins of nightclub dancers in Havana didn’t reach the poor here, eight miles to the southeast, in the village of San Francisco de Paula.
Old men now, in their eighties, they look back on a time 75 years ago when a legend even while he lived enchanted their childhood read more…
A Paradise Going to Hell — Thanks to Global Warming
Just past Johnny Depp’s private island in the Caribbean sits Lee Stocking Island, a little piece of paradise that’s going to hell.
The coral reefs that surround it are some of the healthiest in the Atlantic. And they’re dying. They’re dying in so many different ways, from so many different causes, it’s hard to imagine how they could survive, and without them, what the oceans might look like. read more…
Nether’s World
When the police cruiser approaches, Nether doesn’t run and he doesn’t hide the bucket of glue at his feet. He used to put up his pieces under cover of darkness, but the police never harassed him, so he switched to daylight hours, which he prefers. It gives him a chance to chat to the neighbors while he works. Some people call what he does vandalism. Nether, nom de guerre of one of Baltimore’s most visible street artists, calls it a “site-specific installation.” The streets are Nether’s gallery, his muse, his subject, his canvas and his artistic statement. read more…
Canary
A month later it might have been a tulip poplar leaf in a dying burst of brilliance on the driveway. read more…
‘Out of the Storm’
On a hillside below Catoctin Mountain, worshippers walk through morning sunlight between a wood frame building and a small white clapboard church with a chimney, a steeple and a cross on the roof.
They pass a cemetery no bigger than a garden patch where marked headstones date to 1894 and unmarked ones likely date back farther, to a time when the forefathers of today’s congregation, men and women who were born slaves and died free, founded the church that still stands here in a rural area south of Frederick once known as Mountville. read more…
A Better Pill to Swallow
What if everything we thought we knew about treating depression was wrong?
What if the phalanx of antidepressants we’ve developed over the past four decades with optimistic names full of X’s and Z’s—Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil—was missing the mark?
What if there was a new treatment that could change our lives? That could enable those of us suffering from depression to stop swallowing that bitter pill every morning? That could undo the ravages not only of depression but of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and the downhill slide of ordinary aging?
What if there was a drug that all of us might take someday? read more…
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david@davidmfrey.com
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