Risk! A short word that keeps the world exciting and dangerous and ultimately destroys us all. In these uncertain times, we pine for the totems of our simple past—like the risk of massive real estate bubbles.

What of the humble “department store,” a physical space in which humans used to peruse goods that they now purchase on Amazon? According to one new analysis, the only way for department stores to live is to die faster.

Here are more shots from inside the dead White Flint Mall. Muzak still plays where the people no longer do.

Malls that were once active but have since been abandoned ("dead malls") are fascinating relics of greed, consumerism, and our increasingly antiquated analog way of life that required actual motion through space to get the material possessions we don't need, per se, but covet. They're also creepy and kind of sad, if you think about the unrealized dreams of the people to tried to sell you that shit you didn't need. Dead malls are sweeping the nation in that agonizingly slow manner that dead things sweep.

"Are malls becoming extinct?" I'll say! And becoming, and becoming, and becoming...

The American mall is dying, and dying, and, let me check... yep, still dying. Not just big huge malls, but big-box stores, and strip malls, and everything else that consists of chain stores shaped like boxes, made out of plastic, selling crap. America, in other words. Now our national landscape is littered with the only thing worse than big box stores: empty big box stores. Hey, ho, is there any solution?

The death of the mall has been a meme long enough to have inspired an eponymous website, a documentary, and, with the onset of the recession, a slew of mall deathwatch trend stories. So...how much longer do these monstrosities have?