Culture

Losing Las Vegas

by Matt Wray | October 30, 2010 | Fall 2010

Promises of exuberance and excess no longer appeal to a sobered American public. This has left Las Vegas struggling to reinvent its image.

More from Matt Wray

Las Vegas: The Suicide Capital Of America, All Things Considered.
Las Vegas a Boomtown for Suicide, in Miller-McCune.

Neon Boneyard, Photos by Matt Wray

Further Reading

Futrell, Robert, Barbara Brents, & Christie Matson. Las Vegas metropolitan area social survey 2010 highlights, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Bourgois, Phillippe and Jeff Schonberg. 2010. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Desmond, Matthew. 2007. On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1967. “Where the Action Is.” In Interaction Rituals. New York: Anchor Books.

Lears, Jackson. 2003. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Penguin.

Lyng, Stephen. 1990. “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking.” American Journal of Sociology. 95:4: 851-886.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. 2010. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Volberg, Rachel and Matt Wray. 2007. “Legal Gambling and Problem Gambling as Mechanisms of Social Domination? Some Considerations for Future Research.” American Behavioral Scientist 51:1 (September).

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from New York to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Author

Matt Wray is in the sociology department at Temple University. writing a book about the ecological determinants of suicide in Las Vegas, tentatively titled Death in Vegas: Suicide and Self-Destruction in the Neon Metropolis.