In this week's episode of Scatterbrained from Mental Floss, John Green and the gang tell us about shopping malls: their history, purpose, features, and a lot of little things you never realized before. It's a fact-filled primer on shopping malls! There are also tidbits on the most famous department stores that anchored those malls, plus the small shops that exist nowhere else, and the restaurants that were designed just for malls. Shopping malls will never again be what they were in the 1980s and '90s, but they still exist, and their heyday spawned other forms of community shopping.