Lost Vegas

In this dispatch for Slate, Luke Winkie returns to Sin City to see firsthand why Last Vegas seems to be in decline. He visits casinos, plays at the tables, and talks with people on the Strip to show what has changed. Who is Vegas for now? Who’s winning, and who’s hurting? Winkie’s own love affair with the city began a decade ago, when he stretched $200 into a euphoric weekend fueled by gambling and free cocktails. On this trip, he tries to retrace those steps—but finds that $200 doesn’t go nearly as far.

But what’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem. Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.