There have been a few changes to Tonopah in the almost two decades since apathy42's wu. For one thing, the McDonald's is gone; you have to go ninety miles up the road to Hawthorne for your Big Mac & fries now. No big loss; there's an A&W downtown, a Burger King and a Subway in the Chevron on the north side of town, and at least half a dozen restaurants scattered along US-95 (not 395, that's across the mountains in California) if you prefer less grease and more flavor in your food. One of them is a rather decent brewpub and barbecue joint, the Tonopah Brewing Company, where the meat is decently smoked (if you're Texan) and the house sauces are good, if you're from someplace less hardcore about that sort of thing.
Tonopah is still mainly a mining town, but the dominant mineral these days is lithium, not so much for treating depression but for making batteries for smartphones and electric cars. There's still silver being mined, too, but lithium is where most of the cash flows from. There are still people working at the Tonopah Test Range, but most of the people working on environmental cleanup or secret projects at the former Nevada Test Site (now renamed the Nevada National Security Site) live a lot closer to Mercury, because it's about a three-hour commute to the lone village in the National Security Site from Tonopah, and you'd be better off in Las Vegas or Pahrump, which are only an hour or less away.
Aside from mining, and the several attractions for tourists already mentioned in the previous wu, what else is going on in Tonopah? There's a decent town library, which is hooked up with a bunch of other rural libraries through the Nevada Library Consortium; there's an urgent care clinic which is pretty much the only medical facility for 90 miles in any direction*; and there are a bunch of county offices because this town, not the much more populous Pahrump, is the actual county seat of Nye County. The Mizpah Hotel is now open, and is a pretty luxurious place, as well as being haunted. Its restaurant, the Pittman Room, is very good. Across from the Mizpah is the Belvada Hotel, owned by the same folks and renovated to the same comfy standards. Someday I'll get up early enough to drive down and check out their coffee shop. Finally, one thing notable about Tonopah is that at 6,030 feet elevation and not being all lit up at night, you can get some great views of the moon, stars, and various satellites on a clear night, and we have a lot of clear nights out here.
Oh, speaking of the Lockheed F-117A stealth fighter But it's really an attack bomber! SHUT UP, there is a sizable boulder in front of the town offices next to the bank with "Home Of The Nighthawk" and a bas-relief of the plane carved on it. Spiffy.
*There used to be a hospital, but it was scammed into bankruptcy by some schmuck doctor from Texas before I got here. The town is working on reopening it, since otherwise your hospital choices are between the Mount Grant General Hospital (in Hawthorne) or the Inyo County Hospital in Bishop, California.