The first urbanists were recorded in the pages of Genesis: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” But God struck down the Tower of Babel and cursed his people to rely on Google Translate forever.

Despite this false start, the dream of building a great new city continues to this day, even in developed nations like the United States, where we already have a lot of them. We start new companies, new schools, new neighborhoods all the time. Why not a new San Francisco, Boston, or Miami? The yearning for a blank slate crosses the ideological spectrum, touching socialists, antidevelopment activists, curious policy makers, and, most recently, Silicon Valley investors attempting to build a city from scratch—among them Marc Andreessen, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Moritz, Nat Friedman, and Laurene Powell Jobs (who is also the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic).

And they’re not just dreaming big or tweeting. As The New York Times reported in August, they’re backing California Forever, the parent company of Flannery Associates, which has acquired nearly 60,000 acres in Solano County, California, between San Francisco and Sacramento. That’s a lot of land—roughly twice the size of San Francisco or Boston, and slightly larger than Seattle. Housing developments crop up all the time, of course, and suburbs glom on to existing metropolitan areas. California Forever has something else in mind: a top-down community with brand-new infrastructure, where tens of thousands would live and, most important for the company’s vision, also work and play. It’s not your grandfather’s suburban development.  

[From the July/August 2023 Issue: Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis]

“We’ve gotten into a situation where it’s completely acceptable to talk about inventing general artificial intelligence, and that’s something we’ve accepted is going to happen, but it’s not possible to build a new town where people can buy homes,” Jan Sramek, the founder and CEO of California Forever, told me. (The comparison reveals more about his social environment than anything else; it is not commonly accepted that AGI is “going to happen.”)

But building a new city is hard, and this most recent push to do so—unlike with recent gains in AI—doesn’t reflect an exciting breakthrough in America’s technological, political, or financial capacity. Rather, it reflects an abiding frustration with the ridiculously sluggish process of building housing in America’s most productive cities and suburbs. The dream of a new San Francisco is, then, rooted in the nightmare that the old one may be past saving.

Details about the new proposed city in Solano County are hard to come by, but sketches on California Forever’s website portray an idyllic town, foregrounded by open space and densely built with multiple housing types. Windmills turn in the background. The website reads: “Our vision for walkable neighborhoods, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, good jobs and a healthy environment is not about reinventing the wheel, but rather going back to the basics that were once the norm across America.”

This project has its advantages: The lack of urban or suburban development in the region means an absence of traditional groups that might fight against neighborhood change. Because California Forever has acquired so much land, local officials have a strong incentive to work with Sramek to prevent collapsing land values if his project fails. And Sramek is already considering ways to sweeten the deal for existing residents; he says one idea is “setting up a fund that would provide down-payment assistance for buying homes in the new community, which would only be accessible to current residents of Solano County.”

But financing urban infrastructure is exceedingly expensive. “Organic” cities, in which firms and workers agglomerate and then begin to demand that governments finance infrastructure, have a preassembled tax base. If you try to build the infrastructure first, paying for it becomes tricky.

Alain Bertaud, a former principal urban planner at the World Bank and an expert on urban development, told me: “A new city, especially a large one … has a problem of cash flow.” The city can’t raise taxes to build schools and hire teachers, for instance, but it needs to build schools and hire teachers before parents are willing to move—and be taxed—there. “If you look back to [recent] history … the only large new cities were new capitals like Brasilia, Chandigarh, Canberra, [where] the cash flow is not a problem [because] you have the taxpayers of the entire country paying for the cost.”

Thinking of cities as mere infrastructure is a categorical mistake. New York City is not the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge; London is not the tube; and Levittown, New York—America’s quintessential “first” suburb—is not its single-family homes. Infrastructure follows people, not the other way around. “You don’t go to a new city because the sewer system is fantastically efficient,” Bertaud said.

In general, the superstar cities we have today were not preselected from above; they were chosen by millions of workers in search of economic opportunity: Los Angeles (oil); San Francisco (gold); Boston (a port, academia); Seattle (lumber, aircraft, tech); New York City (a port, finance). Granted, workers tend to follow firms that follow transportation networks, which themselves are sometimes functions of state investments, but the principle is sound: Cities are people.

When people are choosing where to live, that decision is almost wholly dominated by job availability. What that means is people attract people. It’s a virtuous cycle in which people who move have kids and want teachers and day-care providers and taxi drivers and nurses, and those people want restaurant workers and iPhone-repair specialists, and so on. (Within a job market or when choosing between two equally promising job markets, people regularly consider the quality of life.)

But what if Sramek and his backers aren’t really building a new city after all, just a commuter suburb far away from the inner core? That’s what the pro-housing activist Jordan Grimes thinks is happening; he told the San Francisco Chronicle the project was “sprawl with a prettier face and prettier name.” Solano’s population has a lot of commuters already. Census data from 2016 to 2020 indicated that of the roughly 207,000 workers who lived in Solano, more than 40 percent commuted to another county. Compare that with San Francisco, where of its nearly 510,000 workers, a bit more than 20 percent commuted to another county.

I asked Sramek: Is he truly looking to build a city with its own job market, where residents will be responsible for policing, fire services, parks and recreation, wastewater, libraries? Or is he looking to develop housing, with some space for retail, restaurants, and other cultural amenities? “This is one of those issues that’s very open for community input,” he told me. “We do think that eventually this would become an incorporated city that does provide many of those services.”

Sramek isn’t a developer, and his investors are not the sort of people who hope that their hundreds of millions of dollars go into the construction of a few thousand single-family homes. Someone close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it freely, told me the aspiration is to prove to the rest of the world what’s possible in America: We can build an attractive, dense, and climate-friendly metropolis, and we can do it quickly. The source also suggested that a big Silicon Valley player might one day move its offices to the area. (I reached out to Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Friedman, and Powell Jobs. They declined to comment.)

Either way, new city or new sprawl, this project is going to run headfirst into the politics of development. Right now, the land is zoned largely for agricultural use. The county holds that changing the current designation to accommodate high-density urban infrastructure will require a ballot measure. Sramek told me he might try to put the question to voters as early as November 2024, but victory is far from assured.

According to some local officials, Flannery Associates alienated the local community by refusing to announce its intentions before it began acquiring land. (Sramek argues that doing so would have made land values skyrocket.) Congressional representatives alerted the Treasury Department, worried that foreign investors were buying up real estate for nefarious purposes. They noted that an Air Force base is nearby. “I will tell you they have poisoned the well,” John Garamendi, who represents a large part of Solano County, told me. “There’s no goodwill. Five years of total secrecy? Five years of not communicating with [local officials]?”

The process of building a city, difficult as it is, seems remotely rational only because trying to build within cities drives people mad.  

Sramek and his director of planning, Gabriel Metcalf, who once ran the influential San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, say the idea for a new city came to them after deciding that working on incremental reforms would never yield the housing needed to make a dent in the overall housing shortage. As of now, the country needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine, a formidable challenge even if America’s political and legal systems were focused on meeting it—which, unfortunately, most of them are not. Instead of directing a building boom, states still devolve permitting decisions down to the hyperlocal level, where the default is to ban smaller, more affordable homes and where opposition from just a few people can quash desperately needed construction.

“It’s always hard to come to an existing place and try to change it very profoundly,” Sramek told me, when I asked him why he wasn’t focused on building in established cities.

“I spent my whole career on the infill side,” Metcalf told me. (Infill development is building on underutilized land within existing development patterns, such as turning a parking lot into a few townhomes.) “I believe in that completely, but we are only delivering a small fraction of what we need … Whether it’s trying to build a high-speed rail line or renewable-energy transmission line or high-density infill housing, there is a vetocracy in place that across America makes it incredibly difficult and slow to build the things we need to build.” (Funnily enough, that vetocracy includes one of the investors in the Solano County project: Andreessen. I reported last year that he co-signed a letter with his wife opposing new development in the wealthy town of Atherton.)

The socialist writer Nathan J. Robinson has also issued a call to build new cities, and he, too, seems to have given up on the idea of reforming existing places: “​​The exciting thing about building new cities from scratch is that it allows you to avoid the mistakes that are made in the ‘organic’ (i.e., market-built) city … A new city can avoid all of the disastrous errors that gave us the ugly suburban wastelands that constitute so much of contemporary ‘development.’”

American cities and suburbs have earned Sramek’s fatalism. And certainly, building a walkable, thriving new town in Solano County would be positive for anyone who found a home they loved there. But Sramek and his backers want to set an example, and good examples should be replicable. This one isn’t. Sites like Solano County—near bustling job centers that lack residential development—are few and far between.

Two types of places need a development boom: those that already have lots of people living in them, like Boston or Miami, and those that are growing quickly, like Georgetown, Texas, near Austin. To the extent they’re failing to build, it’s not because they lack inspiration. They’re failing because the politics are genuinely thorny. Many people oppose new development on ideological grounds, or because they think it’s a nuisance, or because they deny the existence of a housing shortage at all, or even because they believe it interferes with other priorities.

[Jerusalem Demsas: California isn’t special]

A new city, moreover, won’t necessarily escape these antidevelopment pressures in the future. It might expand for a while, but it will eventually face the same old problem: residents who don’t want change. Even in Manhattan, a place where residents are surrounded by high-density housing and cultural amenities that come from density, people regularly oppose new housing, new transit, and even new dumpsters.

Solving the housing crisis doesn’t require inventing new places for people to go; it requires big cities to embrace growth, as they did in the past, and smaller cities to accept change. Again, cities are people, and people are moving to Maricopa, Arizona, in the suburbs of Phoenix, and Santa Cruz, California, south of San Jose. These places may not feel ready to accommodate newcomers, but some will have to rise to the occasion.

What America needs isn’t proof that it can build new cities, but that it can fix its existing ones.

There’s an old saying that sometimes it is more important for the law to be certain than to be right. Certainty allows people to plan their actions knowing what the rules are going to be.

Nowhere is this principle more urgent than when it comes to the question of whether Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results have disqualified him from becoming president again. As cases raising the question have begun working their way through the courts in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere, the country needs the Supreme Court to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Eminent constitutional-law scholars and judges, both conservative and liberal, have made strong cases that Trump is disqualified from being president again under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars from office those who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Some of those scholars are professed originalists—as are many of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices—and to make their cases, they have analyzed what they say is the “original public meaning” of this provision. Other conservative and liberal scholars have concluded otherwise about the clause’s meaning, or at least raised serious doubts about whether and how these provisions apply to Trump.

Among the unresolved issues are whether the disqualification provision applies to those who formerly served as president, rather than in some other office; whether Congress must pass legislation authorizing the Department of Justice to pursue a civil lawsuit in order to bar Trump; whether Trump “engaged” in “insurrection” or “rebellion” or at least gave “aid or comfort” to “the enemies thereof.” Unsurprisingly, given that this provision emerged in response to the Civil War in the 1860s, there is virtually no modern case law fully resolving these issues, and many enormous questions remain on which reasonable minds disagree—for example, who would enforce this provision, and how.

Those are the legal questions. The political questions are, in some ways, even more complicated, and at least as contested. If Trump is disqualified on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, some believe that this would become a regular feature of nasty American politics. Others worry that significant social unrest would result if the leading candidate for one of the country’s major political parties were to be disqualified from running for office rather than giving voters the final say on the issue.

[David Frum: The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy]

All of these questions, however, are somewhat beside the point. This is not merely an academic exercise. Trump, right now, is already being challenged as constitutionally disqualified, and these issues are going to have to be resolved, sooner or later. My point is that sooner is much better than later.

A number of legal doctrines could lead courts to kick this issue down the road for some time. Maybe the provision applies not to primaries, but only to candidates in a general election. Maybe voters don’t have standing to sue, because they can’t show a particularized injury. Maybe this is a political question to be decided by the political branches, such as Congress, rather than by the judiciary.

But courts should not dally, because judicial delay could result in disaster. Imagine this scenario: Election officials and courts take different positions on whether Trump’s name can appear on the ballot in 2024. The Supreme Court refuses to get involved, citing one of these doctrines for avoiding assessing the case’s merits. Trump appears to win in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. Democrats control Congress, and when January 6, 2025, arrives and it is time to certify the vote, Democrats say that Trump is ineligible to hold office, and he cannot serve.

As I and my co-authors argue in our report on how to have a fair and legitimate election in 2024, such a scenario raises the possibility of major postelection unrest. The country would have one political party disqualifying the candidate of the other party from serving—after that candidate has apparently won the results of a fair election.

The Supreme Court is the only institution that can definitively say what the law is in this case, and it should not wait once a case reaches its doorstep. Think of Republican voters and candidates soon to participate in the primary process. They, and everyone else, deserve to know whether the leading candidate is actually eligible to serve in office.

A Supreme Court decision to disqualify Trump from the ballot would obviate the need for Congress to resolve the question on January 6. Trump would not be allowed to run. In contrast, a judicial decision that Trump is not disqualified would make it very difficult politically for Democrats in Congress to try to reject Trump anyway after a 2024 victory.

[J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe: The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again]

How the Supreme Court would—or should—resolve the question of Trump’s disqualification on the merits is far from clear. There is no question that Trump tried to subvert the results of the 2020 election, using pressure, lies, and even the prospect for violence to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump so far has faced no accountability for his actions: The Senate did not muster the two-thirds vote in 2021 to convict him after his second impeachment, a step that could have led to his disqualification under Congress’s impeachment-related powers. The federal and Georgia cases against Trump for his alleged election interference may yet go to trial, but whether verdicts will ever be reached is far from certain. In any event, even a guilty verdict would not disqualify Trump. If there is going to be any accountability for Trump’s actions in 2020, it might have to come from this disqualification provision. A reading of the Fourteenth Amendment in this way helps protect our democracy.

But serious legal questions continue to dog any use of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. My general view is that to avoid the overall criminalization of politics, reserve prosecuting politicians for instances when both the law and the facts are clear; marginal cases are best left to other remedies. Disqualification, of course, is not a criminal procedure, but borrowing this principle from the criminal context recommends caution here too. In close cases, the voters should get to decide at the ballot box.

The pressure to disqualify Trump is only going to grow until there’s a final resolution of the question. When this issue reaches the Supreme Court, the country will need the Court to decisively resolve it—or risk chaos later on.

A Colorado woman was handcuffed and placed in police car that was then hit by a freight train.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Eminent legal scholars think the Constitution makes Donald Trump ineligible for office; critics of the idea worry that using the Fourteenth Amendment will create an uncontrollable political weapon.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Explore The Atlantic’s guide to privacy. America gave up on the best home technology there is. Three myths and four truths about how to get happier

A Constitutional Dilemma

For weeks, legal scholars and public intellectuals have been debating whether Donald Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again. Six voters in Colorado filed a lawsuit last week that will test this theory. If you’re confused, or uncertain whether this is a good idea, join the club: I change my mind about it roughly once every 12 hours.

Let’s review some basic civics. Here’s Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1866:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

At the time, the section’s intention was to prevent the secessionists of the Civil War from walking right back into power in the states where they’d just been defeated. Confederate states were required to ratify this amendment as a condition for regaining representation in the American legislature, and it was finally ratified in the summer of 1868.

Two of America’s great legal minds, the retired conservative federal judge Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence Tribe, have argued that Section 3 automatically renders Trump ineligible for office. “The clause,” they wrote in The Atlantic last month, “was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”

January 6 was a violent attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, for which many people have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Many more have gone to prison for their actions at the Capitol that day. And they were all there at the urging of Donald Trump, who is now under criminal indictment for multiple felonies stemming from this attempt to subvert American democracy.

I am convinced by this reasoning. Case closed. Take Trump’s name off the ballots.

Well … not so fast. My friend and colleague David Frum believes that all of this talk about using the Fourteenth Amendment is “a fantasy.” David’s argument is that the amendment is, if not an anachronism, a peculiar part of our Constitution whose meaning was clear in 1866 but whose relevance has passed. He warns us not to think of Section 3 as a quick and easy “cheat code” that can obviate Trump’s renomination.

David raises some important practical questions. For one thing, who will make the determination that January 6 was “an insurrection or rebellion”? I think it was, but until things change in this country, The Tom Nichols Institute of Constitutional Adjudication has no power to make its very sensible rulings stick as a matter of law. (Also, I should perhaps point out that Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four indictments.)

Luttig and Tribe assert that Section 3 does not explicitly require such convictions or determinations, but that’s because in 1866 the “rebellion” was obviously the Civil War and the Union Army, as the local authority in the rebellious states, made the on-site determination of who could run for office. David’s correct to predict that invalidating Trump’s candidacy based on “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection” would plunge the country into eternal litigation about what, exactly, all those words mean.

Likewise, how would Trump actually be removed from the election? There is no single national “ballot”; Democratic secretaries of state would have to strike his name from their state ballots, after which Joe Biden would win the Electoral College. But as David writes, Biden would only be “kind of” reelected, in a result that nearly half the country would view as illegitimate. “The rage and chaos that would follow,” he warns, “are beyond imagining.”

David makes a political point that is also worth at least some concern. “If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as ‘aid and comfort’ to enemies of the United States.”

Lest anyone think Republicans would have enough sense to forgo weaponizing important parts of the U.S. Constitution merely for trollish political theater, let us note that as of this morning, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has ordered up an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This effort will likely backfire on Republicans (if it even gets out of committee), as would attempts to remove Democrats from ballots on a Section 3 objection. But clogging the courts with inane Republican lawsuits would be another deep bruise on the American constitutional system of government.

What a killjoy. Because after reviewing his arguments, I now agree with David.

By temperament, I was overall more inclined to agree with David’s prudential arguments anyway. But Luttig and Tribe make a simple and forceful point that still sticks in my teeth: The Constitution says what it says, and it doesn’t stop saying it just because enforcing it would be hard to do or because bad actors will use it for political mischief.

Indeed, fidelity to the Constitution should be the core of principled opposition to Donald Trump’s continued presence in our public life. Of course, he’s unfit for office for many reasons; he’s vulgar and ignorant and narcissistic, but so are many other people who have made their way into elected office. The singular danger that unites so many of Trump’s opponents, however, is that he has shown himself to be an avowed enemy of democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States. How can we flinch now?

And yet I, too, am hesitant to open a legal Pandora’s box. It might not be constitutionally pure to worry about things such as protracted lawsuits and cheap Republican stunts, but the nature of our current political troubles demands a decisive and final answer to Trump’s attempts to destroy the Constitution, and here David makes the strongest of all possible points: The only sure way to stop Trump is with a resounding and undeniable defeat at the ballot box.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy

Today’s News

Five former Memphis police officers have been indicted on federal criminal charges in connection with Tyre Nichols’s death. At least 5,000 people are dead and thousands more are believed to be missing after severe flooding and dam collapses in Libya. The United States and Iran are moving forward with a prisoner-swap deal. Five American citizens will be released in exchange for five Iranian citizens and the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on whether racial “color-blindness” is possible.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Vartika Sharma. Sources: Steve Pyke / Getty; Harry Borden / Contour by Getty.

From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist

By Helen Lewis

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

America has a private-beach problem. The answer to Starlink is more Starlinks. Harriet Tubman, outdoorswoman

Culture Break

Millennium Images / GalleryStock

Read. In her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff has written a new gospel.

Listen. On her sophomore album, Guts, Olivia Rodrigo gets bolder and funner.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I was born at the dawn of the 1960s, and I came of age in the 1970s. I am too young to remember much of the ’60s—well, except that I was completely nuts about the original Batman TV series—and the less said about the ’70s, the better. My time was the ’80s: MTV, new wave, Hill Street Blues and Cheers on television, Stripes and Ghostbusters at the theater. And Ronald Reagan—for whom I voted, but we’re all friends here, so let’s not open that can of worms.

That’s why it’s been such a joy to discover a TV show I somehow missed when it came out in 2014: Red Oaks, a coming-of-age series whose first of three seasons is set in 1985. The title refers to a Jewish country club in New Jersey, where young David Meyers works as an assistant tennis pro while trying to figure out his life. It’s funny, and it’s sweet without being cloying, especially when Paul Reiser, as the club president, counteracts the sugar with desert-dry sarcasm. The musical choices are perfect 1980s archeology: Love and Rockets, Culture Club, Roxy Music, and even a one-hit wonder from Roger Hodgson that I thought no one remembered but me.

I haven’t finished the series yet, but I’m taking my time. I was just a shade older than David Meyers and his friends in 1985, and I’m enjoying revisiting some good years back there.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

On an overcast spring morning in 2012, Federica Bertocchini was tending to her honeybees close to where she lived in Santander, on Spain’s picturesque northern coast. One of the honeycombs “was plagued with worms,” says the amateur apiarist, referring to the pesky larvae of wax moths,  which have a voracious—and destructive—appetite.

Bertocchini picked out the worms, placed them in a plastic bag, and carried on with her beekeeping chores. When she retrieved the bag a few hours later, she noticed something strange: It was full of tiny holes.

The scientist’s interest was piqued. Had the hungry worms simply chewed up the plastic, or had they changed its chemical makeup too? Quick tests in her lab confirmed, surprisingly, the latter: Something in the worms’ saliva had degraded the plastic. “From that point, the research started,” says Bertocchini, a developmental biologist formerly with the Spanish National Research Council.

She is now a co-founder of Plasticentropy, one of the numerous start-ups and research groups that have sprouted in recent years seeking bio-inspired means to recycle plastic. This biological recycling, as it’s called, could offer more effective and environmentally friendly alternatives to some of today’s problem-riddled recycling methods.

The effort has scientists scouring landfills, auto-wrecking yards, and other sites teeming with plastic pollution in search of organisms that might be able to break down plastic into its component pieces. By taking these microbes and enhancing their polymer-munching abilities in the lab, scientists hope to find an efficient way to reclaim the building blocks of plastics. They would then use these subunits to manufacture new materials, thus creating an “infinite recycling” loop.

It’s early days, and finding enzymes fit for the task is just a first step. But biological recycling could be a valuable tool for fighting the ever-growing plastics problem. “There are groups all over the world working on this—hundreds of groups, thousands of scientists. It’s really quite amazing,” says the structural biologist John McGeehan, a plastics-deconstruction consultant who specializes in the discovery and engineering of enzymes for plastic recycling.

These efforts could not come soon enough. Ever since plastics manufacturing began in earnest in the 1940s, production has soared. Estimates suggest that we make close to 507 million tons of plastic annually, equivalent to the weight of roughly 3.4 million blue whales.

Unfortunately, most of that plastic ends up burned, buried in landfills, or dumped in the environment. It’s no wonder that plastic has penetrated our planet—from the deep oceans to both poles; it even comes down in the rain. It’s also in our bodies; traces have been reported in placentas, breast milk, and human blood. The use and disposal of plastics has been linked with several health and environmental issues.

Despite these problems, demand remains unabated, with production forecast to hit more than 1,200 million tons by 2050. That’s largely because plastics are hard to substitute—the material is a manufacturer’s delight: lightweight and easy to shape, capable of being imbued with near-endless properties.

Given that replacing all plastics isn’t realistic, a next-best option could be making less virgin material from fossil fuels and recapturing more of what already exists. In other words, raising global plastic-recycling rates from their present dismal figure of roughly 9 percent.

The reasons for that low rate are plentiful: Plastic is tough to break down, it can absorb harmful chemicals in the recycling process, and there are numerous plastic types, each with its own composition, chemical additives, and colorants. Many of these types cannot be recycled together.

“We have this major plastics-circularity problem,” says Johan Kers, a synthetic biologist and co-founder of the Oregon-based enzymatic recycling company Birch Biosciences. “We can recycle aluminum, we can recycle paper, but we cannot, to save our lives, do a good job of recycling plastic.”

[Read: The future of recycling is Sorty McSortface]

Biological recycling could put a dent in the plastics problem. It involves using enzymes—the workhorses of biochemistry that speed up reactions—to break down plastic polymers into their basic component parts, called monomers. These monomers can then be used to make new plastics. “The nice thing about enzymes is you get the building blocks back,” says McGeehan. “That’s potentially an infinite process, so it’s really attractive.” This approach could turn used plastics into a valuable resource, instead of a source of waste, says Ting Xu, a polymer scientist at UC Berkeley who co-authored an overview of biological-synthetic hybrid materials in the 2013 Annual Review of Physical Chemistry.

Research on plastic-eating enzymes goes back to at least the 1970s, but the field was reinvigorated in 2016, when a team of Japanese scientists published a landmark paper in Science describing a new strain of plastic-eating bacteria. Led by Kohei Oda, a microbiologist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, the team found that the microbe Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 can use PET plastic—a polymer widely used in beverage bottles and fibers—as its major energy and food source.

The researchers came across the microbe in some scooped-up sediment when they were painstakingly sifting through 250 environmental samples they had collected from a bottle-recycling factory just outside Osaka. Further testing revealed that I. sakaiensis could almost fully break down PET within six weeks.

Since then, scientists have discovered plastic-eating microbes at various sites around the world, including a compost heap at a cemetery in Leipzig, Germany; a waste-disposal site in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad; and two beaches in Chania, Greece. A large-scale analysis of more than 200 million genes found in free-floating DNA in environments including the oceans, Arctic tundra topsoil, savannas, and various forests turned up 30,000 different enzymes with plastic-degrading potential, a team reported in 2021.

Discovering enzymes, however, is only the start. Scientists typically have to tweak them to perform better. For example, McGeehan, along with colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado and elsewhere, engineered two enzymes responsible for the plastic-eating abilities of I. sakaiensis to dial up their performance and then linked them, creating an enzyme cocktail that can break down PET six times quicker than previously possible.

Scientists are also using artificial intelligence to strengthen desirable attributes in the enzymes that depolymerize plastics quicker, are less picky about target substrates, and can withstand a wider range of temperatures.

Early data suggest that biological recycling could have a smaller carbon footprint than making plastics anew. For example, using enzymes to break down PET to get one of its monomers, terephthalic acid (TPA), cut greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 43 percent compared with making TPA from scratch, according to a 2021 estimate.

Of course, PET is just one of many kinds of plastic—they are generally divided into seven or more classes, depending on factors like their chemical structure. On one end of the scale sit plastics with mixed-carbon backbones—polymers with a central spine comprising carbon interlaced with other atoms such as oxygen and nitrogen. For now, these plastics are most suited to biological recycling, largely because the enzymes available can chew through the type of chemical bond in that mixed-carbon backbone. It’s “a kind of Achilles’ heel” for the material, says Andy Pickford, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Portsmouth, in the United Kingdom.

PETs have such a backbone—carbon interlaced with oxygen. Commonly found in textiles and soda bottles and accounting for roughly one-fifth of plastics created every year, PETs are a popular first target among biological recyclers and the closest to implementation at a commercial scale. The French firm Carbios, for example, plans to open a bio-recycling plant in northeastern France in 2025, with the aim of recycling 50,000 tons of PET waste annually.

The company is using an enzyme first identified in a pile of compost that researchers then modified to enhance its PET-bond-breaking ability and to withstand the higher temperatures at which the plastic becomes molten and soft. The enzyme can depolymerize 90 percent of PET in 10 hours, scientists from Carbios and its academic partner, the Toulouse Biotechnology Institute, reported in Nature in 2020. Another start-up, Australia-based Samsara Eco, plans to launch a 22,000-ton facility in Melbourne that will also focus on PET.

Plastics with a chemical makeup similar to PET’s—the polyamides and polyurethanes—are also promising targets for enzymatic recycling, as they are intrinsically susceptible to breakdown by enzymes, says Pickford, whose team at Portsmouth works on all three plastic types. In addition to PET, Samsara now works on nylon, a type of synthetic polyamide commonly found in fabrics and textiles. In May, the firm announced a partnership with the popular athletic brand Lululemon to produce “the world’s first infinitely recycled” nylon and polyester apparel from discarded clothes.

Researchers are also investigating polyurethanes, which comprise roughly 10 percent, or 28 million tons, of the global plastics pie and are common in foams such as furniture cushions and in diapers, sponges, and sneakers. Various microbes can degrade some kinds of polyurethanes and Kers’s team at Birch Biosciences has zeroed in on some 50 different polyurethane-eating enzymes for testing, but the polymers are a structurally diverse group and will probably require diverse strategies.

Although enzymatic recycling looks promising for plastics with mixed backbones, the outlook isn’t as rosy for those at the other end of the scale: plastics with backbones of pure carbon. This is an eclectic group that includes polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polystyrene, and polyethylene, which is used to make the ubiquitous plastic bag. Biological recycling of these plastics is far more challenging, says Pickford. “They’re kind of greasy, in a way, for enzymes. There’s not really much for an enzyme to grab hold of.”

[Read: Compostable plastic is garbage]

Still, some scientists—among them, Spain’s Bertocchini—are working on these recalcitrant plastics. “For some reason, I fixed on plastic bags, which are polyethylene-based,” she says. Also commonly used in food-packaging film and takeout containers, polyethylene is by far the largest class of plastics manufactured today, accounting for more than 25 percent of the market. A decade on from their serendipitous discovery, Bertocchini and her team at Plasticentropy have identified the plastic-degrading enzymes in wax-worm saliva—and have named them Demetra and Ceres. The enzymes degrade polyethylene within a matter of hours at room temperature by introducing oxygen into the carbon backbone.

Enzymes found in insects may hold the key for these tougher plastics. Chris Rinke, a microbiologist at the University of Queensland, in Australia, who works on polystyrene (commonly found in takeout-food containers and disposable cutlery), is among the scientists looking at insect larvae, whose tough mouthparts make them “very good at chewing through things” and breaking them down into smaller particles. “Then the microbes in the guts take it from there,” Rinke says.

Rinke came across the larvae of a beetle called Zophobas morio—dubbed the Superworm—that could break down polystyrene via a twofold process: mechanically shredding the plastic into smaller pieces, which “ages” it by introducing oxygen atoms, and then depolymerizing those bits using special bacterial gut enzymes that have yet to be identified.

But some experts are less optimistic about the outlook for biological recycling—especially for plastics with harder-to-break backbones. “I’ve yet to be convinced that polyolefins like polyethylene and polypropylene and PVC will ever be realistic targets for enzymatic recycling at scale,” says Pickford. “There have been some interesting observations, but converting those into an industrial process is going to be extremely difficult. I hope I’m wrong.”

There are hints of progress for PVC, but the brittle plastic, along with its cousins PVA and polylactic acid (PLA), remains largely unconquerable by enzymes. For such cases, it might be more feasible to shift toward creating new plastics that are recyclable, says Pickford.

Yet the findings keep coming: In 2020, a team from South Korea reported on a gut bacterium that conferred polystyrene-digesting abilities to the larvae of a black beetle called Plesiophthalmus davidis. Another group reported finding two cold-adapted fungal strains—Lachnellula and Neodevriesia, isolated from alpine soil and the Arctic shore, respectively—that could break down certain types of biodegradable plastic, including PLA.

Still, enzymes are only part of the battle. It’s unclear how easy it would be to scale up processes that harness these enzymes and what that scaled-up environmental footprint might look like.

“I think there’s never going to be one solution to all this,” says Vanessa Vongsouthi, the research founder and head of protein engineering at Samsara Eco. “We have to work on advanced recycling, but in addition to that, policy, product redesign, reuse, and even elimination … are all part of the bigger picture.”

Some policy changes are in the works. The United Nations is set to create a legally binding global plastic-pollution treaty in 2024. It is expected to introduce new rules for production and the design of plastic products to make recycling easier, among other measures. And in the following year, laws mandating that 25 percent of the material in plastic containers and beverage bottles be recycled plastic will come into effect in Washington, California, and the European Union. But without additional changes and incentives, those efforts may be a drop in the bucket. As long as virgin plastic remains cheap, biological enzymes might not be able to compete.

“The main problem is cost,” says McGeehan. “Fossil-derived plastics are really cheap because they’re made at huge scale on a global market that’s very mature.” It also doesn’t help that some governments still encourage producing plastics in this way, he says. “We need to really switch our thinking there and start incentivizing the PET or the other biodegradable processes in the way that the oil and gas industry benefited from in the past.”

McGeehan remains optimistic that once the technology for biological recycling improves, it will quickly become cost-efficient enough to compete with virgin plastic. Until then, researchers like Bertocchini will keep plugging away. She gave up her beloved beehives when she moved to Madrid in 2019, but today continues to expand her firm’s enzyme portfolio with moth and butterfly larvae. Enzymes will not solve the entire plastics problem, she says—“but this is a start.”

The Bass Pro Shops is bigger than you think it will be. This is true of all of the outdoorsy retailer’s locations, but it’s especially true of the one retrofitted into a 32-story metal pyramid on the banks of the Mississippi River. Located in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, the mammoth structure once held an arena for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. Now it houses the largest Bass Pro Shops in the world, a hunting-, fishing-, and camping-gear store that has been merchandised with Disney-level production values and expanded to encompass a hotel with more than 100 rooms, a wild-game-themed outpost of the Wahlburgers restaurant chain, several enormous lake sturgeon swimming in shallow pools between departments, and at least three live alligators, among other things.

At 535,000 square feet of retail space, this Bass Pro is almost five times the size of the average Walmart. But even that number doesn’t quite capture its almost farcical grandeur. I visited twice last week on a four-day bachelor-party excursion (long story)—once for a DJ night on the pyramid’s third-floor terrace (again, long story), and once more just to wander around the sales floor, which is full of man-made streams and faux cypress trees dripping with decorative Spanish moss. The store’s motif is “lost wilderness,” but I found that it conjured something even more distant: the old-school department store.

Around the turn of the previous century, well-stocked, well-staffed commercial cathedrals sprang up in American cities, delighting a new consumer class. Stores such as Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, and Marshall Field’s not only sold stuff but also positioned themselves as centers of city life, with in-house restaurants, lavish concerts and entertainment, even free child care. Today, most of these stores no longer exist. Those that persist lost the capacity to awe a long time ago, withered down to unkempt, sparsely staffed caverns of clothing racks and scuffed floors.

The department-store dinosaurs died out for a whole host of complex reasons: the rise of Walmart and Amazon, the economic decline of their middle-class customer base, ossified corporate management, private-equity strip-mining. The most recent tale that retailers have been spinning about their own demise is that of consumers’ widespread preference for online shopping. But that theory doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny, and lots of stores may have already doomed themselves by using it for too long as a pretense for quick-and-dirty expense slashing. As I wandered contentedly over the wooden-plank walkways in the Bass Pro’s fake forest, alongside crowds of shoppers with armfuls of soon-to-be purchases, it was hard to ignore one problem that retailers are loath to acknowledge: Going to a store that’s actually good at being a store is all too rare.

In the past few weeks, a handful of data points have emerged to bolster this notion. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that one bright spot remains in American commercial real estate, even as landlords and brokers try to figure out what can be done with the country’s surplus of office space: retail leases. Construction of new retail space bottomed out during the Great Recession and never really got back up to speed. But so far this year, about 1,000 more brick-and-mortar retail stores have opened nationwide than have closed, even with the loss of national chains such as Bed Bath & Beyond. Demand for shop space has stayed buoyant in spite of inflation and high interest rates. Some direct-to-consumer brands that originally forswore brick-and-mortar retail, such as Warby Parker and the bed-linens brand Parachute, have accelerated new store openings in the years since the pandemic’s peak. As it turns out, lots of people still want to try on new shoes or lie down on a new mattress in person.

[Read: You will miss Bed Bath & Beyond.]

As The Wall Street Journal notes, this spate of new openings isn’t evenly distributed. These new stores are disproportionately likely to have opened in modern or high-end malls and shopping centers in higher-income areas. In part, that’s likely because the math of building a pleasant store is just more likely to work out if you’re selling more expensive products. Consumers who are less price-sensitive can handle higher markups, and better margins mean more money sloshing around to ensure that stores always look good and are generously staffed with pleasant salespeople. On the higher end, sales require both the customers and the products to feel special.

You might not think of Bass Pro as a luxury store—its ubiquitous logo trucker hats cost a measly six bucks—but it functions under this logic as well. The Memphis store is a flagship just like grand Chanel or Louis Vuitton boutiques in the world’s fashion capitals: lavishly appointed and intended to serve as a marketing vehicle for the brand as a whole, whether or not the specific location is profitable. Bass Pro is a privately held company, so it’s difficult to determine whether any particular part of its business makes it into the black, but in a leaked 2016 presentation to lenders, the company listed 50 percent gross profit margins, and new megastores in Texas, Ohio, and Colorado are in the works. Lots of serious outdoor gear is very expensive (as is the less serious stuff for people in the suburbs cosplaying as outdoorsmen), and some stores also serve as dealerships for fishing boats, four-wheelers, and other sports vehicles. Many of the floor models on display alongside the sturgeon were priced well into the five figures. If you can’t afford one, you can still come in, look at the fish, buy a hat and a bag of store-brand saltwater taffy, and take a selfie on an ATV. (I speak from experience.)

At the low end, the math on well-run stores has gotten worse and worse with time. Companies push prices and expenses as low as possible, which means that stores tend to be understaffed, poorly merchandised, and disorganized. And at any price level, the charms and conveniences of in-person shopping have to be cultivated, which requires corporate oversight that actually understands and values the reasons that people like going out to shop in the first place—a rarer quality in high-level retail management than you might think. But the fact remains: More than 80 percent of retail purchases made in America are still made in person, and industry experts generally agree that that number won’t bottom out in the near future. If you want to sell as much stuff as possible, the internet alone will get you only so far. Eventually, you’ll still need stores, and you still need to find ways to entice people into them, even if you’re not going to invest in all of the bells and whistles.

[Read: American shoppers are a nightmare.]

The recently announced marriage of convenience between the fast-fashion elder statesman Forever 21 and the Chinese upstart Shein is one way to try to do that—and another data point in favor of physical retail’s staying power. Shein, which sells an enormous assortment of very cheap clothing and home goods that ship to American buyers directly from China, has stirred plenty of consumer interest in the U.S., but it doesn’t have any permanent stores in the country. As part of the deal, Shein will have the opportunity to stock its clothes in Forever 21 locations in the U.S., creating what’s called a “shop in shop.” (Forever 21 will also sell its wares on Shein’s website, but the implications of that are a story for another day.) This move has considerable upsides for both companies: Forever 21 has hundreds of stores across America, but the company has been struggling against more stylish and efficient foreign competitors, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Shein, on the other hand, has lots of teenage and 20-something fans and scads of ultracheap product, but it doesn’t have anywhere for Americans to interact with its clothes before they buy them. That’s a considerable roadblock to Shein’s continued expansion, because it has a reputation for poor quality and irregular fits. Shein’s temporary pop-up stores—an ever more common tactic—in the United States have been mobbed with shoppers.

People want to leave their house and go out into the world and do things. Concert tickets are in huge demand, hotels are full, flights are booked up, restaurant reservations are impossible to get. Long before the pandemic put so much of American life online, some retailers assumed that the internet would wipe out our need to buy things in person, and acted accordingly. But that was never going to be true, and the inadequacy of internet-based life has become screamingly clear for millions of people in the past few years. Now many of the stores that want those people’s business are going to need to figure out how to retrofit a genuinely good shopping experience into the real estate they’ve left languishing for years. Some of these locations are almost certainly too far gone. But if good merchandisers can put a theme-park-quality Bass Pro into a largely abandoned pyramid, they can probably do anything—as long as they have the budget for it.