2026-06-14 20:00:00
Editor’s note, June 14, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on June 8, 2025.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.
My husband and I have a good relationship. We’re both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested.
Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She’s married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn’t know what her relationship agreements are with her husband.
I’m not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I’d like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don’t want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don’t have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don’t actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying “not now.”
My husband admitted that he’s hoping I will have a change of mind. I don’t want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don’t want to leave him I would feel the need to do something.
Dear Monogamously Married,
I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don’t want.
I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you’d do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes:
Love is a passionate affirmation of its “object.” That means that love is not an “affect” but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its “object.”
In other words, love is not a feeling. It’s work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they’re actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self “which can stand alone and bear solitude” will be up for the job. He continues:
This passionate affirmation is not possible if one’s own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.
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So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: You just have to do whatever’s best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite.
In fact, Fromm cautions us against both “masochistic love” and “sadistic love.” In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in “a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,” writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you’re trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are “pseudo-love.”
So although Fromm doesn’t want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner’s freedom, he’s not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism.
If you’re not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It’s just masochistic self-annihilation.
I’m personally partial to Fromm’s non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn’t work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it’s possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy?
It sounds like you’re intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you’re committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other.
But right now, you’ve got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you’ve expressed that you don’t want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair!
Notice, though, that that isn’t a worry about non-monogamy per se — it’s a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship.
In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it’s obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally.
“Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,” writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship.
Since you feel that your husband isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn’t feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably.
In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it’s absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he’s attracted to; he doesn’t have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can’t emerge from a situation where he’s pushing things too far with someone else before you’ve agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn’t, have him read Polysecure!).
It’s probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you’re anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone.
After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you’re feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract?
If the answer is “yes” or “maybe,” you can create a temporary relationship structure — or “vessel,” as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn’t, and go from there.
If the answer is “no” — if you’re not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you’ll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn’t get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he’ll have to respect you, and what’s more important, you’ll have to respect yourself.
2026-06-14 19:00:00
My parents started dating back in the ’80s and for a while, they were long-distance. Since this was before our current era of smartphones and email, one of the ways they kept in touch was mail: My father would send cassette tapes to my mom with songs that reminded him of her, and they would both send letters reminiscing about the last time they were able to spend time together.
I love these letters because it’s a peek into my parents’ lives before me. I can feel the paper. I can see my mom’s beautiful penmanship. And from time to time, they also remind me that many of us would have to think long and hard to recall the last time we wrote something by hand.
According to Shawn Datchuk, a professor of special education at the University of Iowa and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center, schoolchildren are writing less, too — and forget about cursive.
“The vast majority of states have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade,” he told Vox. “On average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.”
This week, we explore how the ways we teach handwriting in the classroom have changed over time, and the impact it’s having on education as a whole. Plus: What are we missing when we don’t write by hand? We find out all of that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Datchuk, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
Ten minutes does not seem like a lot of time. Looking back on my own education, it felt like so much more. When did handwriting become less of a priority?
Changes really started to happen around 2010, and that was when the Common Core academic standards were adopted across the United States. In those standards there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and to start to adopt typing. The standards explicitly say students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade.
That’s so early!
Right? Then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding and completely drops cursive handwriting.
I remember being so excited for third grade in particular because where I went to school, that was when they started teaching cursive. Is it just not being taught at all anymore in K-12 schools?
Over the past several years, there’s been a swing back towards cursive. The latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States have passed some sort of legislation reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum.
There is some compelling evidence that handwriting, whether it’s print or cursive, is closely related to reading development. Following the Covid-19 pandemic across the nation, we saw dips in reading scores. There is some thought by educational stakeholders and legislatures that perhaps if we focus on handwriting — in this case, cursive — maybe that will improve student reading scores.
I also hear consistently from parents, guardians, and teachers that they’re very interested in minimizing screen time. Then there’s also a camp of people out there who may have a strong patriotic inclination and they say that, well, the Declaration of Independence is written in cursive, so we should teach kids cursive because it looks so different than print. That way they can study the founding documents.
You’ve worked in education for a very long time, and I’m curious what you make of the changing trends in handwriting. Is pen and paper actually better compared to screens? Do we know if one is better than the other?
That’s a complicated question, but for younger kids who are learning how to read, there does seem to be some benefit in specifically using pencil and paper. There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they’re basically committing to memory not only what a letter looks like, but also its name.
Let’s say you’re teaching a student, “This is a letter M,” and then they learn and commit to memory, “Oh, these are the different strokes or loops of M, and that also makes the mmm sound.” They’re committing that to memory, and so that allows them to draw on that for when they’re reading.
For older high school students, there also seems to be some logic in how distracting screens can be. I taught high school before. I also currently teach undergraduate students, and there’s a lot of different things that pop up on screens, whether it’s online shopping or checking messages or checking emails that can distract from learning important content.
Now, let me kind of flip over the other side. Screens are definitely here to stay, and I think pencils and paper are also here to stay. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. That also adds a whole other layer of complexity to this. For instructors and parents and guardians, perhaps the better question to ask is not so much which is better, but “How much time do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate, whether it’s with a paper and pencil or whether it’s with a computer or tablet or smartphone?”
We talked a little bit about this evolution of technology. You have pen and paper, you have computers, you have smartphones, now we have AI. Is AI another reason to keep handwriting alive?
Unfortunately, I think so. With the rise of artificial intelligence, computer-based writing brings up difficult-to-determine questions on authorship. Lots of professors are struggling with questions on when we do a new assignment, how much of it is computer-generated versus how much of it is attributable to the hard work that students have done.
I definitely see a shift back to the blue books. I know that the [University of] Iowa bookstore here has started stocking blue books on their shelves for the first time since I’ve been here, and I’ve been here over a decade.
What do you think students lose if they stop writing by hand regularly?
Besides the academic benefits that I discussed earlier, I do think that one of the strongest reasons that I can think of to engage in handwriting is what we consider a moral reason: Handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. I think that’s one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans.
For instance, when my mom had a recent birthday, I sent her a handwritten card. On Mother’s Day, my sons and I wrote little notes and my 4-year-old drew a picture for my wife. And then, I’m in my mid-forties. One of the rites of passage of being a middle-aged person now [is that] my wife and I went through the process of getting a living will put together. Last night I was making handwritten notes on the living will because I knew that it was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately.
What we kind of see with even lots of college-age students is that when you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you’re just typing.
2026-06-13 19:15:00
Here’s what’s undeniable: The Democratic electorate has dramatically shifted when it comes to the United States’ relationship with Israel.
Earlier this year, a national poll from Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans sympathize with Palestinians and 36 percent with Israelis — the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2001 that Israelis do not hold a clear lead in US sympathies. Among Democrats, the gap is a chasm: 65 percent side with Palestinians, just 17 percent with Israelis.
A Pew survey from March, meanwhile, found that 6 in 10 Americans now have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel, up 7 percentage points since last year and nearly 20 points since 2022 — and among Democrats and Democratic-leaners, that figure climbs to 80 percent.
This shift, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal war in Gaza in response, has increasingly challenged elected officials from both parties. Democrats, in particular, seem to be more openly questioning the party’s position when it comes to things like arming Israel with offensive weapons.
But, beyond policy, the Democrats’ new conundrum on Israel also comes down to a question of tone. What is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government? What drifts into antisemitism? And who are the voices that should determine what’s acceptable within that debate?
Third Way, the Democratic organization that promotes moderate candidates and centrist policy proposals, recently weighed in with its thoughts on the subject. In March, the organization’s president, Jonathan Cowan, co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Democrats Are Too Cozy With Hasan Piker,” taking aim at the leftist Twitch streamer whose pro-Palestinian views have made him extremely popular — and a lightning rod.
“No Democrat should engage with him,” Cowan and his co-author, Lily Cohen, argued. “All should seek to push him to the fringe, where he belongs.”
In this episode of America, Actually, I talked with Cowan about his anti-Piker argument and interrogated how much of Third Way’s opposition is about the streamer personally versus a broader shift in the Democratic electorate, specific to questions about Israel. I also talked to Piker himself about his political goals, streaming culture, and whether he’ll apologize for past controversial statements.
Here are three things I learned from those conversations:
Cowan’s central argument is electoral: that cozying up to Piker makes Democrats “more extreme than mainstream” and kneecaps the party’s ability to win red and purple seats. “We don’t need two extremist parties in this country,” he told me.
As proof, he kept returning to the scoreboard. Since 2018, he argued, moderate-backed candidates have flipped roughly 50 red House seats blue, while left-wing groups he associates with Piker — Our Revolution and Justice Democrats — have, by his count, “flipped literally zero.”
But, that framing ignores Piker’s bigger goals. His popularity grew out of problems the Democratic Party will have to deal with, whether or not he exists: how to win attention in a new internet economy, how to reach young men, how to speak to a base that is increasingly disaffected by the party’s foreign policy. As I put it to Cowan, there is “clearly an audience for Hasan Piker’s political message,” and the polling on Israel shows that the audience is now most of the Democratic base, not a fringe.
What’s clear after both interviews: Piker isn’t trying to elect most Democrats. He’s trying to elect specific ones and to drag the party’s center of gravity with them — the same way MAGA reshaped the GOP through primaries, rather than by flipping swing seats.
“Changing the Democratic Party isn’t a silly vanity project,” Piker told me. “Changing the Democratic Party to make sure that we have some real fighters…will actually create longstanding change in this country.” Even by his own account, the goal isn’t to pick winners in the traditional red-to-blue sense; it’s to channel more money, attention, and leverage to the candidates and politics he favors. Measuring him by Cowan’s flipped-seats yardstick misses what he’s actually doing.
Still, Third Way’s complaints aren’t pure invention. Some of what Piker has said is genuinely icky — and he knows it. Confronted with a years-old clip in which he degraded Miley Cyrus, Piker admitted he’d misstepped: “It’s so cringe. … Of course I’ve apologized for it. It obviously doesn’t reflect my current values.”
But that contrition clearly has limits. On calling ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred,” he offered no apology, recasting it as a pejorative he aims at “ethnonationalists” and “far-right settlers.” On the “pig dog” slur Third Way flagged as antisemitic, he claimed not to have known the phrase’s history — and then doubted his critics’ sincerity. And on the line that draws the most heat — “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time” — he didn’t retreat at all. “I’m about to quadruple down,” he said, having already tripled down on it elsewhere.
That’s the tell. Piker described the Hamas line not as a slip but as “agitative propaganda” — a Marxist term he insists is neutral — designed “to cause you to second-guess.” “It is intentionally provocative,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s inappropriate.” Whatever you make of the politics, the provocation is a strategy, not an accident.
Another thing I took from both conversations is that the gatekeeping Third Way is attempting may no longer work, and it might even backfire. In a streaming economy that runs on controversy, an establishment campaign to make Piker radioactive functions less like a quarantine and more like free advertising.
“Your boos mean nothing when I’ve seen what makes you cheer,” Piker said of his Democratic critics. “If they want to position themselves on the 10 percent side of a 90-10 issue, that’s going to be great for me.”
He has a point about the underlying numbers. Polling increasingly describes an electorate that has moved closer to him — not further. And when Third Way tries to police the boundary of acceptable criticism of Israel, it is drawing that line well to the right of where its own party’s voters already stand. “It was a lot lonelier on October 8, 2023, saying the exact same things that I’m saying right now,” Piker told me. “It doesn’t feel so lonely anymore.”
That’s the bind for the party’s centrist guardians: The very offense Third Way takes at Piker — the thing that makes them want him gone — is, increasingly, the reason he keeps blowing up.
New episodes of America, Actually drop every Saturday. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel. Support the show by becoming a Vox member at vox.com/members.
2026-06-13 19:00:00
Gas prices are high right now — an average of roughly a dollar more than they were last year for Americans. But considering that we’re not more than 100 days into the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which the International Energy Agency called the “most severe oil supply shock in history,” it seems like they should be higher. When the Hormuz crisis began, many analysts were predicting the price of oil would rise to $200 a barrel, which might mean gas in the $6.50 to $7 per gallon range. Instead, oil is currently trading at less than $90 a barrel.
That’s partly thanks to some promising recent diplomatic developments, but it’s never risen higher than around $114, far below the heights it reached after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The 1970s-style gas lines that many anticipated have not materialized.
So what’s going on? There are a few explanations. One is that more oil is still leaving the Middle East than many thought possible, via alternative pipelines and via covert means through Hormuz itself. Another is that oil-producing countries that don’t depend on Hormuz, most importantly the US, are ramping up production. Many countries are also still tapping their strategic reserves. But possibly the largest and definitely the most unexpected factor is that the world’s most insatiable consumer of oil has just stopped buying it.
China is normally the world’s top crude oil importer, and it sources much of that oil from Iran and other countries in the Middle East. China’s imports have fallen from around 11.6 million barrels a day to around 7.8 million, the lowest levels since 2017. To put it simply, there are millions of more barrels per day for other countries to import than anyone thought was possible. Good news for every other economy in the world — but what about for China itself?
“If I knew nothing else about what was going on and I was just looking at my data, I would assume there had been a demand collapse on par with the Covid-zero lockdowns,” said Rory Johnston, a Toronto-based oil market researcher, referring to the draconian policies the Chinese government imposed during the pandemic that effectively ground its domestic economy to a halt. “But that’s strange, because I haven’t seen any news about China relocking down its economy.”
China’s economy hasn’t cratered. Quite the contrary: All available data on industrial output, automobile traffic, pollution, and other economic indicators suggests that the country is humming along as normal. In recent years, the Chinese state has made massive investments in green energy and electric vehicles. Those investments have likely helped cushion the blow, but they’re still not enough to account for the numbers we’re seeing.
Instead, we seem to be seeing the results of a longer-term strategy. Back in 2023, many analysts were perplexed by the fact that China was dramatically ramping up its imports of crude oil and its refineries were pumping out dramatically higher amounts of gasoline and diesel, despite the fact that the country’s economy was slowing down. There appeared to be little demand for all that fuel at the time. We may be seeing the fruits of that stockpiling now.
China’s government also hasn’t explained their rationale for cutting imports during the current conflict, nor has it publicly acknowledged that it is. The closest we’ve gotten to an official acknowledgement of what’s happening may have been from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who said that China is releasing oil from its strategic petroleum reserve.
The odd thing about that, notes Johnston, is that the strategic reserve tanks in China that are visible to commercial satellites appear to be just as full if not more full than they were before the war. So where’s all their fuel coming from?
The most likely possibility is that China has large underground reserves that are not visible to the outside. The Chinese government has also mandated state-owned commercial companies to maintain their own strategic petroleum stocks. Whatever the case, China simply has a lot more oil on hand than we thought.
How long can China keep this up? Johnston says that’s difficult to say given that estimates of China’s stocks range from half a billion barrels to one and a half billion. But in theory, it could be months.
In theory, it’s possible that when President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in May, they reached some sort of agreement for China to reduce its imports. After all, Trump is benefiting politically from the choice.
But it seems unlikely that Xi would agree to a policy to underwrite a war against one of its allies, and as unlikely that Trump wouldn’t tell anyone he had extracted that big a concession. More likely, China sees the benefit in preventing an all-out crisis in the countries that are its most important export markets.
Intentionally or not, though, China’s policies may be prolonging the war. Trump is clearly eager to reach a deal to reopen Hormuz, but not desperate enough to agree to major concessions or Iran’s nuclear program or sanctions relief. His urgency might be different if oil were at $150 a barrel rather than $90, putting even more pressure on American consumers during a pivotal election year. For all the attention paid to how Chinese missiles and satellites might be helping Iran’s war effort, that assistance might be outweighed by how its energy policies are helping the US.
Beyond this conflict, China’s policy may have wider strategic implications for China’s growing ability to weaponize its role in the global economy — a field of competition the US long dominated. As Eurasia Group oil analyst Gregory Brew wrote on X, “The world doesn’t have a swing producer any more” — referring to how Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity once allowed it to almost single-handedly swing global energy markets — ”but it may have a swing consumer.”
In other words, China is intentionally keeping oil prices lower than they would be otherwise. It could in theory pull the rug out and jack up the world’s prices as well.
In part, China is simply also a country that’s traditionally inclined to stockpile stuff, whether it’s oil, strategic metals, or even pork. When it began its oil-buying spree a few years ago, there was some speculation it might be preparing for a major global crisis, namely an invasion of Taiwan.
There’s always been an assumption that the massive disruption to global trade a war over Taiwan would cause constitutes a sort of mutually assured economic destruction that might help dissuade Beijing from acting. But what we’re seeing is that China may actually be more insulated from that kind of disruption — and even more capable of causing it — than we thought.
2026-06-13 01:00:00
About a year ago, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025). In Medina, South Carolina committed an obvious violation of federal Medicaid law, but the Court’s Republican majority seemed to bend over backward to prevent the patients affected by this legal violation from suing to enforce their rights. Among other things, the Court’s opinion in Medina was at odds with a decision the justices handed down just two years earlier in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023).
As I wrote at the time, the best explanation for Medina was not legal; it was political. South Carolina broke federal law specifically because it illegally cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. The Republican justices appear to have bent the rules to ensure that an abortion provider would be defunded.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a new opinion in FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital Master Fund, which only adds to the mystery about why Medina came down the way it did. The facts of FS Credit are quite different from the issues in Medina — FS Credit is a securities law case asking when investors may sue investment funds, while Medina concerned when patients may sue states for violating Medicaid law. But the legal issues in FS Credit and Medina are very similar. They both involve a legal doctrine known as “implied causes of action.”
Although Medina is the Court’s most recent case (prior to FS Credit) that deals with implied causes of action, the FS Credit decision does not cite Medina anywhere. Instead, it quotes heavily from decisions that the Court refused to follow in Medina. And it explicitly embraces a legal rule that the Court seemed to reject in Medina.
The rules governing implied causes of action are complicated enough to reduce even experienced lawyers to tears. But, if you bear with me, it will be difficult to avoid a simple conclusion: The Court appears to be manipulating these rules to achieve outcomes preferred by the Republican justices and the anti-abortion movement.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion in FS Credit begins with a simple declarative sentence: “Congress, not the Judiciary, decides who may enforce the law.” Not all federal laws may be enforced through lawsuits, and not all people who may want to sue under a particular federal law are allowed to do so.
In some cases, a federal law explicitly states that it authorizes private lawsuits against violators of that law, or it states who is allowed to bring those suits. In other cases, a right to sue may be implied from statutory text that does not explicitly provide for such suits. These implicit rights to sue are known as “implied causes of action.”
Before Medina, the question of whether a particular federal law creates an implied cause of action was governed by the Court’s decision in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002), which held that “for a statute to create private rights [to sue], its text must be phrased in terms of the persons benefited.”
Thus, for example, a hypothetical statute stating that “no sweaty person may be denied access to a shower” may be enforced through private lawsuits, because that law is phrased in terms of who benefits from it (sweaty people). A similar statute which provides that “states may not impede access to showers” would not be enforceable through private lawsuits, because that statute lacks the person-focused language demanded by Gonzaga.
Prior to the Medina decision in 2025, the Court repeatedly reaffirmed Gonzaga’s rule. It did so most recently in Talevski, which held that a federal law creates an implied cause of action when it is “‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited’ and contains ‘rights-creating,’ individual-centric language with an ‘unmistakable focus on the benefited class.’”
Under the Gonzaga framework, Medina should have been an open-and-shut case. The case involved a federal law that permits Medicaid patients to choose their health providers. South Carolina violated this law by refusing to allow Medicaid patients to choose Planned Parenthood as their health provider. Here is the relevant statutory text:
A State plan for medical assistance must … provide that … any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required (including an organization which provides such services, or arranges for their availability, on a prepayment basis), who undertakes to provide him such services.
This law contains the very kind of “individual-centric language” demanded by cases like Gonzaga and Talevski. It extends a right to “any individual,” providing that these individuals “may obtain” medical care from their chosen provider. It also concludes with a pronoun (“him”) that refers back to the individuals who benefit from the law.
And yet, in Medina, the six Republican justices rendered this statute unenforceable. And they did so in an opinion that didn’t even quote the relevant legal rule. The words “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” appear nowhere in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion.
Gorsuch’s Medina opinion is very difficult to parse, but it appears to create a new rule establishing that no statute may create an implied cause of action unless that statute includes the magic word “right” — as in: an individual’s rights.
Barrett’s majority opinion in FS Credit, however, offers no hint that Medina even happened. Barrett does not at any point suggest that a statute must use any specific magic words in order to authorize private lawsuits. Instead, it relies on the pre-Medina framework established by cases like Gonzaga.
FS Credit holds that “to create a private right, a statute must use ‘rights-creating language’ aimed at protecting ‘a particular class of persons.’” It then quotes the key line from Gonzaga, which states that “statutes create private rights when they are ‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited.’” So Gonzaga is back, baby.
But, if the Court wanted to dispel the impression that Medina was a one-off decision that simply came up with an excuse to deny relief to abortion providers and their patients, Barrett’s FS Credit opinion needed to explain why the new rule that the Court seemed to apply in Medina does not apply in FS Credit. Instead, Barrett’s opinion does not include a single citation to Medina.
One possibility is that the two cases are different because Medina involved Medicaid, which is a federal spending program, while FS Credit involves a statute regulating private businesses. Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina says that “spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely” to contain implied causes of action. So maybe the magic word rule that Gorsuch appeared to rely on in Medina only applies to Medicaid and other cases involving government spending programs.
But Talevski, the Supreme Court case decided two years before Medina, didn’t just reject the argument that there are different rules for federal spending programs; it outright mocked this argument. The losing party in Talevski, that decision explained, “urges us to reject decades of precedent” and to “rewrite” a key federal law to exempt federal spending programs from the Gonzaga rule. But Talevski “reject[s]” this “invitation to reimagine Congress’s handiwork (and our precedent interpreting it).”
Another possibility is that Medina is different from FS Credit because Medina involved a “Section 1983” lawsuit — a lawsuit brought under the federal law permitting individuals to bring civil rights claims against state governments and state officials — and FS Credit does not. Gorsuch’s Medina opinion describes the specific issue before his Court in that case as “whether the plaintiffs before us may maintain a § 1983 suit to enforce Medicaid’s any-qualified-provider provision “
But the problem with this distinction is that Gonzaga — the precedent behind the Court’s reasoning in FS Credit — was itself a Section 1983 case. So, for as long as Gonzaga has been the law, the Court has held that its rule applies to cases brought under Section 1983. Medina is the only exception.
Perhaps there is some other way to distinguish between Medina and FS Credit. But, again, the Court did not provide such an explanation in the FS Credit opinion.
And, without such an explanation, it’s hard to escape the same conclusion that I reached a year ago, when Medina was first handed down. Medina was not decided in good faith. The actual holding of Medina is that abortion providers and their patients cannot enforce their rights, because the Republican justices say so.
The central rule in any nation governed by the rule of law is that similar cases must be treated similarly, regardless of whether a group that individual judges dislike — or even view as morally repugnant — benefits from that rule. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1989 essay, “when, in writing for the majority of the Court, I adopt a general rule. … I not only constrain lower courts, I constrain myself as well.” Because “if the next case should have such different facts that my political or policy preferences regarding the outcome are quite the opposite, I will be unable to indulge those preferences.”
Medina fails the Scalia test. There cannot be a special carve out for abortion providers or abortion patients that denies them the same right to sue enjoyed by any other litigant.
2026-06-12 19:15:00
There’s no such thing as a truly pristine landscape — humans have, over millennia, shaped every environment on Earth — but the Boundary Waters wilderness of northeastern Minnesota comes pretty darn close.
Stretching across more than a million acres near the Canadian border, about four hours north of Minneapolis, the Boundary Waters is a messy patchwork of lakes, streams, and islands with hardly any human infrastructure. At dawn, loons slice through the placid water and, come nightfall, bright stars splatter the dark sky.
The natural beauty of the Boundary Waters — a federally protected wilderness area — is a magnet for tourism, an enormous economic engine for the region. The Boundary Waters is not only the most visited wilderness area in the country, but also home to federally threatened species like the gray wolf and the Canada lynx.
It’s for this reason that many environmental advocates are worried about a proposed mine just outside the southern edge of the Boundary Waters. A company called Twin Metals Minnesota — a subsidiary of the Chilean copper giant Antofagasta — wants to mine copper, nickel, and other metals deep underneath the wet Earth. And earlier this year, Congress and President Donald Trump removed a major obstacle that had stood in its way: The House and Senate overturned a Biden-era mining ban in the region, allowing Twin Metals to revive its mining push within the watershed.
Environmental advocates warn that a metals mine could be disastrous for the unique Boundary Waters ecosystem. Though mining and other extractive industries are prohibited inside the Boundary Waters, the region’s hydrology is such that any pollution from the mine would likely flow into the wilderness area, potentially harming its forests, wildlife, and the livelihoods of Native Americans, who use the area to fish, hunt, and harvest wild rice.
And the thing about mines, critics say, is that they nearly always pollute.
“It’s not a matter of if this mine is going to pollute, it’s a matter of when,” said Ingrid Lyons, executive director of the advocacy group Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, which leads a campaign called Save the Boundary Waters.
Twin Metals says these concerns are largely rooted in misinformation and it can mine in an environmentally safe way. Like other mining projects seeking approval, this one would have to meet both federal and state environmental safeguards before opening — and Minnesota’s are particularly strong. The company also defends the project on a different kind of environmental grounds, pointing out that the world needs more metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt to build clean energy technologies, such as batteries for electric cars — which is true. If those metals don’t come from Minnesota, they might just come from other countries with less rigorous environmental regulations.
The upshot is that what may sound like a simple narrative — environmentalists versus a mine — highlights a more complex reality. Mining isn’t inherently bad; yet, it always comes with trade-offs. The question facing Minnesota, where there’s still a path to ban copper mining near the Boundary Waters, is whether the costs will be worth it.
While the Boundary Waters is famous for its surface lakes, streams, and forests, it sits atop one of the world’s largest unexploited deposits of copper and nickel, known as the Duluth Complex. It’s these materials that Twin Metals is after.
According to Twin Metals, miners would excavate and crush ore — metal-rich rock — as far as 4,500 feet down and, then, send it up to the surface. There, they’d remove compounds containing copper, nickel, and other minerals, which they’d ship elsewhere to be refined into usable metals. The company said it would put some of the leftover rock, known as tailings, back underground. The rest would go into a pile on land nearby.
Twin Metals has been pursuing this planned mine for more than a decade, and it said it’s plowed some $650 million into it. In recent years, however, the project has hit a number of roadblocks.
In 2022, the Biden administration canceled Twin Metals’s two mineral leases (which had given the company a right to explore and mine in certain areas but not approval for specific projects). And, in early 2023, the administration put a 20-year pause on approving new leases near the Boundary Waters in the region where Twin Metals had been planning to mine. “With an eye toward protecting this special place for future generations, I have made this decision using the best-available science and extensive public input,” then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement announcing the decision.
It was that temporary ban that was recently overturned. Congressional Republicans — led by Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber — found what is essentially a loophole, through an obscure law called the Congressional Review Act, to not only undo the ban but also to prevent future administrations from issuing similar protections without an act of Congress.
This move does not reinstate Twin Metals’s two federal mining leases. The company had previously challenged the lease cancellations, back in 2022, and it’s still waiting on a decision from the courts. Congress is also considering a bill that would re-issue those leases to Twin Metals. Should the company acquire leases to mine, the project would then be subject to a review by federal and state agencies, both of which have the authority to block the project. Even with federal approval, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, a state agency, could decide not to grant the company a permit to mine.
Twin Metals says, perhaps unsurprisingly, that its mine will be exceptionally clean. The mine would be underground, the company said, so it would have only a small surface footprint, including a processing facility about the size of a Super Target.
The company also claims that its modern approach won’t produce a water pollutant — common among mines — called acid rock drainage. Metal in the ore is bound to compounds called sulfides. When sulfides react with air and water, they can produce sulfuric acid, which is toxic to plants and animals and can leach heavy metals, such as arsenic, out of rock.
“Twin Metals Minnesota is focused on responsibly developing the minerals in the Duluth Complex,” Kathy Graul, a spokesperson for Twin Metals, told Vox. “Any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong, multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine.”
Environmental advocates and the academic researchers I spoke to are not convinced.
“If the mine is built, there would be runoff, there would be mine discharge, and that discharge would contain sulfate,” said Lyons, of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness. “Because [Twin Metals] can’t present a credible argument otherwise, they attempt to distract from this main point by saying the drainage would not be acidic.”
Lee Frelich, a forest ecologist at the University of Minnesota who has studied the impacts of sulfide mining, shared similar concerns. Harmful chemicals released from the mined rock are likely to reach the Boundary Waters, where they can damage trees and aquatic animals, through complex, cascading effects. Sulfate pollution can also impair the growth of wild rice, a critical and sacred food resource for Indigenous peoples in the region, according to Emily Onello, a physician and medical researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School Duluth.
Twin Metals, and those who support this mining project, recognize that mining in the past has created substantial environmental problems. But modern mines are cleaner and safer, they say. This one, they say, would be cleaner and safer.
That is almost certainly true. Environmental regulations are much stronger now than they were decades ago, when companies would often abandon unprofitable mines without cleaning them up. And if firms like Twin Metals want permits to mine, they’ll need to abide by them. “Projects must prove they can meet the stringent environmental standards that have long been in place in Minnesota before moving forward,” Graul told Vox.
But what no one can really guarantee is that there would be no pollution.
“New mines are going to be cleaner, they’re going to be better, they’re going to be better permitted — but they also are going to have impacts,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a researcher at San José State University who studies the impacts of resource use.
That much was made clear in a 2022 report by the Interior Department: “Hardrock minerals mining of sulfide-bearing rock, no matter how it is conducted, poses a risk of environmental contamination due to the potential failure over time of engineered mitigation technology.” In other words, even mining companies that are thoughtful about their footprint run the risk of polluting the environment. (Many of the report authors are still government employees.)
So, it seems fair to say that there is indeed some risk of pollution, especially considering the rise in extreme floods and other weather events that put infrastructure at risk. Mine drainage is also a problem that can last for decades or even centuries, long after the companies that create the problems leave.
The question, then, becomes: Is that risk worth it?
Proponents of the mine say they have to mine here — that this is where the minerals are, and those minerals are critical to our essential technologies. “We are blessed with these minerals right under our feet,” Rep. Stauber told me, adding that he’s confident that the mine won’t pollute should it get approved by the state.
Julie Lucas, executive director of mining advocacy group MiningMinnesota, has repeatedly made the important point that we’ll need to produce more minerals for the energy transition. “Mining is fundamental to our lives today and more important than ever for our future,” Lucas, the former water resources director for Twin Metals, said in a 2024 commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune. “We aren’t doing the Earth any favors by declaring a definitive ‘no’ against potential mining projects.”
What mining companies often don’t talk about, however, is whether there are less risky alternatives. “There is almost always a better place to build that infrastructure,” said Grace Wu, who studies the trade-offs of clean-energy technologies at University of California Santa Barbara.
Certainly, there are other places to mine copper in the US, Mulvaney said, most of which currently comes from Arizona. There’s also already an active nickel mine in Michigan. What’s more is that the US throws out a lot of copper each year; in 2023, for example, only about a third of post-consumer copper was recycled. The same politicians who are pushing for more mining, citing urgent supply needs, haven’t been addressing the lack of metals recycling, Mulvaney said.
“There’s no place that has to inherently be mined,” Mulvaney said.
The opponents I spoke to weren’t arguing that the US should export mining — and related ecological problems — to other countries, which often have less stringent health and environmental safeguards and law enforcement. But there are more acceptable places to mine in Minnesota, such as in watersheds that are already industrialized, they said.
There are only so many intact expanses of wilderness like the Boundary Waters left in the country, said Frelich of University of Minnesota. The value they provide to future generations is infinite, he said, and dwarfs what we can gain from one mine.
Put another way: It’s not mining that’s the problem; it’s mining precisely here.
“It’s just the wrong place for this type of mine,” said Alex Falconer, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota who also works for the Save the Boundary Waters Campaign. “Society can pick and choose where mining should happen.”
Under the first Trump administration, for example, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced a 20-year ban on hard-rock mining near Yellowstone National Park. At the time, Zinke, now a Montana representative and whose state includes a sliver of Yellowstone, said “there are places where it is appropriate to mine and places where it is not.”
What happens now is murky, though, it’s unlikely that the Trump administration will stand in the way of Twin Metals. (What might be helping their cause: A lobbying firm hired by the company was founded and chaired by Trump’s other former Interior secretary, David Bernhardt.) That means they could get federal mining leases soon.
The fight then turns to the state, where Rep. Falconer is pushing a state bill that would prevent Minnesota regulators from issuing permits for copper mining in the Boundary Waters and its headwaters. Falconer says he hopes it will come to a vote early next year and — pending the results of the midterm elections — become law. “The watershed of the Boundary Waters is sacred to me,” he said. “It’s off limits.”
If efforts like this to block mining in the watershed fail, and Twin Metals starts digging up metals, Lyons says it will be a warning for other natural treasures across the US. “If something bad can happen in the Boundary Waters,” she says, “it can happen anywhere.”