* Canadian healthcare: “She said she didn’t even see an oncologist with BC Cancer until two-and-a-half months later but at that point, she had already received treatment somewhere else.” I’m aware that there are also U.S. healthcare horror stories. I’ve also learned, the hard way, that for serious matters it’s almost always worth backchecking, as best one can, whatever one is told. That’s been our experience with the clinical trial process, for example, and backchecking doctors is much of the reason I’m 1. still alive at all today and 2. not on (palliative) chemotherapy right now.

* “Don’t Let the FDA Regulate Lab Tests!”

* “Israel’s Impossible Dilemma: The IDF can hand Hamas either a Pyrrhic victory or a real one.”

* Low oil prices hurt Saudi Arabia, and presumably Russia, as well as some other autocratic countries. Good.

* U.S. math scores plunge. Recently I posted How Gabriel Mays is (re)learning math as an adult; it seems that there is more information and ability to learn than ever, but most people prefer short-form video and such.

* “Bari Weiss’s Surging News Startup, the FP, Lures Readers Miffed at Media Coverage of Israel” (wsj, $) One can see why: much of the legacy media’s coverage has ranged from “biased” to “abysmal.” See also “There Is No Right to Bully and Harass: Progressives who once argued that free speech is violence now claim that violence is free speech.”

* “People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone.” The U.S. isn’t building enough in nearly all domains, and if China invades Taiwan, it’ll be too late to improve.

* “Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change.” We should be doing more, yes, but a sense of helpless doom is bad. Climeworks, for example, has a subscription product that lets individuals pay $28 to remove about 20 kg monthly. That’s not a tremendous amount but it’s not zero, either. Matt Yglesias has a paywalled post about how most people don’t actually care about climate, however, and he seems to be right.

* Search engine optimization (SEO), AI-generated text, and the death of the commons.

* “Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India.” More humane and surprising than expected.

* Coffee obsessives on making better coffee (video).

* Guy takes Ayahuasca to fix a vestibular balance problem associated with his left ear. YMMV. IMO we still know practically nothing about the brain or consciousness.