“I’m starting to look forward to these chats—they’re a nice routine. We’ll create some memories yet.”

1. When a cancer story touches the British Royal Household, it stops being just another news item. It becomes something people feel personally connected to, because illness is universal. We read those headlines while sitting in waiting rooms, while thinking of our own families, while remembering the people we have lost. And so when Richard Sullivan, a leading voice in cancer policy, points out that more than one in four mainstream media stories about this sensitive royal health subject are simply false, it should stop us cold. It is easy to imagine that misinformation is a fringe problem, something that…