Imagine scrolling through your social media feed and stopping at a headline that makes you blink twice: “Woman approved for MAID because she couldn’t cook.” It sounds absurd, almost like a dark joke. It invites an immediate reaction—outrage, disbelief, perhaps even a bitter laugh. How could a country that calls itself compassionate allow someone to die simply because they weren’t good at making dinner? The headline spreads quickly, shared by people who are already worried about the expanding scope of medical assistance in dying in Canada. It feels like proof that the system has gone too far. But the headline…

On a quiet evening in Jeju, a family sits by the phone, waiting for any sign from a sister, a son, a neighbor who has vanished from the rhythm of daily life. They have already filed a missing person report with the local police, and they cling to the hope that somewhere in the machinery of law enforcement, someone is looking for their loved one. But what they do not know is that in a small police office on the island, an officer has already typed a few keystrokes into a computer system, changed the status of the case from…