My mother was making lunch when she heard a thump from the bedroom. She ran upstairs and found my father face down on the carpet, blood seeping from a gash under his eye. He had been lightheaded and exhausted since a chemo session at Memorial Sloan Kettering; sitting on the edge of the bed, everything had gone black. As she struggled to lift him, he vowed he was done—done with Western doctors, whom he called “crooks” and “quacks”; done with the poisons coursing through his body; done with treatments he didn’t believe in. That evening, with a bruised eye and…

Paragraph 1 Imagine waking up in the morning, reaching for your phone, and scrolling through a stream of messages, alerts, and headlines. Some of these are from friends and family, but many are from strangers, bots, or cleverly disguised fraudsters. You see a story about a new government policy that makes your heart race, only to discover later that it was completely fabricated. Then you get a text message that looks like it is from your bank, warning you about suspicious activity and asking you to click a link. Your finger hovers over the screen. It feels urgent. It feels…