There are few finer songwriters than Dolly Parton. And while she was an amazing musician and storyteller, she was an even better human being. Damn, we should all aspire to be more like Dolly. I know you’ve seen that the icon died Tuesday at 80. Her publicist said she passed peacefully in Nashville.

What’s clear from all the tributes from every corner of the internet is that the most universally liked person in American music (hell, America maybe) is gone, and the country spent the morning agreeing on something for once. Dave Holmes, writing in Esquire, said “we’ve been wishing for something to unite us, and as always we have forgotten to be careful what we wish for.”

The announcement came the way she planned it. Her nephew Bryan Seaver, who ran her security detail, delivered the news in a prerecorded video Parton had asked him to prepare years earlier, paired with a final message posted to her Instagram: “I will always love you.” At her request, the family will hold a private funeral.

Of course, there had been signals for months. Parton disclosed unspecified health issues beginning in September 2025 and canceled a Dollywood appearance 10 days before her death on her doctor's orders, CBS News reports. Carl Dean, her husband of nearly 60 years, died in March 2025.

She was as successful as she was generous. The track record includes 10 Grammys from 55 nominations, more than 100 million records sold and a legendary songbook. Off the charts, she built Dollywood and an Imagination Library that has given away over 300 million books to children. Parton operated in pure joy, empathy and sincerity. She also turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden—a detail The Atlantic flagged as the whole point of her: she refused to be claimed by anyone’s side because she was for everyone.

Canada is hitting back. Ottawa announced Tuesday it will impose retaliatory tariffs of 15%, 25% and 50% on roughly $20 billion of U.S. goods, effective Sept. 8th. The rates match American duties "dollar for dollar,” product by product, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said.

The target list is long and deliberately personal. Steel and aluminum jump to 50% (doubling the existing 25%). Also on it: seafood, appliances, wood and paper, clothing, cosmetics, toilet paper, video game consoles and golf clubs. Yes, two of the largest trading partners on earth are now taxing each other's toilet paper.

After the negotiations collapsed last week, President Trump vowed to increase tariffs on all cars, trucks, car parts and steel from Canada to 50%, starting on Jan. 1. He called Canadian officials “clowns”. And while there is time for both sides to “gauge what the costs are and maybe find alternative solutions,” the Wall Street Journal says that rhetoric on both sides has grown increasingly heated.

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Outsourcing your BS detector to a chatbot works … until it doesn't. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab had people evaluate paired news headlines and images over four weeks. With a chatbot's help, they were 21% more accurate at separating fake news from real. Four weeks later, working without AI, they were 15% worse at spotting fakes than when they started. Uh oh.

And the kicker is that roughly a quarter of them thought they’d gotten better. The team calls it the “AI dependency paradox,” and MIT Technology Review reports it’s turned up in other fields, medicine included. However, the bots that pushed back with Socratic questioning left people sharper on their own, just a bit slower.

The BBC reports a different study from Georgetown University found similar results. As one neuroscientist put it: “There's plenty of evidence that if you are not doing as much of the actual thinking, then your capability to do that kind of thinking is going to atrophy.” The tech is fairly hard to ignore, but the takeaway is to stay skeptical. If you wouldn’t trust a random stranger’s answer to a question, you shouldn’t outright trust AI either.