FlashFeed

Full text

The most convincing thing Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, said to me during an on-stage conversation last week was that perhaps his original vision of how AI would change biotech might not start to be visible for a decade.

In a 2024 essay, “ Machines of Loving Grace , ” Amodei had argued that artificial intelligence, and in particular large language models like Anthropic’s Claude, could allow researchers to make what we think of as a decade’s worth of progress every year, covering a century in a decade. Now he admits we’re not there yet.

“I don’t think that today we can make progress at a rate of ten years per year for a number of reasons,” Amodei said. Those included: Models aren’t as good as they someday will be; researchers need time to figure out how to use these tools; and the infrastructure and regulatory systems will take time to change.

Amodei and I were speaking at an Anthropic event where the company, a public-benefit corporation meant to be focused on improving the world, unveiled a product for biologists and pharmaceutical companies called Claude Science . I agreed to interview Amodei on-stage as part of the event, with the stipulation that I would decide on my own what to ask.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

Full text

You’ve got long arms for your height. Everyone tells you so. Good for hugging and pulling down rebounds in pickup basketball. Even better, you soon realize, for catching kids and throwing them back, even the ones who kick and scream, who pull your hair out by the fistful, the ones who, for whatever reason, can’t wait to grow up. Who would want such a thing?

You weren’t even going to take the gig, but once you received the job description, you figured it wouldn’t be so bad to hang out in a rye field all day and catch the kids that fall off the cliff. You could do that; you could be a soft landing place for children before returning them to their innocence. And, selfishly, it would be a good chance to catch some sun and get nice and tan before heading to P-town, where maybe you’ll make all the twinks and dykes go crazy over you. Get some for once. You’ve been divorced for ten years. Ex-wife never calls, only reacts to your texts. Little thumbs-ups you could just stick in your eye.

You two never had kids though you tried. That does something to a couple, the suicidal silence that follows failure. The how-can-this-be of it all.

First, you snapped the door handle off, then another negative test later, you ripped the whole door off its hinges, and it felt so good, so clarifying, that you thought you’d spend the rest of your life breaking things just to revel in the disbelieving after. Revel. That was the name you had picked out, carried around on a piece of paper in your pocket like a wish.

“What happened to the last catcher?” you asked your boss at your first and only interview.

“Couldn’t handle the pressure.” “Where do the kids come from?”

He shrugged. “Everywhere? No one really knows. They just show up, and we do what we have to do.”

“And what, exactly, is that?”

“Keep them innocent for as long as humanly possible.” “Okay,” you said. “I can handle a little pressure.”

“You need peak conditioning and an unnerving ability to take some punches,” he said. “Some of the kids simply trip and fall, don’t know what hit them. But some jump of their own accord. They’re the ones who really don’t want to go back.” He yawned then glanced at the door, ready to kick me out and get on with his day. He probably didn’t have kids of his own. He probably liked complaining about them on airplanes.

You told him about your track career in college, and you wiggled your long arms, showing off a bit.

He looked you up and down, nodding his approval. “Keep in mind,” he said, “there are others who don’t trip or jump; they’re pushed.”

“What do you mean?”

He lowered his voice. “You know, by a parent, or a babysitter, or a weird uncle. Or, like, a pastor.”

“Oh,” you said, then you went home to cry yourself sleepless.

Day one on the job, the rye field stretching for miles before you, the sun staining the tall grass a golden orange, you get the worst farmer’s tan. So day two you shed your T-shirt and catch all the children while wearing a binder, though the binder starts to hurt after a while. You can’t move as easily. You get out of breath, suspecting that you don’t know how to read those online sizing tables, the ones in small print, dependent upon small insanities like owning string and a tape measure. Either way, the kids don’t seem to mind the bare skin; they’re happy to have you dangle them upside down, to have you tickle their armpits and bellies and bottoms of their feet, to have you eat them up and send them into high shrieking fits. They beg for more.

“Turn me into slime,” they say.

“Call me a booger,” they say. “Again, again,” they say.

And you do, every time. You try not to think about which children had their childhood cut short because of power and who has it. You love them all, too much and too hard; you want to keep them as your own, even though that’s not how this works.

You briefly consider whether you went through this same thing, who might have caught you and when. Or did you slip through their arms into the jaws of adolescence? There is a blank space in your memory where your childhood should be. You don’t know what this means, but you know it can’t be good.

When you catch them—the orange Cheeto-dust-covered children, the ketchup-faced children, the missing-teeth children, the peanut-butter-fingers children, the stepped-in-dog-poop-in-bare-feet-and-don’t-care children—you imagine that you are giving the performance of a lifetime. You imagine the most beautiful people in the world watching you, pointing and covering their mouths in awe. You imagine moving them to tears with your recital of joy and innocence, of catching and returning, like a disciplined fisherman. You imagine your beauty as the beautiful people see it: uninhibited, pure. Noble.

You, with your long arms and strength of will, throw the kids hundreds of feet in the air, back to the top of the cliff, where they can return to their playhouses, secret gardens, and belief in the intoxicating power of laughter, back to their grown-ups and bedtimes and the assumption that good always overcomes evil, that evil is a mean old witch in the forest and not the estate planner next door or the man sleeping one room over.

But after a few weeks of this, you’re dead-legged and sunburnt, you’re heatstroked and uninspired. P-town came and went, and you did too much watching and not enough approaching, too much judging, too much negating: not them, not her, and definitely not her. Too much wanting for something ineffable, something that feels more like absence than body, the negative space around a someone. You drank whatever you could find—shooters, shots, cocktails, frozen drinks that gave you a brain freeze—but never rye whiskey, never ever rye. There were kids there, at the parades and on the boats. Everywhere you looked, families, bodies hanging on bodies, hands wrestling with hands. Mouths full of teeth that would only bite to protect a kid. You wouldn’t make eye contact, wouldn’t linger on their sweet little faces so that you wouldn’t one day wind up recognizing them in your arms. It would be too much, to know them from the outside world.

Anyway, your legs are tired and noodly, your joints ache, and your quota is down. You keep letting kids slip through your arms into adolescence. Everywhere, in big cities and small towns, there’s an increase in the adultification of children, even the well-off ones, even the ones raised by gentle parents, even the ones with skate and surf camps, guitar lessons, and college funds.

All of a sudden, six-year-olds are saying things like I’ll work until I die and How are the interest rates right now? and I can’t believe it’s tax season again and Chores and errands can’t be all there is to life and I’m not sure I’ll ever know real happiness and If love is real, I’ve never felt it.

They stop using their imagination to play family, and magic, and swamp monster, and dragons, and dinosaurs, and start using it to imagine the worst. They imagine time as a threat, the sweet scratch and snarl of it. They stop saying things like Next year, I went to the zoo . Time is linear now, an edge, a threshold, and there’s nowhere to go but over.

The kids you still manage to catch say things like Oh, you date all genders? Neat, where’s your belly button? and You aren’t a boy or a girl, cool—want to see me lick my foot?

The ones you don’t catch, the ones you miss because it’s just too much—the running back and forth, holding them close, tossing them back up to safety—they run past you dragging their hands through the tall wanting grass, yelling over their shoulders, You’re fucking disgusting, no one’s gonna want you! and We used to be a proper country! and I hope someone beats your face in.

This should bother you, but it’s almost a relief. Proof that the babies aren’t born with hatred in their bellies and in their blood.

Here’s what you don’t do: You don’t resign, though you receive several warnings, though the kids continue to slip through your arms, though you tell your boss this is a job for thousands upon thousands of people and you are just one. You don’t resign as playgrounds slowly empty and the swings become sick with ghosts. You don’t resign, though you should be better at accepting failure.

What you do: You call your ex-wife and tell her voicemail how all and none of the children look like the ones you two never had, how they have their same charming eyes and their same magic carpet lashes, resisting gravity and everything heavy. You tell her how some of the kids are pushed by someone they trust. And how the lucky ones, yeah the lucky ones, are blindfolded and led to the edge so they don’t see who it was that pushed them. They don’t see a face, just the ground roaring toward them. That way, when you catch them and toss them back to childhood, they don’t have to know, they don’t have to be faced with that knowing, of being told to love anyway, despite despite. Maybe one day, they will be like you: a person who seems to have just appeared one day as an adult, with no childhood to speak of.

You tell her voicemail how you’re never able to identify who pushes them—they’re too far away, and from what you can tell, none of them look like the villains that kids are taught to fear. At night, after you sit on the porch and watch the sky through the wasted trees, after you take your sleeping pills and your pain relievers, exhausted by the stupid beating of your heart, too fast and too worried, after you read in bed without enough light, after you finally close your eyes and count the kids falling off the cliff—one, two, three, four—and drift off to sleep somewhere around five hundred, after you do all that, you dream a red-hot, devouring dream. You dream of identifying those faces, once and for all. You dream of fistfuls of hair, you dream of your knee shattering cheek-bone, you dream of left hook, right hook, floor, you dream of bloodied knuckles and teeth scattered like skittles. You dream of a violence so innate, so instinctive, that it should make you fear yourself. But it doesn’t. It excites you; this is what you were made for: not catching but avenging. You dream of bodies hitting the floor, of a victory that no one sees but everyone can feel.

__________________________________

From Perverts by Mac Crane. Used with permission of the publisher, The Dial Press. Copyright © 2026 by Mac Crane.