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The New York Times loves to annotate the statements of powerful people - line by line, claim by claim - to show readers what’s real and what’s false.

So when I read their recent piece on China and longevity, packed to the brim with its own unexamined claims and recycled clichés, I figured I’d return the favor.

Screenshots of the relevant passages first, my comments directly after. Let’s go!

Come for the sensationalism, stay for the easy jokes. Buried inside this article there’s a hint of the real story - the one that presumably justified the assignment in the first place - namely that China is emerging as a credible geroscience challenger to U.S. dominance. That’s important!

But the article can’t help itself. Of course it can’t. It reaches immediately for the familiar clichés. “Immortality” becomes a rhetorical lure, a way to hook readers before gently mocking the very idea. Once again, a subject (namely, that aging will kill all of us) that demands seriousness gets flattened into caricature and we’ve yet to arrive at the first paragraph.

It begins with the hot mic thing between Putin and Winnie. At which point we are treated with a classic longevity myth. At least I assume the “anxious consternation” is the fear of “immortal dictators”. You know, why bother with tackling aging if it means bad people will live longer? Why bother with curing diseases at all? It’s better we all suffer and die instead!

Okay, moving on.

We’re only a few paragraphs in when a strange asymmetry shows up. The Times is already staging the piece as spectacle - “immortality islands,” “grapeseed pills,” the usual stuff - while simultaneously reassuring readers that it sees through the nonsense. The tone is: “don’t worry, we’re not falling for this; we know it’s all a bit ridiculous” (“extravagant claims,” “shaky science”).

And then, immediately, the article does the very thing it later scolds the longevity world for. It hands a microphone to a supplement startup and broadcasts, without any friction or follow-up, some of the most unhinged claims printed in a mainstream outlet this year - all centered on a senolytic molecule extracted from grapeseed that has never been shown to do anything in humans.

“Living to 150 is definitely realistic.”

Is that realistic? When we solve aging, yes. Will that depend on this molecule, and on Lonvi’s pill? My bet is: no. But I would also be very happy to be proven wrong.

“In a few years, this will be the reality.”

This is where the wheels come off. The oldest living human today is Ethel Caterham, age 116. Even if Caterham somehow reached 150 - which is extraordinarily unlikely (read: impossible) - we would not know that “in a few years.” The first confirmed 150-year-old cannot appear until 2059 at the absolute earliest.

And on the scientific side, we are nowhere near a position to make confident lifespan forecasts for currently living individuals. We have no validated biomarkers that function as reliable surrogates for long-term survival, and we have almost no approved medical interventions that have been shown to slow, stop, or reverse biological aging in humans. The idea that we could look at someone in 2027 and plausibly assert they’re on track for 150 is just ridiculous.

“In five to ten years, nobody will get cancer.”

Based on what? A mouse paper with an editor’s note flagging data errors? A supplement capsule? The article never asks the most basic follow-up question: Where is this coming from? What evidence supports it?

Instead, these lines float by as quotable color - the same kind of hype the piece pretends to critique.

This is the heart of the asymmetry: the Times warns readers about quackery while passively amplifying it. It mocks the aesthetic of immortality-seeking China, then prints outlandish claims without scrutiny.

The piece can’t resist invoking “American tech billionaires like Peter Thiel” as shorthand for proponents of unlimited lifespan. This is now a compulsory narrative move in mainstream longevity coverage: cast Silicon Valley as the spiritual descendants of medieval alchemists.

The problem is that it’s just flat out false. Take a look at this slide that I’m borrowing from Vitalism Foundation’s co-founder Adam Gries.

The Billionaire Paradox tells the actual story:

This is rounding-error money. A decently run biotech fund deploys more capital toward a single narrow therapeutic area. Meanwhile, global aging is a multi-trillion-dollar problem touching every sector of society.

Yet journalists, almost without exception, continue to frame longevity science as “a billionaire obsession” rather than what it actually is: a chronically underfunded domain of biomedical research with world-historical consequences.

The NYT repeats this trope exactly because it’s familiar, comforting, and provides a ready-made moral framing: this is just eccentric rich-guy stuff, not serious science. In reality, serious science is happening in spite of the rich, not because of them. Almost none of the world’s wealthiest people have meaningfully stepped into the arena.

Immediately after the billionaire cliché, the article reaches for the second compulsory trope: Qin Shi Huang and the mercury potions. It signals to readers that the desire to extend life is inherently hubristic. It casts modern longevity research as a direct descendant of ancient folly. It offers a tidy moral lesson: be careful what you wish for.

Ah, yes - the same “whiff of quackery” the article itself had just amplified a few paragraphs earlier.

This section should be the core of the story. China designating longevity as a national priority is significant. If a major power decides, in earnest, that aging biology is strategic infrastructure, that could change a lot of things: funding models, clinical trial scale, regulatory flexibility, translational speed. I mean, this sounds like state-level geroscience.

But instead of exploring any of that, the piece gives us… nothing. No specifics. No examples of what “pouring billions” actually means.

And then there’s Vadim Gladyshev - an outstanding scientist with decades of serious work behind him. The man could talk about all of this and I’m sure he would have, had the reporter asked him. Instead, The Times quotes him saying China has “improved very rapidly” and is “rapidly catching up.” What a waste.

Then we are treated to this.

Rather than unpacking China’s state-scale strategy, the article devotes valuable real estate to the longevity carnival: cryo “phone booths”, hyperbaric gadgets, “anti-aging magic boxes” and luxury “immortality islands”.

The problem isn’t that these gimmicks exist; of course they do. The problem is that The New York Times - just as almost all mainstream outlets - treats that perimeter as the field.

To their credit, the article concedes that “serious scientists” were present. I’ll give them that. But that concession immediately gives way to a framing that tells readers how seriously they are allowed to take the field.

Steve Horvath is quoted saying that “nobody serious talks about immortality at scientific conferences anymore because it is so absurd.” Come on, has anyone ever stood up at a Gordon or ARDD Conference and announced a plan for literal immortality?* No. But that isn’t the right question. The word “immortality” here is a rhetorical stand-in for a whole set of ambitions that are very much live scientific questions: radically extending healthy lifespan, reducing age-related mortality to near-zero, and ultimately eliminating the degenerative processes that cause 80-90 percent of human deaths.

* Well, okay, José has.

Horvath, a researcher I respect enormously, almost certainly meant “nobody uses the word immortality in a literal sense.” That’s true. But the article treats the line as if it settles the entire matter - as if rejecting the word means rejecting the project. This is another pattern in mainstream coverage: the semantics of “immortality” get used to shut down the biology of lifespan extension.

Then, with no sense of irony, the piece pivots to Immortal Dragons and dismisses it as a marketing operation hunting for “moneymaking opportunities.” Cryopreservation, 3D-printed organs, and whole-body replacement are portrayed as curiosities, not as three pillars in a serious long-term strategy to decouple lifespan from aging biology.

In reality:

Cryopreservation is the only existing fallback for people who will die before rejuvenation therapies mature. It is scandalously underfunded. Organ generation and replacement, including whole-body replacement, is the rational endpoint of regenerative medicine.

The irony is that the article scolds the field for “wild claims,” then immediately trivializes many of the areas that have the potential to deliver structural breakthroughs.

Look, the field of senolytics has huge potential. Clearing senescent cells could meaningfully shift morbidity curves. But calling a largely untested compound “the holy grail” does the opposite of helping.

And here the asymmetry returns in full force. The article warns us earlier about quackery, then immediately gives this company the most flattering framing imaginable: that its pills kill zombie cells, that this is “not just one more pill,” that it might help people live to 100 or even 120. There is not a single sentence that tells readers the one fact that actually matters:

This compound has never been shown to extend lifespan or reduce age-related disease in humans.

Granted, David Furman at the Buck Institute is quoted as saying the pills “seem promising” and need large trials. But a planned trial is not an endorsement of efficacy. It is an attempt to find out whether the claims survive contact with reality. You know, unlike this New York Times article.