Scientific American was once a great magazine, but now it is just a good magazine. I read Scientific American as a teenager in the 80's, I read it as a student and as an engineer in the 90's and I am still reading Scientific American and subscribing to it. Even today I enjoy reading Scientific American very much, but I am not pleased with the fact that the depth of the articles has decreased.
In the olden days the writers for Scientific American were not afraid of putting mathematical formulas, algorithms, in depth analysis, and statistics as well as references to research articles in their articles. Today's Scientific American is not written by scientists, but by journalists and free lancers.
It used to be that scientists and engineers interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise were the magazine's target audience. Now, however, Scientific American is aimed at general readers who are interested in science. Scientific American is now looking more like Discover magazine. In my opinion Discover magazine and Scientific American should complement each other (in depth reading vs. light reading) and not be so similar.
Another wrong turn that they have taken is that they have become slightly political with a noticeable left-wing agenda. For example, the attack on Björn Lomborg should never have occurred and would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. Scientific American should be apolitical in my opinion. I understand that these changes were made for business reasons.
However, the illustrations are great, the topics are varied and include, for example, medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology, artificial intelligence, economics, geology, archeology, and social science. I am interested in all of these subjects, but I enjoy reading about physics, cosmology and artificial intelligence the most. I always find something interesting to read in Scientific American. I highly recommend Scientific American even though I would like them to take one step back with regards to the depth of the content.
UPDATE an hour after I wrote the following review I checked out American Scientist magazine I am now a proud subscriber. AmSci is everything that SciAm used to be! I'll keep my SciAm subscription for another year, and then will probably drop SciAm.
I'm so frustrated with Sci Am I could scream. I've been a subscriber since 1975; I have all the back issues lovingly stored in expensive magazine cases. I used to look forward to each new issue with excited, joyful anticipation. Now I dread the arrival of each pitiful rag. The only reason I have not dropped my subscription is the fading hope that they will fire most of the editorial board, starting with DiChristina, who is doing her best to morph SciAm into a Frankenstein's Monster of Popular Science (she used to be the editor of PopSci).
The "new" format is just another step down the long road to failure. The glued-binding keeps the magazine from sitting flat on a table, and if a page is torn there is no easy way to repair it.
It is distressingly skinny, a mere 82-96 pages per issue. When I complain about this, the response is that paper and ink are so, so terribly expensive but if that is the problem, why do they squander page after page with either full-color pictures and graphics that add nothing to the content, or even worse, waste almost all of a page with nothing at all no text, no images? Can't they afford to pay for a few thousand more words to fill the empty space? Here's a list of the wasted pages in the January 2011 issue: 34,35,40,41,46,47,half of 52, 53,58,65,half of 69,72,78, half of 79 and half of 88! This represents nearly 20% of the pages available for non-advertising content!
The layout has moved some of the few remaining decent features such as "50,100 & 150 Years Ago" to the back of the magazine. Even worse, the middle now has "feature articles" that are only two or three pages and a few hundred words long (because they are mostly whitespace or useless photos).
In the current issue, only two "full length" articles are written by actual research scientists the rest of the fluff is penned by "science writers" from failing institutions such as the New York Times or grad students! Issue after issue goes by without a single equation appearing anywhere (except in ads for software)
Even the few decent articles, written by real scientists have been shortened to 6 pages or less, and the quality of the writing has deteriorated. Even as recently as 2004 I would LEARN things when I read Sci Am; now I am teased, confused and forced to research on the web to figure out what the author was trying to express, or (even worse) spending time scribbling corrections in the margins.
Long gone are former delights such as "Mathematical Games" or the "Amateur Scientist"
The content is consistently, disturbingly political, and always slanted to the left. I'm no right-winger, but anyone with a shred of objectivity can see the blatant bias that permeates the magazine. Essay after essay bemoaning human-caused climate change by hacks that can't do simple math that would tell them that if every one of the fruitless carbon-saving recommendations were adopted, the reduction in greenhouse gases would amount to an insignificant fraction of the total atmospheric mass of same. Every point in the "Political Wish List" on page 12 is stupid and just plain incorrect ignoring for the moment the idiocy of even having a page devoted to a "Political Wish List" in a magazine purportedly devoted to science!
Even in the esoteric realm of theoretical physics, you will no longer find any essay that does not toe the "superstrings or the highway" mindset.
I'm not sure if circulation has increased since the dumbing-down started, and I really don't care. If it has gone up, it just means that I have nothing in common with the new subscriber base.
I'm genuinely freaked-out and at a loss. I don't want to see a gap in my unbroken swath of issues, but it galls me every time I write a check and send it to this bunch of losers. Perhaps I should just go to Walmart and snap hi-res photos of every page of every new issue, print and bind them, and wait until I see the problems have been corrected before sending them any more of my hard-earned money!
Disgusted,
Steve Crye
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Yes, I'm one of those who sadly dropped my subscription over a decade ago, when the magazine abandoned content written by scientists in favour of populist journalism written by staff.
Before that, I had been a faithful subscriber and enthusiastic reader since the early 1970s.
I now subscribe to American Scientist. I'm not a scientist, but I like my updates on science to be dinkum, as we say in Australia.
**********
That's what I wrote back in 2007, and I still think it was true then.
But emboldened by comments on my review, I bought the December 2012 edition to see if I still think it's true now. I don't. While I wasn't watching, someone has picked up my one-time favourite magazine out of the gutter of glib populism, and given it status again.
Welcome back, Sci Am!
The letters pages once again debate and enlarge topics from past articles. The prose has stopped trying to be cute and undemanding, and is again written to inform and lead the mind. The tone has returned to literate adult discourse. Content is written by real scientists, and by journalists who know science and like it. The investigative piece on pharmacology research and big pharma pulls no punches.
Boy, what a relief!
One small point: my airport copy cost AUD$15.95, stickered over a cover price of USD$5.99. With the two currencies hovering within a bull's roar of parity, that looks like an opportunity for a parallel importer.
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Witnessing the editorial deterioration of Scientific American over the years has been a sad disappointment. I began to read SA in my high school library nearly fifty years ago. From the 60's through the 80s' it was a serious and dignified journal with explanations by major scientists of their own work. The Amateur Scientist and Mathematical Recreations columns had many devotees. In these years many who chose careers in science credited SA as an inspiration. Apparently it was not considered cool or profitable enough by its publishers however; sometime in the 90's SA was taken over by a new crowd, the articles now written by journalists, and it became strongly politicized, with a shrill liberal agenda. They turned away from hard science and devoted more pages to psychology and social issues, often with a clear bias attached. Many of the columnists were no longer significant thinkers but just some cronies of the editor borderline cranks whose monthly "thoughts" are not worth the paper. Steve Mirsky, the "humorist," is simply a waste of a page and Michael Shermer has nothing new to say. (Jeff Sachs however is an exception he is a genuine leader in international development.)
There has also been an ongoing obsession with the evolution / creationist debate, not bringing any new scientific insights as a leading science magazine could and should have done, just elitist religion-bashing and constant ridicule of the "stupid" creationists. Embarrassing even to non-religious readers. Even the art direction is wacky, highly impressionistic (people with blue heads and swoopy arcs in outer space seem to be used for ALL subjects) and of no value for illustrating the content.
During most of this phase the editor was John Rennie, a mediocre mind who had no business leading such an important institution. He guided Scientific American down a soft path which dissipated fifty years of prestige. Very sad. Recently his understudy Mariette DiChristina has taken over. She also is a journalist rather than an intellectual leader with a personal grasp of the vastness of modern science. None of these people are PhDs. The advisory board of famous scientists seems to be only for show; I am surprised they allow their names to be used as the magazine slides downhill.
The bottom point so far has been the September, 2009 issue where the magazine's hack staff (not a panel of real scientists) took it upon themselves to choose the greatest "origins" in the history of the universe. Among their choices; Scotch tape, the vibrator (female sex toy), the paper clip, intermittent windshield wipers, and cupcakes. Yes, cupcakes. The venerable Scientific American, continuously published for 160 years, chose the paper clip and the cupcake as two of the most important innovations of all time. What a pack of idiots. This is what happens when Nobel Prize winners are replaced by Steve Mirsky.
It didn't have to be like that. Magazines like Smithsonian and National Geographic have maintained their identity and high editorial standards consistently, decade after decade, while SA has lost it. During a period where science itself has exploded on every front, Scientific American has been surpassed by many other sources in print and on the Web. HowStuffWorks attracts ten times the readership of the SA website, likewise Discovery. Popular Science has become much more sophisticated in recent years. Wired News is brilliant. PhysOrg is an excellent way to keep up across the sciences. The Web pages of Science and Nature highlight recent discoveries. Physical Review Focus interprets recent developments for students and non-experts, and does a very good job.
After forty years of subscribing, I will not renew. Others who may not be renewing include your local library or university after being taken over recently by the Nature Group, the most aggressively profit hungry of the academic publishers, Scientific American announced they were raising their subscription price to libraries by a factor of 10X as if they were a major archival research journal rather than a pop-science disposable like Psychology Today. Good strategy folks piddling away the uniqueness of your franchise while arrogantly raising the price.
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I've subscribed to this magazine for around 15 years now, and I have always loved it. There is a great variety of science and technology subjects covered and the articles have always seemed to have the right level of technical detail for me.
Unfortunately this magazine has changed over the past year or two. The past six months have been so bad that I'm finally throwing in the towel and cancelling my subscription and looking for a replacement. Every issue now contains a steady dose of environmentalism that often only vaguely resembles science and could be better described as sensationalism. I've also noticed a recent trend of religion bashing, with the underlying message being that anyone who believes in God must be an ignorant rube.
It is really a shame because before this trend it was an excellent, un-biased magazine that was pretty much a perfect fit for me. Had I written this review a couple years ago I would have certainly given it 5 stars. Maybe in a couple years I'll check and see if they've gotten it back on track and removed much of the bias. This magazine has been around for over 150 years, so I suspect they are adept at change.
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