I lost interest in Sci Am in the late 1980s when they got bought by a German publishing conglomerate and started printing articles with process color instead of spot. For about a decade they were really struggling with the monthly columns like The Amateur Scientist and various replacements for Martin Gardener's Mathematical Recreations column.
I noticed they were "too woke" at least five years ago, like a lot of conservative commentators the authors of this article come across as slow on the draw. I see it as mildly annoying, like an obnoxious character in an anime that you might still watch anyway, not an existential threat to western civilization.
To what extent might this not really be ideological, per se, but an economic shift which drives media companies towards better-selling (i.e. popularly controversial) topic areas?
I'm thinking of how the History Channel stopped being about history.
I noticed the shift and cancelled my subscription. It was one of the last magazines I read regularly. This coming from one of the most progressive people you'll ever meet!
But here's the thing - you have to deal with reality head-on. You have to have the courage to publish what the data shows, regardless of how it may be perceived. In fact, a primary function of a science journal is to challenge common perceptions as new evidence and data show them to be wrong.
The editorial shift at Scientific American told me they weren't going to continue doing any of that going forward - so there was no point in my continuing my subscription.
I noticed they were "too woke" at least five years ago, like a lot of conservative commentators the authors of this article come across as slow on the draw. I see it as mildly annoying, like an obnoxious character in an anime that you might still watch anyway, not an existential threat to western civilization.