That is such a shame about Scientific American. When I was in school long ago, I used to sit in the library and read it every time I had the opportunity. It had great articles that were so informative.
Then again, Time and Newsweek used to be about news.
I had a subscription to SciAm all through high school and college, which would have been 1978. When I was in seventh grade, our next-door neighbor gave me about five years worth of back issues; I can still picture the three neat stacks in the hallway outside my bedroom, each stack about a foot and a half tall.
I truly loved that magazine in those days. I read ever page over and over, and learned so much from them.
I distinctly remember a strange event in Scientific American. It happened in 1974 or 1975. The magazine printed a two-page article that looked like an advertisement, right on the centerfold. The subject of the “article” was not a scientific topic at all; it was congressman Les Aspin, whom the magazine was promoting as some sort of “new generation” of science-oriented legislators, destined to help carry science to new heights in America. The article appeared over the seal of the magazine’s publisher, W. H. Freeman.
I thought it looked odd and out of place. It was rare for Scientific American to say anything about a personality, or at least a living personality (there might have been an article about Linus Pauling, I’m not sure). This Les Aspin thing struck me as odd and puzzling.
It was around that time that the magazine began to take a more explicitly political positions, both on its editorial page and in its selection of articles.
When RR announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, SciAm responded with a number of articles that made the case that Star Wars was hopeless, a waste of money that would destabilize the balance of power between the United States and the USSR. An MIT professor named Kostas Tsipis was the author of several of these articles, but there were others. There were articles against the deployment of Pershing-II missiles in Europe, and in support of the theory of “nuclear winter” as promoted by Carl Sagan and the TTAPS collective.
Now, it strikes me as being mainly a magazine about the role of science in politics, with an obvious and total orientation toward goals that liberals misuse the prestige of science to promote and further.
It is indeed unfortunate, but the whole concept of ordinary Americans as people with an inherent interest in science and technology is obsolete.