Scientific American

I am terribly impressed with the reviews by Thom Wikman, Iain Massey and Bryan Catey. In Grade 13 my Bio teacher impressed me with the idea that I should be able to read SciAm as a High School Graduate. For 15 years I read every (non-advertising) word in every issue I received. Month by month it became more and more odd to me. Why those articles on Soviet weaponry? Why were they so fascinated with the Soviets, and with communism itself?

I kept reading, still in trust. Then the Environmentalism began to take over. No longer were the communists a threat... Gorbachev had diluted it, partly in response to Reagan, and partly in response to economics. Politically, the U.S.S.R. was a failure in economics and in the life and happiness of its citizenry.

Sci Am persisted in one or two articles per issue on *Russian* stuff. There could be little doubt, they were promoting Russian style communism as a political ideal, even after it proved clearly violent against citizens, lead to massive economic failure and mass starvation, depression, alcoholism and so forth. By SciAm's editorial policies, we Westerners *needed* to be reined in and taught to adhere to the Collectivist party line!

But as the fear of nuclear winter faded, the new doomsday scenario was the Chlorine monoxide Ozone Hole and Anthropogenic Global Warming. Even in the 1980s AGW was blatantly false.

CO2 on Earth was at an 800 million year ebb (atm [CO2] =.027%). It was so low that plants were evolving new ways to capture CO2 (Crassulacean Acid and C4 plants). In 1000 AD Scotland had vinyards and a climate equivalent to today's Southern France! Thee facts were plain in 1980, yet SciAm editors could not be bothered with them. So...

Scientific American is NOT scientific. Its editors play into fear-mongering and readily fall for transparent hoaxes (the three top Global Warming Scientists should spend at LEAST 25 years in jail)! No, the editors of SciAm are NOT scientific and should be embarrassed out of their positions.

Magazine is not technical, did not expect it to be.
It is just boring and uninteresting. I like science and
want to learn new things. This magazine seems to suck the life
out of anything interesting. Most articles at least
in the July issue seem to be left wing propaganda. Way too
much editorial commentary to promote a agenda. I
don't care about their politics.

Like so many others, I grew up reading my dad's stash of Scientific American magazines. Like so many others, I got my own subscription when I moved out. And like so many others, I cancelled in disappointment when they dumped the real scientists and turned everything over to "popular science" journalists.

In the years since then, I've also heard about how they've become increasingly political. I like to think I'm an open-minded guy, however, so I decided to give them another chance.

Boy, did I pick a fine time to do it. The May 2010 issue, which focuses on embryonic stem cell research, begins with an editorial that essentially tells people like me to go to hell and it just gets worse from there. Not only is the current editor-in-chief proud of the political slant -- or as she calls it, the "expert-informed point of view" -- of the modern SciAm, she makes some incredibly condescending and misleading statements to justify it. (That's pretty typical of a politician, actually.)

Well, Ms. DiChristina, YOU can go to hell. What you're writing about isn't real science, it's scientific advocacy. You say you can't have one without the other, but dozens of other magazines and journals seem to manage it just fine. I think I'll take my business to one of them.

I decided to get a subscription after being assigned readings from the magazine for a college biology class. Very pleased with the magazine and the speed at which it was shipped.

Like a lot of these magazines, Scientific American has a mix of content - some good, some not so interesting. When I subscribed, I found that several issues would go by without an interesting article. However, when it had an interesting article, it was good, often written by an expert in the field. That's the best part of this magazine - it really lets you keep up with current research in a variety of fields. Recommended.