SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN….Continuing on the subject of science journalism, David had a short post the other day praising Scientific American. I’m just curious: what does everyone think of this magazine? I used to read it pretty religiously, but a few years ago it started to decline and finally I stopped buying it. To me, they’re stuck in some kind of limbo: not as technical as they used to be, but not as fluffy as Discover. Both kinds of magazine are fine, but being in the middle seems like a loser.
(I should add that they’ve always published semi-political pieces ? nuclear proliferation, welfare reform, etc. ? but under John Rennie they began publishing pieces so egregiously tendentious that even my liberal biases couldn’t take it any longer. I mean, a science magazine should at least pretend to some level of objectivity, shouldn’t it?)
