Richard of Oregon and others–

Re Scientific American

back in high schoola nd college I used to haunt teh libraries and would look up old cpies of SA, just out of antiquarian interest.

They have ALWAYS reflected the cultural and political obsessions of the day. Go back to 1910 and they were obsessed about all aspects of designing Dreadnought battleships and automobiles. The 1880s about new applications for electricity.

Sometimes the stuff was technically OK, sometimes not, but they’ve always been front-runners with what is topical rather than what is going on in real research. Not that they miss everything, but the slant and emphasis has always been there.

I gave up on ‘em about a 15 yrs ago, the PC response to The Bell Curve coming on top of some insane articles about nuclear weapons policy in the Reagan years were just too much.