It has hardly ever been on the coffee table of most Americans, but for those of us in certain fields, Scientific American was once one of those magazines.  Everybody read it.  It was a great way to keep up with other fields and to see your field made accessible to a public wishing to put in the work.  It was often fun.  The regular columns from Martin Gardner and then Douglas Hofstadter on mathematics were great stuff.  I enjoyed a short correspondence with Hofstadter and reading his Pulitzer winning book remains a formative experience in how I view the interaction of mathematics and intelligence.

My subscription followed me into the digital age when I would get the magazine “online” as an unwieldy pdf.  Somewhere in that period I let my subscription drop.  The magazine was growing increasingly political.  No longer was I learning about theoretical physics or developments in artificial intelligence.  Now I was being treated to hand waving statistics about climate change and lectured about what government had to do in response.  No more would an article tell me about what scientists were doing and how they were doing it in response to the latest virus plaguing the third world.  Now I was being told how those plagues were the results of policy.  The magazine had ceased to be about science and had become just another policy rag.

Well, as of the October issue, they have taken the final step – endorsing Joe Biden for the presidency.  The argument presented by the editorial is virtually indistinguishable from what one might encounter in the NYTimes or WaPo.  The transition is complete.  Scientific American is no longer a scientific magazine, it is now just another magazine that happens to cover science.  I would be in deep mourning had I not long ago mourned for this loss.

Christianity Today went full politics back around last Christmas.   And now this.  Forget the fall of Mainstream Media, it has always covered politics.  Specialty journalism is officially dead – consumed by politics.

These are most precarious times.