Academic publisher Springer Nature to divest itself of woke Scientific American
About to go the way of the dodo.
As the saying goes, “Go woke, go broke.” The academic publisher Springer Nature has now announced it is selling off its two consumer magazines, Scientific American and the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft, stating that it wishes “to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education.”
I don’t know about the German magazine, but I do know that Scientific American has become a junk and very woke publication in recent years, unreliable for good reporting as its editorial policy has been instead to push a variety of leftists tropes, from queer sex theories to Covid falsehoods. As the article at the link notes,
The low-lights from the magazine’s stack of articles include:
- Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
- The magazine pushing “birth parent” terminology, which is utter nonsense in the face of real biology.
- The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.
- Endorsing Kamala Harris for President.
Other examples of the magazine pushing junk science can be seen here and here.
The article above also notes the interesting timing of this announcement, just before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was to approve the union its writer staff has recently overwhelming voted for. The unionization was supposedly about “compensation, workload, job security,” but it also included the demand for “editorial independence”, the typical code words used by the leftist journalists to demand the ability to write whatever they want, even if the magazine’s owners protest.
Well, rather than protest, this magazine’s owners decided to fire the magazine entirely.
Hat tip to reader Gary.
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I first started reading Scientific American on a regular basis when I started subscribing during my undergrad days more than 50 years ago. I kept renewing, but, after a while, I didn’t have enough “round tuits” to read it, so the magazines piled up.
After I moved into my current apartment, I created some extra room by donating the issues after SA became politically correct. It appears that I was fortunate to not have had time to read them.
I recall reading Philip Morrison’s book reviews and Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns. I found The Amateur Scientist feature quite interesting when “Red” Stong and, later, Jearl Walker wrote it. (Think of it as Hackaday decades before Hackaday was created.)
I also remember that SA published an excellent set of books on building amateur telescopes, including how to grind and finish mirrors. (That was another “round tuit” project for me, but those items became rather scarce.)
To quote a title of song by the rock band Queen, another one bites the dust.
They were VERY ugly to Bjorn Lomborg
I liked “21st Century Science & Technology” even if it was a Lyndon Larouche rag.
I have hardback copies of the three books of A. K. Dewdney’s columns from SA. His and Martin Gardner’s columns were must-reads for me back in the late ’70s through the mid-’90s. I haven’t even glanced at a copy of that magazine in years, since they went all-in on the unscientific liberal nonsense.
They were VERY ugly to Bjorn Lomborg
I liked “21st Century Science & Technology” even if it was a Lyndon Larouche rag.
w.r.t. Lomborg: Correct. That review was a disgraceful hit job, and then (IIRC) they doubled down.
This seems to be the typical endgame for institutions taken over by the left. First, they gut and skin the thing and wear it as a skinsuit to trade on said institution’s former reputation for as long as that can be plausibly done, then to just continue brazening it out as the uncured hide they are wearing begins to smell, then visibly decay. At that point either the entire institution dies and the parasites within the corpse disperse to do whatever additional mischief they can still find to do elsewhere, or the institutional husk is taken back over by people with sense and integrity, the parasites are fired and some effort is made to restore former credibility. We see this latter scenario being at least attempted in the case of CBS, CNN and certain other former media handmaidens of the screechy left. I have my doubts about how ultimately successful such efforts will prove. The time for certain forms of media – especially newspapers and magazines – seems to have pretty decisively passed. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The really heavy lift for this process is going to be the public schools and academe and that project has barely started.
I kept my subscription from 1980-ish until October of 2008. That’s when SCIAM ran an article about a Columbia journalism study that showed that statistically, presidential candidate McCain had gotten much more favorable press coverage than candidate Obama, a preposterous proposition!
If you bothered to read to the very end and parse the dates, you learned that the hundreds of news articles reviewed by the dozens of grad students came not from the time of the current Presidential campaign, but from the primary season of the prior year. You know, when McCain was the media’s Republican darling (stalking-horse) and upstart Obama was ruining the coronation of Her Inevitableness, Hillary!
What a crock of misdirection! I cancelled immediately.
Did you send Happy Presidents ‘Day greeting to Hillary?
Funny the way the most entitled rail against their opponents’ entitlement
Accuracy In Media and FIRING LINE was all Americans had to counter the Dan Rathers.
I think Cal Thomas reported on a study that admitted a liberal bias, but that was at least a decade ago.
Remember how wonderful the The Amateur Scientist Department of the magazine was in the 1970s?
What happened to the people who used to read such magazines?
What happened to those people? The same thing that happened to the people who wanted to buy a quality EV from Ford or GM… they found a product elsewhere, or they gave up.
I didn’t leave SCIAM, it left me!
Eh… I was always an OMNI man. I’m thankful, I guess, that it folded long before woke could infect it.
I read both. Omni published some great science fiction short stories.
I used to look forward to getting my copy of Discover in the mail every month. And then it got infected with woke in the early 2000’s and suddenly half the “science” stories were about this or that government program getting started or shut down, the latest NGO heading to someplace in Africa or Malayasia to raise LGBT or Climate awareness, or… and I let that subscription lapse. I picked up a couple issues of SciAm to see if that would would work instead, and it was pretty much just as bad.
Publisher LabX, which just aquired SciAm, acquired Discover about a year and a half ago. I suppose I could go look at some of the latest stuff on the Discover Magazine website and see if that bodes well for SciAm or not, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it.
Or you could continue to read Behind the Black, which isn’t infected with “woke.” :)
I AM doing a fund-raising campaign right now. :) :) :)
But we’re all broke too
Actually, we’re not. Compare the cars in a high school parking lot to those of back when. Students and even parents couldn’t afford all those upscale cars when i was school age. There are so many ways we are wealthy compared to 50-100 years back that there is no comparison.
There are absolutely problems that should be addressed. That doesn’t mean they can’t be. #1 in my mind is the corruption of society in which getting the right people in office or getting unearned checks is considered more important than delivering value.
Here’s the website I mentioned in my earlier comment:
Hackaday
It has a lot of articles for tinkerers and experimenters, plus it also includes comments on scientific and technical matters. I first heard about it on an amateur radio podcast that I used to listen to.
What happened to Scientific American reminds me of how another formerly august publication, National Geographic, mutated into something horrid.
One of the sad things about the destruction of Scientific American was that it was actually educational. The topics it covered ranged from, say, paleontology to microelectronics. Often, those were on subjects that I hadn’t heard about before. For example, during the 1980s, I read articles on nuclear winter (Carl Sagan was one of the authors, as I recall) as well as phased-array radar, such as those used for ballistic missile defence.
Much of that information eventually became freely available on the Internet. I suppose, when that happened, SA had to have some reason to justify its existence and became politically correct to attract readers to replace those who found what they were looking for on websites.
I don’t like what is going on with the Nasaspaceflight forums.
Some kids actually visited my nearby library (on summer break no less…good on em’) and one asked about websites on space history, and what future missions might look like.
As it happens, their space history and advanced concepts pages are “protected” now and the younglings there –and all over–can no longer read about space.
BTB is arranged in terms of updates, and Mark Wade’s site by Alphabet–but the NSF has topics…which is easier for kids to use.
SPF is even better in that regard, but you need an account to zoom in on pictures.
So the spirit of Photobucket is alive and well in space websites being increasingly hostile.
Cosmoquest Forum has died off….and they banned me years ago when I pointed out the fact about Biden’s dementia.
I told the kids about Hazegray and Nick Stevens art sites as the library was about to close.
“The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.”
I’ve not seen the article; don’t intend to. But, I’d bet I could come up with at least 1000 reasonable sounding words making that argument; just on that brief. Honestly, it almost writes itself.
More uncertainty of science
Many experts agree that Michelle (aka “Big Mike”) Obama is really a dude.
Example:
“UFC fighter calls Michelle Obama ‘a man’ after winning bout at White House”
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/josh-hokit-michelle-obama-man-ufc/4117060/
Unfortunately Democrats cannot define what a woman is so this conundrum may never be solved.
My recent reading of Scientific American has been limited to issues printed in the ’90s and the oughts. The 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s.
It is a marvelous historical source for technology of that period, and I write extensively about the history of technology and engineering.
One of the beauties of Scientific American, when I used to read it, was that it described scientific discoveries and technical innovations to people outside those fields, giving them a good understanding of the subjects, and doing so without excessive jargon or obscure mathematics.
It was through SA that I first heard of plate tectonics. I was in senior high school back then and the library had a subscription to it. I came across an article which described some of the early work done by scientists like geophysicist Dr. John Tuzo Wilson. That was when Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift made sense to me because plate tectonics was the means by which it occurred.
About 50 years ago, I first read about black holes, which were still a matter of speculation. Through that, I heard about two chaps who did pioneering work on them, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne.
All that came to an end when SA became politically correct.
Knowledge is an intended casualty of the Left.
I quit reading all those magazines when I could no longer find a single one that did not have a mention of global warming in it someplace and somehow.
In fact a found a few that half of the ads mentioned GW and every single article mentioned GW. Almost all blaming people for it.
I just got tired of it.
So, no longer Scientific or American.
Sad demise of an icon started in 1845. I was a regular in the (19) 80s and 90s. But it soured in many ways those here have noted. It didn’t need to go that way, and I wonder with how much intention this was done?