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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

For a long time I had subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American. Scientific American slid down into the space Popular Science was by really lightening up the content of their analysis. (An interview with their editor-in-chief called it being 'more accessible' by writing for people who had not attended college versus for people who had at least a four year college degree). Everybody suffered from 'the web' and how much stuff was being put out for 'free' and nobody understood information economics yet.

I still get Popular Mechanics, mostly because I subscribed using miles on an airline I don't fly hardly at all. And I ended up dropping my SciAm subscription in favor of Science News.

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> writing for people who had not attended college versus for people who had at least a four year college degree

I'm from Italy so I read Le Scienze since the 80s. It was a translation of almost every article of Scientific American (they had a license), Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games plus one original Italian article and many very short stories (they are original Italian content now, I can't remember who were the authors back then.) I started reading it well before going to university. It was more challenging than the more vanilla scientific magazines on the newsstands but hardly not accessible by somebody interested in science and technology.

It dumbed down when Scientific American dumbed down but I could get interesting content on the Internet by then. I still subscribe to it. It gets some articles from Quanta Magazine now, maybe Scientific American does it too.

As an aside, when I see a link to a SciAm story here, I know that I'll get the Italian translation in my mail box after two or three months. I read both.

SA decided that politics was its business. As if we didn't have enough of that already.

Even back in the day, they covered such things as the argument for/against ballistic missile defense (well before SDI).

In the 80s I recall reading an article discussing whether a laser could bring down a missile. It was all technical, though, not political.

I mean, would you have said the same thing about Zeitschrift für Physik in the 1920s if they had objected to the accumulation of influence by "good German physics?" If you warned the editors to stay in their lane and avoid politics, you wouldn't been wrong, but... neither would they.

Failure to speak up when you see an enemy on the horizon may be polite, but that's all you can say for it. Right-wing politics in America is careening headlong toward flat-out racism, which in addition to being Wrong and Bad is also just plain unscientific.

It's not about politeness. There is no shortage of media warning about racism. It's nice sometimes to read something about science and engineering without a political angle.

In the D programming language forums, we enforce a "no politics" rule. And you know, our members like this policy! It's a refreshing place to talk about the joy of programming, and not politics or cooking or motorcycle repair. There is no problem finding other places where people can do that.

Myself, I enjoy political debate, as you all know well. But not in the D forums, and not at the D conferences. All political stripes are welcome there, but not discussion of it!

I hear you, and like I said, you're not wrong. But your position of choice is a privileged one, and I hope it doesn't prove to be only a temporary luxury.

> But your position of choice is a privileged one

I have no idea what you mean by that.

By 1939 it was too late for the journal editors to say anything, but they no longer had the luxury of not caring.

The way it seems to work is, it's always too early to say something, and then it's too late. It's never the "right time."

In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" book it was clear that the physicists knew what was going on, and a lot had left by 1939. They wound up in Los Alamos.

That funny for me to read, I stopped buying Scientific American I think in the early 2000s as I found the articles too far beyond my comprehension at time and didn't have time to study them in detail.

I had a subscription to SciAm when I was young, back in the 1970s. It was like something published on a different planet.

I agree Scientific American really isn't what it used to be and is not worth reading

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