This quote was when I know something was seriously wrong with the magazine I read assiduously as a child:
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
You are quoting it out of context. The article made reference to endurance events prior to this as well. Also, it’s extremely relevant to idea that Neanderthal have similar wear patterns on the bones. This article is in reference to hunter gatherer theory. Our modern concepts of male/female physical characteristics may make our judgments of prior humans inaccurate.
“ Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
As other people are pointing out, we are going to great rhetorical lengths to avoid the empirical fact that in almost every major event based on physical strength or endurance, men outperform women. Are suggesting that every data point from every cultural, ethnic, national background in the world is contaminated by sexist bias?
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
But that's obvious nonsense. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running. We're talking about many, many data points, all pointing in the same direction: in practice, men outperform women in distance sports [1].
To even begin to argue against this mountain of evidence, you have to resort to slippery rhetorical tactics, like this:
> As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
So, the argument being implied here (but not actually made!) is that the performance difference we see throughout the history of the marathon is due to...pace setters?
Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?
This reminds me of the old expression: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
[1] I'm talking about distributions here. Obviously, there are going to be many women who outperform many men on an individual basis.
“Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?“
Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.
> Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
Come on. Think things through to the end. If it were actually true that the pace-setters could run faster than the competitors for the full marathon, then the pace-setters would win the event.
What you want to say is that the pace-setters are capable of running a faster pace than the competitors for a shorter distance. Maybe that's true (I doubt it), but it's not responsive. Pace setters are there to set a pace, like a metronome. If the competitors feel this pace is inadequate, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from running faster, or demanding a faster pace-setter.
Where did I say “for the whole marathon”? The point of pace setters is that they run shorter distances faster and then drop out. They’re given a tempo to run by the lead group, yes, and they enable that lead group to run faster by providing shelter. This is true from the 1500 upwards; look at Josh Kerr’s recent mile record, the Breaking 2 project, etc.
> "There is a prominent sex-based difference in athletic performance such that males outperform females by 7%-14% in races from 100 m to marathon. In ultramarathons, the difference is often much smaller, leading to speculation that females are "built" for the sport. However, data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race. This study compared data from two ultramarathons where males and females competed in comparable numbers. [...] In conclusion, the sex-based performance discrepancy shrinks to 1%-3% in ultramarathons when males and females compete in comparable numbers."
A key point in the above quote is "data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race." This calls the "many, many data points" that you mentioned into question.
Re keeping an open mind, the corollary is that if you're not willing to ever question your assumptions - a.k.a. biases - you're not going to be able to update your understanding based on the facts.
> It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running.
And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get? Also, as you are saying yourself: this is about distributions, not necessarily about the top 0.1% of the world. The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then. You might disagree with this, but the article is more nuanced, and reducing it to the rage-bait comment above does not do it justice at all.
> And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get?
So what? The gap exists. Saying that it diminishes with distance is interesting, certainly, but it's a far cry from evidence that the gender gap is due to something other than biology.
> The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then.
This is sophistry. In reality, even on average, men are faster than women.
The worst thing about this article is it seems to fail to understand the basic of hypothesis-testing, the bedrock of science.
Title: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
Subtitle: The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
Saying there isn't enough evidence to prove a hypothesis is not the same as proving its negation. Failing to reject the null hypothesis is not the same as proving it.
> The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.
I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.
Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".
My first computer science professor claimed women could not have been the first programmers because they were physically incapable of learning something this complex. Sadly this is exactly what I expect here.
Of course the quote is "accurate" -- the text appears in the article. But here we are purportedly discussing science journalism and we yet get troglodytic comments like that. I see no refutation of the article from you or anyone else. Your comment is pure emo and of no value whatsoever.
I'd posit that it's not primarily ignorance, but the idea that ideology can bend reality. This idea is quite successful at spreading, in part due to ignorance, but there are other factors too.
This is the paragraph. "As an example" here implies that they are talking about sports in general, not just endurance events.
Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best...
> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.
No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.
IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).
> Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game.
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
Jasmin Paris has won a fair number of extremely difficult ultras in mixed company, for example. Really long ultras are not an exclusively male domain. The marathon is if anything too short.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
Persistence hunting is speculative as a guiding force in evolution. It is a very rare practice amongst modern hunter/gatherer and there's no archaeological evidence that it was common enough historically to be important.
Compare this to game drives/trapping which are both mentioned in this article and have significant archaeological and anthropological evidence.
I went and read it and it doesn't seem to matter to me that it's about ultra-endurance events? Of course differences in stride length and endurance physiology will matter for run performance.
The full paragraph:
>Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
The claim that is being made in the article is that only cultural differences are relevant. Saying the relative effects of cultural and biological differences are hard to know would not be a very controversial statement.
Yes, which is why I am happy to state it having not read that deeply into the evidence either way. I would argue that stating "Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences" is a very strong statement that the scientific consensus has many counter-factuals available to disprove.
Get an issue of Scientific American from the past few years and compare with one from the early 90s. It will become obvious why Scientific American no longer has readers.
I used to subscribe to SciAm, just looked at their website after around 3 years, and the lead article is "Why partisan politics may be changing people's accents."
The Atlantic went the same way, but as more mainstream magazine, that's kind of okay. Not acceptable for SciAm.
The Atlantic did not shroud itself in glory during the pandemic. Better than SciAm, certainly, but they publish a lot of dubious stuff right next to decent articles.
Which, regardless of what you feel about Fauci, is at least against type for the Atlantic. But in 2020, they had no problem publishing garbage like this:
I've been thinking a lot about this example of decline, and the conclusion I've come to is that as print media has lost relevance and power, the only people willing to fill the remaining roles are those people who have ideological axes to grind.
Basically, formerly great media empires have declined to the point where only people willing to work for low wages in uncertain careers will accept positions writing for those institutions. So we mourn the loss of the brand, but if anyone actually cared about the brand in practice, it would not employ these people.
Great thought. Inline with this - I think the form of media changing has also changed the demographic of people who are drawn to produce it, and that reflects in the quality and ethics of the entire medium as a whole. In turn we have a society that rewards attention over the truth or what's right and wrong and only seems to continue to worsen day by day.
I suscribe to Le Scienze, which was founded in 1968 as the Italian translation of Scientific American. You might find that weird but knowledge of English was not common back then. Furthermore it contains local articles and other local content. However it's still mostly a translation of most of the articles of SciAm, from one or two months before. Sometimes I read them in advance in English from the links here on HN. It's run by an Italian editor, they've got a contract with SciAm but they are not part of the same business group.
It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.
However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.
Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.
scientific progress is facts plus people, people researching and people evaluating, judging the science.
people dynamics matter.
and we can and do _scientifically_ look at that part of "doing science".
for example in social sciences.
and their findings, and then attempts to remedy injustice uncovered in these findings are what drove and drives approaches for remedy, "policies".
these _of course_ are disputed by those benefitting from the status quo, like publishers as part of the top wealth percentile.
so far so obvious.
what baffles me is that some call injustice "issue du jour", when it is much older than Christianity.
even more so when as we found out taking care benefits business.
and I dare going one step further: if we don't discuss social implications of science and tech, the AI gives the wealthy cheap access to smarts, while it takes smarts the lever for a good life.
to me, the advent of AI puts the question of societal justice _in science_, in intelligence work, front and center.
I've been a continuous subscriber since the early 1980s.
The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.)
It's improved a lot over the last few years.
Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.
Reading the comments I hear about disagreements with science. Headline and articles. I don’t hear any objections the facts or refutations. You don’t have to like Science, but stop claiming that Scientific America isn’t using it unless you have proof.
It's really funny how it is always right-wing backlash and how the magazine's independence is at stake when the owners want it to remain neutral.
The sheer idea that people from all political sides could be complaining because they don't want politics everywhere never comes to mind.
Also the fact that Helmuth fundamentally altered the magazine's course by pushing politics is completely ignored.
Instead, when the owners have to forcefully correct the course it's being sold as threatening the magazine's independence.
My family didn't want me subscribing to magazines, although our household had a lifetime subscription to TIME, among others. But when Grandma took us out shopping, I would pull issues off the rack at the store. I distinctly recall enjoying Scientific American for years as a young child, fascinated by some of the articles and the cold, hard facts within.
My strongest memory is of the "Rubik's Cube" cover art, which depicted a quite impossible state of a Cube that was solved, except for one corner turned 1/3rd of the way. This was controversial, but certainly eye-catching, especially for a boy like me, striving to improve my solving record of 63 seconds.
> Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash.
The magazine chose to go more political. When the political winds changed direction they found themselves on the wrong side of the new administration.
Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them.
The timing was sadly important too. She started 2020. The pandemic had disputed origins. I would say one can guess which side her editorial take took, but one doesn’t need to; she openly mentioned her views on lab leak in a handbook for scicomm editors she authored.
“Trumped-up controversies about where the novel coronavirus originated have fueled racism and given cover to politicians who withdrew funding for international collaborations with China.”
That handbook was her leaving her indelible mark on all western scicomms editing.
Old school magazines and newspapers have not adapted well to the internet at all. I don't entirely understand the psychology of it, but somehow it was a lot more satisfying to buy a print magazine and hold it in your hand than take out an online sub. I think it was partly because I tended to buy individual issues based on the cover or contents, rather than buying them blind.
Unfortunately, when these pubs' readership started to decline, so did their revenue and they would have started taking money from "philanthropists" with an axe to grind. (Not always in the obvious areas. I used to read a local sports magazine which has ended up little more than a promotion for various private schools.)
There was always an element of soft power about Scientific American, and it was tailored partly to people without specialist expertise in whatever field, but it did not feel like political propaganda back in the nineties.
You'd expect this from totalitarian regimes where even the most mundane cultural output becomes a vehicle for ideology. When you read a book about raising babies in Nazi Germany, you're actually learning how to raise obedient, emotionally hardened citizens. When you watch a romantic musical comedy in Stalin's Soviet Union, you're actually watching a celebration of the supposed superiority of Soviet society. Hell, my own dad who studied music in an east German conservatory had to write his thesis about Marx perception of classical music.
Somehow, this ideology achieved this without any of the pressures of a totalitarian regime - just by being an intransigent minority.
“It wouldn’t be the last conflict between Helmuth and Springer Nature. Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash. This time, facing pressure from Springer Nature, she resigned.”
So, an activist editor in chief focused on social justice nonsense and identity politics instead of on science, the resulting distraction ran it into the ground, and what used to be a respected institution is now struggling to recover from this disastrously poor leadership. A familiar story.
I used to enjoy SciAm. A few years ago I picked up an issue and was annoyed by several articles that used the mantle of “science” to push social, political and cultural issues. Articles about how mathematics is misogynistic and how some other field was racist or white supremacist, etc. The same bullshit as the rest of the media, frankly. So I put it down and haven’t read it again since. Too bad.
I don’t think it’s woke that killed it. If they’d embraced the right with similar zest, the result would be the same. I think it’s ‘go divisive, go broke.’
Lowest denominator politics like this is what dominates social media and none of it improves anything. Choosing to focus on publishing objectively rigorous science is inherently speaking truth to power and does far more good than almost anything else. Of course, anyone can see the value science has as a way of providing objective understanding and wants to use it to justify their issue du jour.
There is a difference between being taught and being preached to. Intelligent people are particularly sensitive to this distinction, and that category of people happens to be the audience of the magazine.
Come on, some things just aren't worth reading. Political content masquerading as science is at the top of that list.
>Instead you doubled down on remaining ignorant. Not even that, but you think it's worth bragging about on the internet!
All that condescension to hide the fact that you haven't made a point. Stop insulting people and point to something in the magazine you think is worth reading. Or have you not read it either?
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-m... - and I am not quoting out of context)
“ Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
But that's obvious nonsense. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running. We're talking about many, many data points, all pointing in the same direction: in practice, men outperform women in distance sports [1].
To even begin to argue against this mountain of evidence, you have to resort to slippery rhetorical tactics, like this:
> As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
So, the argument being implied here (but not actually made!) is that the performance difference we see throughout the history of the marathon is due to...pace setters?
Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?
This reminds me of the old expression: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
[1] I'm talking about distributions here. Obviously, there are going to be many women who outperform many men on an individual basis.
Boy, you sure picked the wrong category. It's women who are better at endurance events.† Men have an advantage in power events.
† Here's just 2 recent ones off the top of my head:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/05/us/american-solo-rowing-hawai...
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a74192266/catherine-...
https://runninglevel.com/running-times/marathon-times
https://swimswam.com/comparing-mens-womens-records-in-swimmi...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2052-1847-6-7
https://results.nyrr.org/event/M2025/overview (pick any year you like by changing the URL)
https://www.marathon.tokyo/en/about/past/2026/ (Same)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-46032-9?fromPaywa...
The overall story is one where the difference in performance decreases with distance, but is very real.
Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.
Come on. Think things through to the end. If it were actually true that the pace-setters could run faster than the competitors for the full marathon, then the pace-setters would win the event.
What you want to say is that the pace-setters are capable of running a faster pace than the competitors for a shorter distance. Maybe that's true (I doubt it), but it's not responsive. Pace setters are there to set a pace, like a metronome. If the competitors feel this pace is inadequate, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from running faster, or demanding a faster pace-setter.
You didn't, which is exactly the point. It's a critical piece of information for evaluating the truth and relevance of your argument.
I was a distance runner.
Many of those data points are contaminated by a long tradition of sex- or gender-segregated races.
Here are a couple of interesting studies, which I assume are the ones the SciAm article is referring to, but I haven't checked.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38684111/ :
> "There is a prominent sex-based difference in athletic performance such that males outperform females by 7%-14% in races from 100 m to marathon. In ultramarathons, the difference is often much smaller, leading to speculation that females are "built" for the sport. However, data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race. This study compared data from two ultramarathons where males and females competed in comparable numbers. [...] In conclusion, the sex-based performance discrepancy shrinks to 1%-3% in ultramarathons when males and females compete in comparable numbers."
A key point in the above quote is "data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race." This calls the "many, many data points" that you mentioned into question.
Another study, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12068597/, of 56 suitable races, found that "pacing was not consistently affected by sex or age."
Re keeping an open mind, the corollary is that if you're not willing to ever question your assumptions - a.k.a. biases - you're not going to be able to update your understanding based on the facts.
And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get? Also, as you are saying yourself: this is about distributions, not necessarily about the top 0.1% of the world. The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then. You might disagree with this, but the article is more nuanced, and reducing it to the rage-bait comment above does not do it justice at all.
So what? The gap exists. Saying that it diminishes with distance is interesting, certainly, but it's a far cry from evidence that the gender gap is due to something other than biology.
> The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then.
This is sophistry. In reality, even on average, men are faster than women.
Title: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
Subtitle: The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
Saying there isn't enough evidence to prove a hypothesis is not the same as proving its negation. Failing to reject the null hypothesis is not the same as proving it.
Genuine or not they abandoned their readers who genuinely wanted to learn.
I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.
Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".
I won't respond further.
You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events. You can downvote me all you want, but I have actually read the article.
Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best...
> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.
No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.
IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
Compare this to game drives/trapping which are both mentioned in this article and have significant archaeological and anthropological evidence.
The full paragraph:
>Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
And of course what they are talking about has nothing to do the criticism in TFA, which they also haven't read.
The Atlantic went the same way, but as more mainstream magazine, that's kind of okay. Not acceptable for SciAm.
For example, they publish this, now:
"The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci"
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/07/anthony-faucis-emb...
Which, regardless of what you feel about Fauci, is at least against type for the Atlantic. But in 2020, they had no problem publishing garbage like this:
"Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice"
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
Basically, formerly great media empires have declined to the point where only people willing to work for low wages in uncertain careers will accept positions writing for those institutions. So we mourn the loss of the brand, but if anyone actually cared about the brand in practice, it would not employ these people.
It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.
However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.
Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.
people dynamics matter.
and we can and do _scientifically_ look at that part of "doing science".
for example in social sciences.
and their findings, and then attempts to remedy injustice uncovered in these findings are what drove and drives approaches for remedy, "policies".
these _of course_ are disputed by those benefitting from the status quo, like publishers as part of the top wealth percentile.
so far so obvious.
what baffles me is that some call injustice "issue du jour", when it is much older than Christianity.
even more so when as we found out taking care benefits business.
and I dare going one step further: if we don't discuss social implications of science and tech, the AI gives the wealthy cheap access to smarts, while it takes smarts the lever for a good life.
to me, the advent of AI puts the question of societal justice _in science_, in intelligence work, front and center.
The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.)
It's improved a lot over the last few years.
Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.
The sheer idea that people from all political sides could be complaining because they don't want politics everywhere never comes to mind.
Also the fact that Helmuth fundamentally altered the magazine's course by pushing politics is completely ignored. Instead, when the owners have to forcefully correct the course it's being sold as threatening the magazine's independence.
Same old, same old...
My strongest memory is of the "Rubik's Cube" cover art, which depicted a quite impossible state of a Cube that was solved, except for one corner turned 1/3rd of the way. This was controversial, but certainly eye-catching, especially for a boy like me, striving to improve my solving record of 63 seconds.
> Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash.
The magazine chose to go more political. When the political winds changed direction they found themselves on the wrong side of the new administration.
Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them.
https://ksjhandbook.org/editing-controversial-science/about-...
“Trumped-up controversies about where the novel coronavirus originated have fueled racism and given cover to politicians who withdrew funding for international collaborations with China.”
That handbook was her leaving her indelible mark on all western scicomms editing.
Why oh why destroy something so precious to so many people.
Spewing politcal hate is not the best way to win friends it seems.
Unfortunately, when these pubs' readership started to decline, so did their revenue and they would have started taking money from "philanthropists" with an axe to grind. (Not always in the obvious areas. I used to read a local sports magazine which has ended up little more than a promotion for various private schools.)
There was always an element of soft power about Scientific American, and it was tailored partly to people without specialist expertise in whatever field, but it did not feel like political propaganda back in the nineties.
Somehow, this ideology achieved this without any of the pressures of a totalitarian regime - just by being an intransigent minority.
So, an activist editor in chief focused on social justice nonsense and identity politics instead of on science, the resulting distraction ran it into the ground, and what used to be a respected institution is now struggling to recover from this disastrously poor leadership. A familiar story.
I used to enjoy SciAm. A few years ago I picked up an issue and was annoyed by several articles that used the mantle of “science” to push social, political and cultural issues. Articles about how mathematics is misogynistic and how some other field was racist or white supremacist, etc. The same bullshit as the rest of the media, frankly. So I put it down and haven’t read it again since. Too bad.
Somtimes it matters a great deal, yes. Sometimes. Not all the time. Not every time. Sometimes.
>Instead you doubled down on remaining ignorant. Not even that, but you think it's worth bragging about on the internet!
All that condescension to hide the fact that you haven't made a point. Stop insulting people and point to something in the magazine you think is worth reading. Or have you not read it either?