Goodbye, Scientific American!
By
Scientific American has been acquired by LabX Media Group, which holds Discover Magazine, IFLScience, and a number of other science publications. I haven’t looked at IFLScience since it was a Twitter account stealing other people’s material. They say it’s different now.
And they have started out by firing writers and editors. The Writers Guild of America – Scientific American union has released a statement.
We are shocked by this news, which comes just three days before the NLRB will count our votes on unionizing—a vote we know we won by an overwhelming majority. We are also deeply saddened by the news that LabX Media Group wants to say goodbye to 15 of our hard-working colleagues, including 12 unit members—nearly one-third of our unit and 60% of our organizing committee. Everyone played a role in the success of the publication.
We should call this action what it is – blatant union-busting. But there’s worse: we also have reason to believe that the sale was motivated by fear within Springer Nature that our attempts to doggedly report on the crisis facing science in America today would lead to repercussions from the Trump administration. On multiple occasions the company has sought to quash or tone down political or sensitive stories that were journalistically sound.
We are calling on our new owners to immediately recognize our unit and meet us at the bargaining table to work together to steer a sustainable future of Scientific American–including, but going far beyond, a commitment to respecting our editorial independence. We have already developed a number of proposals for making our journalism more profitable that we look forward to discussing in these negotiations.
I have a very personal reaction to this. Scientific American has been an important part of my life, from my early teen years or perhaps before.
The beautiful covers, white with a script date, featured high-quality illustrations from one of the articles inside. It was probably those covers that drew me to the magazine, which was then sold at some newsstands and magazine racks.
I managed to save enough for a subscription. I would have all the covers, all the beautiful illustrations! I read every issue from cover to cover. I worked the mathematical puzzles in Martin Gardner’s column.
Hexaflexagons occupied my time for many months. Folding paper allowed different surfaces to emerge, something like a cootie catcher, but much better. I think I got up to one with twenty faces. You can easily find them on the internet now, with videos on how to cut and fold them, but the article was a revelation to me.
Scientific American was scientists writing about what they did. I could directly access their thinking, a girl in her early teens or maybe younger. I read Hans Bethe on the Sun’s helium cycle and memorized it. I was delighted to be able to answer when it came up on “The $64,000 Question.”
I got my introduction to arms control and the danger of nuclear weapons from articles by Bethe and other scientists, many of whom worked on the Manhattan Project. I probably absorbed the idea that this was scientists’ obligation, to deal with the results of their discoveries.
And then something I was involved in was written up in Scientific American!
Sputnik was orbiting the earth. My friends and I were interested in astronomy. One of them, Jane Shelby, figured out a way to calculate Sputnik’s orbit from visual observation. She got a bunch of us out on the field part of Sagamore Park one night and gave us our instructions. We cooperated, and she got her data. I think she was the first to calculate an orbit. In any case, she won in the Westinghouse Science Fair with it.
And Scientific American’s Amateur Astronomer column wrote it up!
My name didn’t appear; I was just a data slave, which was fine with me. It was enough that the project, run by someone I knew, was written up in that magazine. (Many thanks to Dan Vergano for finding the column!)
As I went to college and graduate school, that subscription continued to support my aspirations. I continued my subscription to this day. When I got a job and had money, I had the copies bound, beautiful covers and all. At some much later point, I sent the bound copies to a group that was collecting books for libraries in Africa.
They changed those covers, and much of the inside, in 1999. I was heavily engaged in my own career by then and didn’t pay a lot of attention, although I felt that an era was coming to an end.
I can see why they did it. The format was extremely inspiring to a teen girl nerd, but the scientists wrote in a way that didn’t have broader appeal. The newer version has been fine, but my life has gone other ways, and the magazine that inspired me was gone.
And now perhaps even that pale echo is gone.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner