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by anigbrowl 2460 days ago
No. It used to be great but then they went way downmarket about 20 years to increase readership. After several years of declining quality I quite when I noticed they had adjusted the font size and spacing to have about the same number of pages (and ads) in each issue while reducing the actual content by ~20%.

I mean, it's not terrible but it used to be solidly educational whereas Nature or Science is relatively hard work to read unless you really love getting into the weeds. Scientific American used to sit in the middle ground between Popular Mechanics or National Geographic and actual journals, but you'll probably find it disappointingly shallow.
1 comments
chemicalnovae 2460 days ago
More to the point then, is there anything that sits between the high quality generalist journals and generalist scientific magazines (Nat Geo. and the like)?

I can and do read Nature and Science, but outside of my PhD field I find it pretty slow going and often feel like I'm missing out on what could be interesting findings due to not having sufficient background to fully understand the problem space.

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anigbrowl 2459 days ago
Not that I'm aware of, sadly. There's New Scientist from the UK but that's more of a weekly newspaper and thus a bit shallow. There's some great online magazines of course (Quanta is pretty good) but for longform writing I still like hard copy cause I'm old.
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MayeulC 2460 days ago
I personally read Ars Technica (and am a subscriber), which I feel fills this niche (maybe that's not what you are looking for?)

Even though most of their articles are IT-oriented, they cover quite well major scientific publications in various domains.

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