Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE - an hour after I wrote the following review I checked out American Scientist magazine - I am now a proud subscriber. AmSci is everything that SciAm used to be! I'll keep my SciAm subscription for another year, and then will probably drop SciAm. I'm so frustrated with Sci Am I could scream. I've been a subscriber since 1975; I have all the back issues lovingly stored in expensive magazine cases. I used to look forward to each new issue with excited, joyful anticipation. Now I dread the arrival of each pitiful rag. The only reason I have not dropped my subscription is the fading hope that they will fire most of the editorial board, starting with DiChristina, who is doing her best to morph SciAm into a Frankenstein's Monster of Popular Science (she used to be the editor of PopSci). The "new" format is just another step down the long road to failure. The glued-binding keeps the magazine from sitting flat on a table, and if a page is torn there is no easy way to repair it. It is distressingly skinny, a mere 82-96 pages per issue. When I complain about this, the response is that paper and ink are so, so terribly expensive - but if that is the problem, why do they squander page after page with either full-color pictures and graphics that add nothing to the content, or even worse, waste almost all of a page with nothing at all - no text, no images? Can't they afford to pay for a few thousand more words to fill the empty space? Here's a list of the wasted pages in the January 2011 issue: 34,35,40,41,46,47,half of 52, 53,58,65,half of 69,72,78, half of 79 and half of 88! This represents nearly 20% of the pages available for non-advertising content! The layout has moved some of the few remaining decent features such as "50,100 & 150 Years Ago" to the back of the magazine. Even worse, the middle now has "feature articles" that are only two or three pages and a few hundred words long (because they are mostly whitespace or useless photos). In the current issue, only two "full length" articles are written by actual research scientists - the rest of the fluff is penned by "science writers" from failing institutions such as the New York Times or grad students! Issue after issue goes by without a single equation appearing anywhere (except in ads for software) Even the few decent articles, written by real scientists have been shortened to 6 pages or less, and the quality of the writing has deteriorated. Even as recently as 2004 I would LEARN things when I read Sci Am; now I am teased, confused and forced to research on the web to figure out what the author was trying to express, or (even worse) spending time scribbling corrections in the margins. Long gone are former delights such as "Mathematical Games" or the "Amateur Scientist" The content is consistently, disturbingly political, and always slanted to the left. I'm no right-winger, but anyone with a shred of objectivity can see the blatant bias that permeates the magazine. Essay after essay bemoaning human-caused climate change by hacks that can't do simple math that would tell them that if every one of the fruitless carbon-saving recommendations were adopted, the reduction in greenhouse gases would amount to an insignificant fraction of the total atmospheric mass of same. Every point in the "Political Wish List" on page 12 is stupid and just plain incorrect - ignoring for the moment the idiocy of even having a page devoted to a "Political Wish List" in a magazine purportedly devoted to science! Even in the esoteric realm of theoretical physics, you will no longer find any essay that does not toe the "superstrings or the highway" mindset. I'm not sure if circulation has increased since the dumbing-down started, and I really don't care. If it has gone up, it just means that I have nothing in common with the new subscriber base. I'm genuinely freaked-out and at a loss. I don't want to see a gap in my unbroken swath of issues, but it galls me every time I write a check and send it to this bunch of losers. Perhaps I should just go to Walmart and snap hi-res photos of every page of every new issue, print and bind them, and wait until I see the problems have been corrected before sending them any more of my hard-earned money! Disgusted, Steve Crye