National Geographic has gone the same route. I got it as a Christmas present every year for decades, starting in 4th grade. It was the finest publication on the planet for over a century.

The Fox bought it, and every other cover story became about religion, or some war. It became obvious conservative propaganda, and was awful. I had already let my subscription lapse in the smart phone era, but I still kept up with it, until Fox destroyed it.

Everything MAGA touches is ruined. What shame that it had to happen to the greatest magazine that ever existed.

Checking a few other articles from the Scientific American, they were equally poor or without substance. It's tabloid level journalism about science. They used to have a good reputation when I grew up, so it's sad to see how far it has fallen.

I believe ownership of SA changed hands some time in the 2000s, and the new leadership was targeting pop-science. They shifted views, so their competition stopped being actual scientific outlets/journals, and instead they started competing with I Fucking Love Science and other Facebook pages. They realized they could make more money pumping out quick, easy-to-consume factoids on social media than they ever did by putting actual effort into their product, so they made the financially-obvious choice.

Absolute shame.

At first I thought "well, there are degrees of warm blooded maybe they found something new" but nah that author is legitimately just thirty years behind.