How Scientific American’s Departing Editor Helped Degrade Science
Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” she wrote on Bluesky. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread).”
Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn’t be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.
In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being “full of fucking fascists,” complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.
“Fuck them to the moon and back,” she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump’s victory.
Whether or not Helmuth’s resignation was voluntary, it should go without saying that a few bad social media posts should not end someone’s job. If that were the whole story here—an otherwise well-performing editor was ousted over a few bad posts—this would arguably be a case of “cancel culture,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.
But Helmuth’s posts were symptoms of a much larger problem with her reign as editor. They accurately reflected the political agenda she brought with her when she came on as EiC at SciAm—a political agenda that has turned the once-respected magazine into a frequent laughingstock.
Sometimes, yes, SciAm still acts like the leading popular science magazine it used to be—a magazine, I should add, that I received in print form every month during my childhood.
But increasingly, during Helmuth’s tenure, SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day’s social justice cause du jour. In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we’ll be living with for a long time.
When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy“? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented “his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” That author also explained that “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” But the normal distribution doesn’t make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn’t be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.
Some of the magazine’s Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. Perhaps the most infamous entry in this oeuvre came in September 2021: “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” That article sternly informed readers that an acronym many of them had likely never heard of in the first place—JEDI, standing for “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion”—ought to be avoided on social justice grounds. You see, in the Star Wars franchise, the Jedi “are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.)”
You probably think I’m trolling or being trolled. There’s no way that actual sentence got published in Scientific American, right? No, it’s very real.
But what really caught my eye was SciAm‘s coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I’ve established a modicum of expertise: I’ve written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am wo
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