The magazine used to be intimidating when I was young. You saw it in libraries, and you might have to fight your way through one of its articles to research a paper, but the only people who had a subscription were folks like my Uncle Loring (Yale '48, Physics and Violin), who worked in one of those science-y places on Rte 128 and had his own weather station and then home computer in the 60s and 70s. He was some sort of expert on the three-bodies problems, I heard.
Someplace along the line Scientific American became more like Discover. I hadn't looked at it for a long time, so I checked it out today.
It's a lot like Discover. A little better. Obsessed with climate, it seems.
I used to enjoy National Geographic, and subscribed for a number of years. Same thing. Climate change all the time. Lots and lots of articles about how man is raping the environment and causing the weather to change. So on and so forth. I dropped my subscription.
ReplyDeleteDecades ago (early 70's) S.A. had an article on how to build your own Van de Graff generator. Financial exigencies ended my subscription not long thereafter, but when I looked for it in the library it looked like an editing change had "softened" it an awful lot. (emphasis on the "awful")
ReplyDeleteI used to enjoy National Geographic, and subscribed for a number of years. Same thing. Climate change all the time..
ReplyDeleteMy childhood home had decades of National Geographic to peruse. My brother assumed the subscription when my father died.
Sometime in this century, I happened to read a National Geographic article on Argentina. It stated that Argentines were bitter about US support of Argentine military dictatorship[s]. Undoubtedly, some were bitter, but that snippet left out a lot of history.
1)Argentina had nearly two centuries of intermittent military dictatorships well before the CIA came into existence, such as the 1943-45 pro-Nazi military dictatorship.
2)While the US did extend diplomatic recognition to the military dictatorship(Junta) that took power in 1976, the coup was made in Argentina. Refer to the above repeated coups and military dictatorships. Argentine journalist Jacobo Timmerman was among the supporters of the 1976 coup.
3)Most people did not predict the ensuing gross human rights violations of the Junta- among them being Jacobo Timmerman, who had supported the coup.Jacobo Timmerman, after publishing denunciations of the Junta's human rights violations, was kidnapped and tortured.He was later released and deported.
To his credit, President Carter denounced the gross human rights violations of the junta. I was working in Argentina during this time. Many Argentines expressed to me their appreciation of President Carter's denunciations. But nothing of that was in the National Geographic article.
I would imagine this is but one example of the National Geographic's bias.
Viz S.A., I used to subscribe but as my tours of duty took me overseas I let the subscription lapse. As you say, it is not the magazine it was in the 70s and early 80s.
ReplyDeleteViz Argentina and the coup. It is easy from this remote distance in time and space to say that there were human rights violations. It really depends on one's point of view. People denounce Pinochet for the actions he took to ensure that Venezuela did not happen in Chile. So too the Junta in Argentina. I'm pretty sure they are way better off without the usual communist/socialist interlude that laid low so many countries in South and Central America. Imagine if the Tsar had disposed of the handful of communists the way his forefathers had. Would Russia be a powerhouse on the world stage now instead of a sort of enlarged banana state rich in resources but impoverished by the 70 years of communist misrule?
Scientific American had an editorial board change in the mid 80s (with the editorship of Jonathan Piel), where they went from a rather staid, scientific journal to a dumbed-down, leftist (strongly against SDI, pro AIDS, etc.) magazine. His successors have continued in his legacy, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteI find it much less scientific these days. The Geographic, too.
ReplyDeleteI've a very prominent memory of being directed to a late 1970's article in either S.A. or "Science" on one of the mulivariate analysis techniques developed at Bell Labs by the mathematician J.B. Kruskal. Reading this was key to my working out how to do my PhD research. It had extremely clear writing, way more than enough detail for me to know how and why the technique was useful to me, and almost enough detail for me to implement the research and avoid the pitfalls. I subsequently read everything extant on the use of MDS, but there was very little added that wasn't clear in that first article.
ReplyDeleteI've come across a variety of stuff where one of the most credited articles on bibliographies is an article from S.A. in that period, and always thought it strange that when I would read current issues, none of the articles were as clearly written or of things as important. Probably there is some hindsight bias at play there.
HMS Defiant
ReplyDeleteViz Argentina and the coup. It is easy from this remote distance in time and space to say that there were human rights violations. It really depends on one's point of view. People denounce Pinochet for the actions he took to ensure that Venezuela did not happen in Chile. So too the Junta in Argentina.
BTW, I was working in Argentina during the Junta, though by the time I got to Argentina, it was pretty quiet. A fellow employee told me that several years before, the guerrillas had offered to pay him to relay messages. He declined the offer, for which his wife and children are eternally grateful.
I hold no brief for the Argentine guerrillas- the Montoneros or the ERP, or their supporters. Naipaul wrote 4 articles for the New York Review of Books from 1972-92. In The Corpse at the Iron Gate, Naipaul points out that torture was acceptable to the left. Naipaul wrote this in 1972, years before the Dirty War was in full swing, so he was rather prescient.
These lawyers had been represented to me as a group working for “civil rights.” They were young, stylishly dressed, and they were meeting that morning to draft a petition against torture....But one of the lawyers was diverted by my invitation to lunch, and at lunch-he was a hearty and expensive eater-he made it clear that the torture they were protesting against wasn’t to be confused with the torture in Perón’s time.....
He said: “When justice is the justice of the people men sometimes commit excesses. But in the final analysis the important thing is that justice should be done in the name of the people.” “There are no internal enemies,” the trade union leader said, with a smile. But at the same time he thought that torture would continue in Argentina. “A world without torture is an ideal world.” And there was torture and torture. “Depende de quién sea torturado. It depends on who is tortured. An evildoer, that’s all right. But a man who’s trying to save the country-that’s something else.
Argentina in the 1970s suffered a mass mental breakdown. Both sides endorsed torture. Consider the priest of aristocratic origins whom Naipaul met.
And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.
That is sheer madness, emanating from the aristocratic "priest for the poor." He turned guerrilla and was killed, a similar fate that Camilo Torres, a Colombian aristocrat turned guerrilla priest, suffered. Family friends were friends with Camilo Torres. Sad fate, but those who play with fire get burned.
Pinochet and the Junta, while on the same side, had rather different performances in office. Pinochet killed 3,000- the Junta killed 25-30 thousand. Pinochet's killings were targeted. The Junta, I was told when I was in Argentina, would kill people whose names they found in a suspect's address book. Much more indiscriminate.
Pinochet, after some false starts, turned the economy around. The Junta's economic record was poor, basically because they didn't get rid of the government-owned companies operating at a loss. Pinochet did.
While Argentina had a certain anti-Semitic tinge to it, my take was that anti-Semitism was stronger in the military. An Argentine co-worker of the Jewish faith told me that after high school graduation he took a cruise from Buenos Aries to La Plata. He me the daughter of an officer, who went on and on about Jewish conspiracies. This was some years before the 1976 coup.
Torture: I suggest you read Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Recall that he initially supported the coup, yet he was tortured.
BTW, Pinochet gets a lot more flack than the Argentine Junta did, even though the Junta had a lot more blood on its hands. Why? Mainly because Pinochet was a competent ruler; not so those of the Junta.
National Geographic had excellent photos. Maybe it still does. Is it still published as a paper magazine?
ReplyDeleteScientific American was wonderful when I was a kid. The Amateur Scientist column was a font of clever, sophisticated projects, most over my head but so what. I remember experimenting with slings of the David vs. Goliath type after reading a marvelous article that went into the practical details. The paper-airplane book was a source of great joy. Even in the '70s they were somewhat political, especially on nuclear weapons issues. Popular media seem very dumbed-down now in comparison, but you can find the old, undiluted, empirical/DIY spirit on Youtube and elsewhere online if you look.
The Amateur Scientist column was a font of clever, sophisticated projects, most over my head but so what..
ReplyDeleteMy high school physics teacher submitted some independent research one of his students did- a year older than I was- to Scientific American. His experiment was featured in The Amateur Scientist one month.