It made news when Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of the venerable 175-year-old Scientific American magazine, had a complete public breakdown on X following Trump’s election. However, the rot runs much deeper than one woman. The magazine has been collapsing for years, something that predated her taking the helm. In that way, Scientific American’s decline embodies how leftism destroys both people and institutions.
First, let’s talk Helmuth.
On paper, Helmuth is impressive. She has a BS in biology and psychology and a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. One would think that this woman is a hard scientist who deserves to helm America’s oldest continuously published magazine, a job she took over in April 2020.
However, from the moment Helmuth took over Scientific American, she blatantly politicized it. She did so by breaking with the magazine’s 175-year tradition of staying out of politics. In 2020, the magazine endorsed Joe Biden. The magazine also endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024.
But Helmuth’s real political fervor showed up in a series of tweets she posted once it became clear that Kamala had lost. These weren’t just “Aw, shucks, my preferred candidate lost” tweets. These were the ravings of a mad woman:
Public domain.
When Helmuth realized her career was at risk, she apologized:
Public domain.
No word yet, though, on whether her apology will save her job.
Certainly, Helmuth revealed herself to be yet another one of those crazy leftist women I keep writing about, the broken women who have drunk so deeply of the leftist Kool-Aid that they are emotional basket cases.
What’s important here, though, is that Helmuth wasn’t hired to change Scientific American’s direction; she was hired to reinforce it. Here are some of the crazier leftist ideas—many of which are highly unscientific, emotion-based advocacy—that this once respectable magazine has pushed both before and after Helmuth’s tenure. They accelerated under Helmuth’s leadership, but the rot was already there. (I’ve skipped most of the COVID issues because they were overwhelming in number and leftism.)
In addition to those purely leftist concepts, the magazine offers endless “women’s magazine” subjects such as dieting, human relationships, feelings, looks, aging, etc. Instead of feeling like a scientifically rigorous popular magazine, it feels like a vaguely scientific version of Woman’s Day or Family Circle which were homemaker staples during the 1960s and 1970s.
In other words, Helmuth presided over and accelerated, but did not cause, the intellectual degradation of this venerable magazine. Both the magazine and her post-election breakdown are microcosms of what the left has done to the world of reason.
Image: June 1922 Scientific American cover. Public domain.