Get an issue of Scientific American from the past few years and compare with one from the early 90s. It will become obvious why Scientific American no longer has readers.
I feel like we rehash this every few years, science reporting was the first to get axed. Scientific American, NatGeo, Popular Science, and magazines in general died way back in the 2000s.
I used to subscribe to SciAm, just looked at their website after around 3 years, and the lead article is "Why partisan politics may be changing people's accents."
The Atlantic went the same way, but as more mainstream magazine, that's kind of okay. Not acceptable for SciAm.
The Atlantic did not shroud itself in glory during the pandemic. Better than SciAm, certainly, but they publish a lot of dubious stuff right next to decent articles.
Which, regardless of what you feel about Fauci, is at least against type for the Atlantic. But in 2020, they had no problem publishing garbage like this:
