SQUIRMING MAGS: The Tech-Head's Workshop

SCIENCE (Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington DC 20005 $56/yr. No one actually READS all of each weekly issue of SCIENCE. Research articles and papers are presented baldly, in painfully specialized vocabularies meant to preserve intellectual turf rather than to enlighten the layman. But close attention to the Letters, News and Comment, Editorials, and above all the astonishing and wonderful ADVERTISEMENTS brings a wealth of insight to the patient reader. SCIENCE is the tribal tom-tom of the nation's scientific/technical culture, a bizarre and very human world full of odd, passionate feuds and byzantine power-structures. It is a world worth knowing, and SCIENCE, though sometimes as oblique as PRAVDA, shows it like no other.

SCIENCE 85 (same address, $18/yr.) This layman's magazine is the sister publication of SCIENCE. Its news coverage is authoritative and excellent, with fine graphics. But it often displays an irritating arrogance and condescension, and its annoyingly up-scale ads reek of East Coast yuppiedom. Genial essays and awful poetry sometimes fail to disguise its essential nature as an organ of propaganda.

HIGH TECHNOLOGY, P. O. Box 358, Arlington, MA 02174 $21/yr. This peculiar and wonderful publication is the handmaiden of yet another subculture, that of the corporate investor and industrial entrepreneur. These hard-bitten souls are impatient with academic obfuscation, which means that HIGH TECH's articles are miracles of clarity. You'll find no gushing cosmic gosh-wowism here; just cool analyses and cash-on-the-barrelhead pragmatism. Ominous articles on high-tech weaponry take a prominent place, putting the American military-industrial complex into refreshingly stark relief. Strident editorials, unique advertisements, international scope, and relentless practicality make HT an invaluable and fascinating document.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, P. O. Box 5919, New York N.Y. 10164 $24/yr. For generations, Americans have read SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN with a vague, gnawing sense of duty, in the earnest hope of intellectual betterment. And for generations this magazine has narcotized them with its cluttered prose and useless graphics. It's pretentious and dull and we deserve better.

AMERICAN SCIENTIST, P. O. Box 2889, Clinton, Ohio 52735 $24/yr. This is the house journal of Sigma Xi, "The Scientific Research Society." Sigma Xi seems to be a clubbier, more personal group than the AAAS, and its articles are by members, who attempt to make the significance of their own work clear in relatively straightforward language. The intended audience is fellow scientists of different disciplines, rather than potential rivals for priority or funding. This distinguishes AM-SCI essays from SCIENCE papers, which are clearly intended to baffle outsiders, indoctrinate colleagues in in-group terminology, and stake irrefutable claims to particular sub-sub-disciplines. AMERICAN SCIENTIST is consequently much easier to read. It's a professional journal, however, not a popularizing work, which means that it comes with the marvelous specialized advertising that so often provokes the layman's sense of wonder.

NEW SCIENTIST, 200 Meacham Avenue, Elmont, N.Y. 11003 $95/yr. This intriguing British weekly has a deliberately activist point of view, replete with wry comments on swaggering Yankees, Third World exploitation, and lavishly funded military boondoggles. NEW SCIENTIST is see as somewhat left-of-center by American standards. (With the American federal budget showing a 65% increase in "defense-related" R&D, a certain chumminess with the right-wing has become a bread-and-butter fact of life for batallions of Yank scientists.)

This is only a smattering of the smorgasboard of journals, many of them newly founded, which exist to feed the technical curiosity of the new post-industrial readership. And these are for generalists. The explosion of specialized technical journals has given the world a new phenomenon: "information pollution." This is hazardous territory, best dealt with by computer. Theorists warn us that information is losing its value: it is ATTENTION TO INFORMATION that must be rationed and conserved.

Technological literacy is crucial, but by no means ENOUGH. With NEW SCIENTIST, we find ourselves edging onto the slippery slope of Social and Political Issues. These journals, too, bizarre, outrageous, sometimes blackly humorous, deserve a segment of our overloaded attention. We will grapple with this topic in the second installment of "Squirming Mags."