Remember, Nat Geo isn’t a valid source for scientific. There’s no peer review. It’s people magazine for people who like science and travel. The best example of this is that they fund Dr. Nazir Ibrahim’s research on Spinosaurus, and everytime he publishes the conclusions are the most extreme conclusions they can be, because that drives traffic for Nat Geo. It’s to the point that it frustrates a lot of other paleontologists, to the point some papers have titles that are one step removed from “you’re wrong Nazir stop making us write frivolous papers correcting your bs.”
Not that it was ever good (as a kid I used to read back issues all the way to the 60s at my local library), but it’s gotten exponentially worse ever since NewsCorp bought it.
Back in the day it was great for getting at least some glimpses about what else was going on from a generally less political and more science and cultural lens. In part because there wasn’t any sort of way to actively search for info about a lot of topics.
Yep, I remember their articles on (say) plant life in the Amazon being decent, but their articles on the USSR being pretty hit-or-miss. In fact, reading these articles was what first led me to start exploring communism – because of the way they’d report on something clearly good the USSR was doing, but try to spin it in a way that made it sound frightening and scary. The hypocrisy bugged me, and made me wonder if there was more being held back.
Remember, Nat Geo isn’t a valid source for scientific. There’s no peer review. It’s people magazine for people who like science and travel. The best example of this is that they fund Dr. Nazir Ibrahim’s research on Spinosaurus, and everytime he publishes the conclusions are the most extreme conclusions they can be, because that drives traffic for Nat Geo. It’s to the point that it frustrates a lot of other paleontologists, to the point some papers have titles that are one step removed from “you’re wrong Nazir stop making us write frivolous papers correcting your bs.”
Not that it was ever good (as a kid I used to read back issues all the way to the 60s at my local library), but it’s gotten exponentially worse ever since NewsCorp bought it.
Back in the day it was great for getting at least some glimpses about what else was going on from a generally less political and more science and cultural lens. In part because there wasn’t any sort of way to actively search for info about a lot of topics.
Yep, I remember their articles on (say) plant life in the Amazon being decent, but their articles on the USSR being pretty hit-or-miss. In fact, reading these articles was what first led me to start exploring communism – because of the way they’d report on something clearly good the USSR was doing, but try to spin it in a way that made it sound frightening and scary. The hypocrisy bugged me, and made me wonder if there was more being held back.