Not the actual death of the magazine, just someone getting upset about lack of depth in an article. Specifically: > "No, scientists haven’t created a wormhole using a quantum computer. They haven’t even simulated one. They simulated some aspects of wormhole dynamics under the crucial assumption that the holographic correspondence of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model holds." Quanta publishes great, detailed articles - but i…
I agree. Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world. The "it's dead to me because of this one bad article" standard will leave one with no magazines and no newspapers that are worthy. More important, however, is that the OP's blog post (as I sense it), is actually mimicking hyperbolic attitude of the article it's complaining about. I suspect that Quanta is not "dead" to…
May be not but just the same it's an overly-prevalent trend nowadays. For instance, New Scientist is notorious for hyping up stories that amount to little more than our current/general understanding of them—and or the Mag's cover stories or articles' headings are often outright misleading. New Scientist didn't do this decades ago (well, certainly not to the same extent).
Then there's the perennial problem of the sweeping statement without references or further explanation: new phenomena, complex processes etc. are just stated as if it was taken for granted that everyone already understands them in the way we understand, say, what a gram is. This is damn annoying as understanding the article hinges on actually understanding these skipped-over points.
It's not only New Scientist but others too including Quanta that engage in the practice but New Sc. is a past master at it. It seems to me the main reason for this is that the many journalists who engage in the practice don't actually understand the matter themselves and this is why they skip over such explanations (and or they're rewriting stories from press releases without first fully researching them, etc.).
Moreover, either editors are asleep at the wheel for allowing the practice and or they're under commercial pressures to print such crap—profit being more important than science news.