Science, SciAm or Discover?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

I'm looking to get a multidisciplinary magazine subscription to both read and leave around the house in hopes that my kids will pick it up. 

Thoughts about these? 

[kerbiloid]

You need a lot of iPads to leave them around every room.

E-magazines are the trend, paper junk is for boomers.

[Kerwood Floyd]

I find Science too technical. For my own reading I prefer SciAm but if I wanted to interest young'uns I'd go with Discover. YMMV.

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

You need a lot of iPads to leave them around every room.

E-magazines are the trend, paper junk is for boomers.

Ipads are, apparently, used only for tiktok videos or streaming someone else playing a video game. 

 

I'm looking for something to garner attention during mandatory analog time - which I enforce daily 

[kerbiloid]

When I was reading SciAm, it was a strange feeling that they were mixing empty blah-blah and fully childish stuff for volume with deep/high science interesting only for deep/high narrow specialists.

Not that I would get interested with the former and understand much from latter, unless I was already a university student when first read it.

[satnet]

Discover is probably the best bet for your kids. I once had a Scientific American subscription, but over time I came to the same conclusion @kerbiloid did and dropped it. SciAm is still probably a better option if you want something deeper than Discover that is still reasonably kid friendly. Science is probably not going to be the best option unless your kids already have a deep interest and you're trying to nurture it.

You might also consider National Geographic. They tend to be more multidisciplinary than you might expect, though I tend to pick up their specials when they happen to coincide with my interests rather than their normal monthly issues, which might bias my perspective.

I would also recommend looking at Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine. Obviously it is more focused and has more of a history point of view than scientific, but could foster an interest in engineering. IEEE Spectrum is another pretty decent option for engineering. It tends to be reasonably technical, but still covers things that are of general interest.