John Horgan

John Horgan is a science journalist who has knocked many scientists over the course of his career and yet stubbornly thinks of himself as a nice guy. For a critical albeit weirdly selective take on Horgan’s work, check out his Wikipedia page, which harps on his 1993 article “The Death of Proof” and his attacks on racist pseudoscience.

Horgan was a full-time staff writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997, when the magazine fired him due to a dispute over his first book, The End of Science. Eight years later all was forgiven, sort of, and Horgan wrote a couple of freelance articles for Scientific American, notably “The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips.” From 2010-2022 he churned out hundreds of opinion pieces for the magazine’s online edition.

Horgan has also written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Washington Post and other publications too obscure to mention (like Time and Newsweek). Since 2005, Horgan has received a steady paycheck from Stevens Institute of Technology for teaching and running a lecture series, which means he writes primarily for fun, not money.

After high school, Horgan spent years as an itinerant hippy before settling down. He got a B.A. in English from Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1982 and an M.S. from Columbia's School of Journalism in 1983. Yes, his critics are right, this “science writer” lacks scientific training. IEEE Spectrum, a journal for electrical engineers, gave Horgan his first writing job (1983-1986) even though he had no idea what an ohm is. He does now only because he just looked up “ohm” on Wikipedia.