^A In one of the strangest disasters I have witnessed, politics has become a sports question of who is winning rather than a policy question of what is the right thing to do. This has led to political tribalism, in which the leader of a party can say publicly that he is more interested in the other party’s leader losing the presidency than in fixing the problems that are facing his country.²⁴

^B The first scientific journal was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which has been publishing scientific papers since 1665, including the first scientific reports from Newton, Darwin, and others.

^C Whether this is a good thing or not is, of course, debatable. As pointed out by Douglas Adams in his classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”