Just a few days before the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, the bombing of a paediatric hospital in Kiev reminded us of how many wars exist around us, and distracting attention from Gaza, where several paediatric hospitals have been destroyed. On this occasion, few thought about what was happening to the sick children in Sudan or Myanmar. Whenever a child is killed, war carries over to the next generation. Whenever a child drowns in the Mediterranean, peace sails away. Is it all too big, too much, too far away, too cruel to do something?

War is paralysing the souls, not just killing the children.

After the bombing in Kiev, a friend shared a message with the photo of a smiling, young paediatric nephrologist, a small Buddha smiling in the background. As editors of a scientific journal, we reflected on how we now, overwhelmed by information, need to see a dead child, or look at the blond colleague who is no longer with us in this world to fight against kidney diseases in order to be moved…

The spectacle takes over.

Too much pain results in a sort of anaesthesia. We experienced it with COVID-19: thinking about millions of deaths is almost impossible. Often, it is by remembering the friend who died that makes you feel what happened to too many.

Like the other billion people who watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, we watched the boats carrying the teams from 205 countries. Some boldly faced the rain, while some tried to hide.

In the dialysis ward in Le Mans our nurses offer thematic decorations, and sometimes dress-up to cheer the patients. What could be more inclusive than an Olympic symbol made of cut paper plates, in the dialysis ward where patients from more than 10 nations are treated together?

What are our expectations from a different kind of information, scientific information, in our media-dominated era? A journal like ours, in the upper silver quartile, as the second quartile is called in Italy, has the choice between trying to publish few articles containing spectacular news, inviting stars to sing for the event, mainly focusing on bibliometric yield, or trying to be the expression of an open-minded culture, that attempts to give voice to many. In 2018, our journal got 91,780 downloads. In 2023, there were 565,499 downloads. The impact factor is the same, but our team is now better known, and more widely acknowledged. We are publishing papers from every continent, we have received case reports, images, quizzes and lessons for the clinical nephrologist from more than 100 countries. In this issue we’ll start our series on humanities, while the green nephrology series, we were the first journal to propose, is now calling for submissions. While we are committed to fighting for a gold medal, having solidly conquered the silver one, we are proud to provide an opportunity to young authors and to emerging countries. We will do our best to give, like in the Olympic games, space to small delegations, countries whose geographic location may escape us, while praising the excellence of the great schools that choose our flexible journal for sharing innovations, trying to give a humble yet concrete example that, as sport should do, science may convey peace (Fig. 1).