Washington, DC, USA. The next president faces a crucial choice in how he’ll get along – not just with foreign governments — but with leaders at home in the 50 states. Stop coercing and start cooperating is the advice from Raymond C. Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association (NGA), in his latest commentary.

Here’s a crucial question for the presumed presidential nominees — Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama — and all the candidates for the next Congress. Are you happy with the status quo in federal-state relations?

States have long served as laboratories for creating and testing policies and programs that drive positive change nationally. Yet for more than a decade,

Melbourne, Victoria, AUS. Anyone who has been a leader, who has tried to make large workplace changes, who doesn’t speak English, who has a mental illness or is a teenage girl, knows the power of ostracism. The social webs of friends, of clubs, community and in the workplace are becoming stretched for a variety of complex reasons.

One of the perverse by-products of living in a post industrial society is the frequent use of ostracism, especially among the middle class, as a form of punishment.

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How many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? — Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry.

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I first became int

Lancaster, PA, DC, USA. Independence Day is our leading national holiday. It has no equal or rival in its prominence and popularity. But maybe it should.

To be sure, the Fourth of July commemorates a crucial moment in national history; that decisive point in time in which the Second Continental Congress declared, formally and publicly, American independence from Great Britain. That day together with the written Declaration of Independence itself comprise the single most familiar day and single most famed document in American history.

But the very importance attributed to Independence Day and to the Declaration of Independence begs one of the most intriguing questions in national political life: Why then

Subiaco, WA, Australia. There is something within us that signals that we are in the presence of an enthusiast. I had that feeling while watching Andrew Denton interview Jeff Kennett. After stalling question after question Jeff launched into a promo about depression and the organisation Beyond Blue (depression initiative).

This kind of behaviour is embarrassing because it breaks the norms of conversation. This is why we quickly move away from someone we meet at a party who displays enthusiast tendencies, there is no room for conversation, let alone a quiet critical discussion, you are there only to receive the message.

The historian John Pocock, in an article on Enlightenment England, refers to a gravesto