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 gravestone said to record that a certain clergyman “served his Maker for forty years without the smallest sign of enthusiasm”. Admittedly, he also says that this may be a piece of historian’s folklore since he has never seen the said grave stone or possesses any reference to it or authentication.

Still, it is an interesting inscription that sounds odd in our day. For our response on reading it is that this was a slur on a lazy and careless clergyman

New York, NY, USA. The controversy inspired by Hillary Clinton's remark crediting Lyndon Johnson with the civil rights movement's successes seems to have subsided. Contrary to much recent punditry, this contretemps does not prove that the Democratic primary has been reduced to a zero-sum game of identity politics. Rather, it reveals the complexity of bringing together the aspirations of different social groups within a single political movement — something Americans have experienced before.

Some commentators have already compared Barack Obama to Frederick Douglass, the former slave and crusader for emancipation who insisted that the post-Civil War years constituted the "Negro's hour" and that the struggle for the rights of the newly freed slaves took precedence over gaining the vote for women. In this scenario, Hillary Clinton is a latter-day Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who broke with her male allies when they called on women to subordinate their claims. But like many historical analogies, this one distorts as much as it reveals.

American feminism was born of the abolitionist movement, with its powerful insistence on universal equality. Before the Civ

Five Dock, NSW, AUS. While Kevin Cox argues for one electronic identity and a host of relationships [1], a subtly but fundamentally different view is that we actually possess many identities, and that it is better all round to retain the ability to keep them all separate. This is not actually a radical proposal. I believe that most of us are pretty comfortable almost unconsciously treating, for example, identity as a citizen differently from identity as a bank account holder, or identity as an employee.

Judging by the work of others in the field, we may in fact be in the midst of a true paradigm shift, to a new worldview based on a plurality of identities. And here I’m using the infamous “p word” — much loved by consultants but derided by almost everyone else — in its proper context.

The term “paradigm” was popularised by the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn, in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [2]. Kuhn described paradigms in the sciences as sets of prevailing assumptions and theories that add up to an accepted worldview, such as the old idea that the sun and the planets revolve around the earth, or that disease is cau