The Palestinians have announced their intention to submit an application to the Security Council, setting the stage this week for the most dramatic annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in years.
The preferred settings for Monogram movies included cruise ships, boarding houses and nightclubs, closed environments that provided basic dramatic justification for gathering a full cast of characters in one place.
Through sermons, discussion groups, prayer gatherings, dramatic readings, video screenings and postcard-writing sessions to their U.S. Senators, people of diverse faiths across the country recently arose to proclaim the urgent need to address climate change.
The story of the Florida recount has raised interest to the level that accrued to these dramatic and melodramatic events, gathering us together before a coast-to-coast proscenium, once more an audience communally obsessed, privately agape.
In a dramatic showdown, the emperor forced a gathering of his opponents; it was touch and go as to whether he would leave the meeting alive.
From my perspective, the extraordinary period of transformation that the world is passing through at present would potentially seem as significant as, and far more dramatic than, shifts from hunting and gathering to agriculture or from agriculture to industrial society.
The administration official's account of the nearly two-hour session suggested a more dramatic exchange than is typical of such gatherings.
But it could in time be seen as a gathering that recognised and institutionalised the dramatic shift in global power toward the emerging Asian economies.
Wednesday's gathering was one of the most dramatic signs to date of how joblessness and the home foreclosure crisis have pushed people from the lower and middle ends of the economic scale to seek help wherever they can.
Equally dramatic is the destruction of democracy that has been gathering pace.
It also, of course, makes for a dramatic finale to the mission's two decades of data gathering.
