'' THE ART OF ASSOCIATION '' : SUPREME GLOBAL ESSAY

'' THE ART OF ASSOCIATION '' : This, perhaps, is what younger audiences, students, seek now; less empty escape, more mutual recognition; less mindless content and more mutual connection.

After all, we've always gathered around great stories and knowledge, sports, music, and art to laugh, to wonder; to feel something, and to feel part of something.

WE human beings, we the students of the world, remain stubbornly, beautifully starving for one another.

More surprising - and heartening - we are looking upward and outward, and returning to one another after being tethered for so long to our screens.

This all portends well for the entertainment business, no doubt. Leaders across the industry can see and seize the moment of possibility, opening our apertures and expanding the imaginations, investing in :

Creators and projects that represent, reflect and swerve younger audiences, forging new kinds of partnerships across digital platforms, exhibitors and live experiences alike.

AND this moment portends even better for democracy - and for our humanity.

These days, our wider culture and politics are consumed by a very old story of power - about the resurgence of a '' might makes right '' mentality that enables corruption and cruelty and impunity.

But I believe with greater conviction than ever, in the power of story to lead us through and forward.

Storytellers - and the stories they tell - expose and reveal. They challenge and provoke. They lift our sights and our spirits. They bring dignity and grace where these virtues have been denied, and faith and hope and love where they have been suppressed.

Like Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans possess an exceptional instinct for '' the art of association '' for joining together, organically and authentically, in common purpose and pursuit.

This observation happened nearly centuries ago. !WOW! needs to think and act along these great sprinklings as we go ahead and prepare for the great Constitutional Democratic Convention.

!WOW! thanks Darren Walker who is the chief executive of Anonymous Content and a former president of the Ford Foundation.