bridging cultures
Williams is a skateboarding envoy with the U.S. State Department and is spreading his love for the sport, recently completing a cultural diplomacy mission in Cambodia, where he highlighted skateboarding's benefits to young people.“It’s a bridge between people all over the world,” Williams said. “For me, I’ve always been focused on what it was that made skateboarding special.”
The song playing was Taylor Swift’s ode to young adulthood, which is something of an anthem for American millennials. The lyrics transform an unexciting age into an identity, the uncertainty of youth into a celebration. [...] The song set the tone for that night and cemented what became a steadfast friendship among us, students from different continents with traits more different than similar.
Sagy, a former pilot with the Israeli Air Force made the switch to commercial brewing in 2008, although he says he had been home brewing for about 30 years. “Now I’m trying to make peace in another way,” he said, with a smile. “Through beer.” Eitan Weiss, head of public diplomacy at the Embassy of Israel, matched Sagy with Fournier, who founded the craft beer festival, as a means of bridging cultures through beer.