To honor the former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Berlin's Red Ballroom hosted an event which featured eight bands playing a variety of musical styles. [...] Now in its second year, the concert was put on by the Mendy's Ubuntu Initiative, which takes its name from the Southern African word meaning a universal bond.

Riverdance and Lord of the Dance superstar Michael Flatley received a lifetime achievement award from Irish America magazine December 3 at the 30th annual Business 100 Awards Luncheon at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan. Flatley, who is also a Golden Gloves-winning boxer and world-class flutist, received the award for his contributions to Irish dance, music, and cultural diplomacy.

 Alizadeh secretly recorded a video for her rap song, “Brides for Sale.” “I scream for a body exhausted in its cage,” she sings in Farsi, “a body that broke under the price tags you put on it.” After posting the video on YouTube in October 2014 [...] she was offered a scholarship to a high school in central Utah. The ordeal is the subject of Sonita, a documentary that was selected to be screened at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam this November.

Food waste is not only an issue in the United States — roughly one-third of all the food that is produced in the world is never eaten. [...] “I think we have to look at where we are as a global community,” says Stanley. “Our consumer standard is so high that there’s no room for imperfection anymore, and that really drives the overproduction of food and, at the same time, conversely, a lack of value for food.”

In 1984, Prince was on top of the world, with a No. 1 album and later a No. 1 movie, both named Purple Rain. Little did Prince know then how widely his projects' influence would spread, or the ways in which they might translate — literally. Three decades after the film first premiered, it got a remake filmed in Niger, featuring members of a nomadic group of people known as the Tuareg.

TBS’ late-night talk show Conan secretly sojourned to the island nation, becoming the first American late-night program to broadcast from Cuba in over 50 years. [...] O’Brien’s second travel special, Conan in Armenia, proved to be not only another boon for ratings, but also a powerful example of cultural and public diplomacy.

There is one reaction that so exemplifies the current state of the networked world that it warrants closer analysis. That is the filmed declaration of Anonymous to take down ISIS. It is the epitome of the theory of Netpolitik, which Leshuo Dong and I wrote about earlier this year.