The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group's media emir, and the site of that day's shoot.His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.

Some of the world's most expensive and rarely seen modern art, including works by the Americans Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, went on display Saturday in a major exhibition in Iran. 

So ISIS takes pop culture, or soft power, very very seriously indeed, even if we don't. The attacks on Paris demonstrate their cultural focus most of all. They attacked restaurants, theaters, and sports events rather than military or political targets […] The forces that will defeat ISIS aren't the army, the navy, and the air force; they're Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. They have to involve themselves in the war.

When the German publisher Don Stone approached Heba Amin to paint Arabic graffiti on the set of Showtime's series Homeland, her initial impulse was to decline, as others had before her […]  [Instead, she] painted statements such as "Homeland is racist" on the set and then put out an artists' statement. The story went viral and has been covered by more than 60 media outlets in numerous languages.

A year and a half since China began rapidly building and militarizing artificial islands in the contested, resource-rich waters of the South China Sea, the states most threatened by Chinese expansion are looking for ways to push back more forcefully. 

The Ohio governor announced his idea in a foreign policy speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., "I will consolidate them [U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting] into a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo-Christian Western values that we and our friends and allies share".

The Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History, American University, hosted Russian jazz legend Igor Butman at the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington DC. The event, meant to represent the unifying qualities of cultural cooperation[.]

As I explore in a new Brookings paper, a major reason for this level of [ISIS's] recruiting success has been the group’s savvy use of propaganda and social media. Counter-messaging efforts, meanwhile, have been largely ineffective—in part because they are dwarfed by the sheer size of the ISIS communications footprint, but also because they have been too mono-dimensional and static.