The Books for Afghanistan program recently received a Public Diplomacy Grant award of $4.5 million from the U.S. State Department, which will allow it to print and distribute nearly 2.6 million books by September, including 1.7 million copies in Dari and Pashto, the major languages of Afghanistan. That's a huge boost from its paltry 2011 budget of $67,000 from private donors.

The problem is not with the entertainment industry per se – Hollywood is one of America’s greatest exports to the world, a form of soft power as well as storytelling that can inspire hearts and minds.

We Americans tend to take our presidential campaigns lightly...But for people in many other parts of the world, the American presidential campaign is a thing of wonder...As a public diplomacy tool, this process is invaluable, but how should it be presented?

We Americans tend to take our presidential campaigns lightly. We see them as fodder for Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, and we become so enamored with the incessant polling that we watch the candidates as if they were race horses approaching the finish line.

One of the goals of this blog series is to develop greater awareness and knowledge of how culture intervenes in public diplomacy. In public diplomacy, culture’s web of influence spans across policy, practice, and research, and encompasses both sponsor and intended public.