A teenage girl in New Jersey has won a campaign to man up the Easy-Bake Oven. McKenna Pope, who launched a petition last month to get Hasbro to make a more boy-friendly version of the oven—currently available in girlie shades of pink and purple—met with the toy maker Monday at its headquarters in Rhode Island. “They showed me a prototype of a new oven. It’s black and blue and silver,” she says. “It kind of looks like an appliance you would legitimately have in your kitchen.”

The eighth grader's quest for a more manly stove started when she found her 4-year-old brother, Gavyn, trying to cook a tortilla on top of a lightbulb. Deciding the young chef needed an oven of his own, she and her mother went to Target, only to find the Easy Bake packaging geared solely toward girls.

Pope posted her petition on the site Change.org, saying she found it "quite appalling" that "boys are not featured in packaging or promotional materials.” She added, “The oven comes in gender-specific hues: purple and pink. I feel that this sends a clear message: women cook, men work.”

It was a scene straight out of a wedding ceremony. Opposition leaders Ksenia Sobchak and Ilya Yashin, Russia’s most talked-about sweethearts, were holding hands and bouquets of white roses in a tight group of activists and TV cameras. The group proceeded toward the Federal Security Service headquarters on Lubyanka Square, passing gray rows of police trucks and a cordon of officers.

They didn’t get far. The police were waiting for them in an underground passage. They surrounded Sobchak and Yashin and wordlessly separated the two from their astonished companions. “That’s it. They’re driving us away in a police truck,” Yashin said quickly into his cellphone a few minutes later.

The romance between Yashin, a famously fearless opposition leader, and Sobchak, an It girl turned political activist, has captivated the public and the authorities alike this year.

After working in the sex trade for around seven years, I met a guy I sort of liked. He had a major problem with what I did for money. Getting to know him stopped as soon as it started. That’s when I knew: I no longer wanted to sell “the girlfriend experience,” as we called it in the industry, in other words, selling sex but acting as if the guy and I were on a “real” date. I wanted to be an actual girlfriend. I wanted to use the academic degrees I had worked hard to earn. For me, I realized, sex work and the “straight” life couldn’t mix. I wanted out—just like so many critics of the sex industry would advise.

That wasn’t so easy. I faced a constellation of challenges that made transitioning out of the trade incredibly difficult. It took me multiple tries to leave sex work for good. When I left in 2007 to become a public-school teacher in New York City, I ultimately lost my job after blogging about my past. Today, in honor of International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, I’m here to tell you about another kind of indignity sex workers face—not on the job, but when they leave the trade.

Whether sex workers love, hate, or feel ambivalent toward their job, most don’t intend to work in the industry forever. But the complicated reasons people enter the trade—including but not limited to economic factors—are the same complicated factors that make it difficult to leave.

On one of my visits 
to New Guinea, I met a young man named Enu, whose life story struck me then as remarkable. Enu had grown up in an area where child-rearing was extremely repressive, and where children were heavily burdened by obligations and by feelings of guilt. By the time he was 5 years old, Enu decided that he had had enough of that lifestyle. He left his parents and most of his relatives and moved to another tribe and village, where he had relatives willing to take care of him. There, Enu found himself in an adoptive society with laissez-faire child-rearing practices at the opposite extreme from his natal society’s practices. Young children were considered to have responsibility for their own actions, and were allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. For example, if a baby was playing next to a fire, adults did not intervene. As a result, many adults in that society had burn scars, which were legacies of their behavior as infants.

Both of those styles of child-rearing would be rejected with horror in Western industrial societies today. But the laissez-faire style of Enu’s adoptive society is not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted, and who are allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots, and fires.

I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-­confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly ­telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teenagers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for ­several years, far more social models available to children through ­allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

No one smiled like Olivia Engel. The bright-eyed, brunette 6-year-old, who was killed last Friday in the Newtown school massacre, was all set to play an angel in her church’s nativity play that night.

“She was supposed to be an angel in the play,” Msgr. Robert Weiss told congregants at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church on Saturday. “Now she’s an angel up in heaven.”

What does a little girl do? She plays, she races into school, she flashes her gapped teeth. This is childhood perfection—and it was all shattered in a matter of minutes on a quiet Friday morning. Olivia’s mother, Shannon, and her father, Brian, will never hug their little girl again. Brayden, her 3-year-old brother, will never get to tease his older sister as she gets older and prepares for dates.

When Victoria Soto heard gunfire ricocheting off the normally quiet hallways of Sandy Hook Elementary School, she didn’t run and hide. Instead, the 27-year-old teacher gathered her first-grade class into the closet and bravely placed herself between the young children and Adam Lanza, the heavily-armed shooter.

While it’s not yet clear how exactly the tragedy unfolded, whether or not the young teacher is a hero is not under dispute.

On Tumblr, a friend of Soto’s shared unconfirmed details that she had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect her class from the bullets. “I talked to Vicki Tuesday and she told me that she loved her 16 angels and never wanted to let them go,” he wrote on Friday. “Today when the shooting started Vicki hid her kids in closets and when the gunman came into her room she told them the class was in gym. She was then murdered.  Words can not express how heartbreaking and tragic this is. I will miss you dearly.”

I read with dismay and immense pain in my heart and the pit of my stomach the horrific shooting and killing of 20 kids and 6 adults in Newtown, Conn.

As a mother I can't begin to imagine the pain the parents of those children are going through. Young people who should have been future doctors, lawyers, peace builders, and even teachers are all gone too soon. Many questions will be asked, many fingers will be pointed at different sources.

Many questions come to my mind as I sit in my bedroom watching CNN and reading through every article on the subject at almost 3 a.m. in Africa. It's a place also where many mothers have lost their kids to larger scale gun violence, most recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where rebels took over Goma and Juba, and South Sudan, where protesters, predominantly students, protested land ownership.

This weekend yet another young person, a 17-year-old girl named Wangchen Kyi, set herself on fire to protest the Chinese presence in Tibet. She joined almost 100 others who have self-immolated in the past few years over the same issue. The last two months have seen an unusually high number, including 28 in November alone, thought to be related to the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, held the same month, or else to demonstrate support of the Dalai Lama, who is accused by China of encouraging the deaths in hopes of drawing international attention to the complex relationship between China and Tibet.

Attempting to quiet things down, China’s highest court recently issued a statement, “Opinion on Handling Self-Immolation Cases in Tibetan Areas in Accordance With the Law.” The court declared that inciting self-immolation was a form of murder and referred to “significant evil ...  from collusion between hostile forces” to explain the phenomenon.

Self-immolation has been around for centuries, having been intermittently practiced by protesting monks in the East. The medical literature only recently has begun to examine the medical and psychiatric underpinnings of the practice. In a review of self-immolation written by psychiatrists in Seattle, the world’s experience was considered; the authors found that two very different groups gravitated toward the action. In higher-income countries, self-immolation was rare and most often carried out by males, many of whom had a psychiatric history. In contrast, in low-income areas, especially in Asia, the action is more common and more often carried out by women either in political protest or to escape marital strife.

Nadia Sidiqi knew her life was in danger, but she tried not to dwell on it. She told friends she had been getting threats from Taliban commanders and hard-line clerics in Afghanistan’s eastern Laghman province, where she served as acting director of the provincial Department of Women’s Affairs. “I saw her last week,” says Mrs. Niazi, the head teacher at a girls’ school in Mehtar Lam, the provincial capital. “She briefly mentioned the risk to her life, but she talked more about how to improve women’s education and women’s circumstances in the province.” Now someone has carried out those threats, shooting Sidiqi dead on her way to work.

There had been no doubt that the threats were genuine. Laghman, situated on one of the main Taliban infiltration routes to and from Pakistan, is a hotbed of insurgent activity. Sidiqi’s predecessor in the job, Hanifa Safi, was killed this past July by a magnetic bomb attached to her car, and her husband and daughter were injured in the explosion. Nevertheless, Sidiqi agreed to take the post. “She accepted the challenge for the sake of Afghanistan’s women,” says Niazi.

Human-rights activists around the world praised Sediqi’s courage and denounced the killing. “The cold-blooded assassination of Nadia Sidiqi underscores the deadly consequences that lie in store for courageous women standing up for basic rights in Afghanistan,” said Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, in a statement. “They take their lives in their hands by insisting on equal opportunity and rights for everyone, including the right to go to school.”