There were two parallel stories recently. In one, Lara Logan was assaulted by a crowd in Cairo.

The sexual assault on CBS correspondent Lara Logan in Egypt has trained a spotlight on the danger - ever-present but little-discussed - facing female journalists in zones of upheaval.

Complicating matters, some say, is a fear that employers will shut them out of choice assignments if they draw attention to the problem.

In another, Dave Duerson, a retired Chicago Bears Safety, shot himself in the heart so his brain would be intact for study.

Duerson, 50, died Feb. 17 after shooting himself in the chest. The former safety left word he wanted his brain intact in order for it to be studied for signs of football-inflicted trauma.

In both cases there were some who claimed Logan and Duerson had put themselves in needless danger, and others who claimed they had to be free to do their jobs.
 
I grew up among the plumes of my mother's cigarette smoke. I used to draw red lines halfway up her cigarettes, as recommended by the anti-cancer adverts. When she ignored that, I'd put pinholes in them. Nevertheless she let me live.
 
As an adult I watched her struggle to breathe on a ventilator after a lung operation. I have a picture where I caught her smoking a few months later. AM Radio's Dr Dean Edell used to remind us that anything people will do despite it costing them fingers and toes is clearly addictive. I really hate smoking, and I'm glad I don't have to smell it everywhere lately, but at the same time I hesitate to tell other people that they can't smoke.
 
Now in Brooklyn, Homegrown Tobacco: Local, Rebellious and Tax Free

The cigarettes Audrey Silk used to smoke, Parliament Lights, are made at a factory in Richmond, Va. The cigarettes she smokes these days are made and grown in Brooklyn, at her house. 
 
... Planted in 2009, her first crop - 25 plants of Golden Seal Special Burley tobacco - produced nine cartons of cigarettes. Ms. Silk would have spent more than $1,000 had she bought nine cartons in parts of New York City. Instead, she spent $240, mostly for the trays, the buckets and plant food.
 
But for Ms. Silk, 46, a retired police officer and the founder of New York City Clash (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment), a smokers' rights group, it is not just about the money. It is about the message. In the state with the highest cigarette taxes in the country, in a city that has become one of the hardest places in America to find a place to smoke, Ms. Silk has gone off the grid, growing, processing and smoking her own tax-free cigarettes from packets of seeds she buys online for about $2. She expects to produce a total of 45 cartons after planting two crops - the first in the summer of 2009, the second last summer - and estimates that she will have saved more than $5,000.
 
"It'll make the antismokers apoplectic," said Ms. Silk. "They're using the power of taxation to coerce behavior. That's not what taxation is supposed to be for."

A friend at a summer job used to claim you can't legislate morality. Actually we do all the time, but making immoral stuff illegal also makes it really expensive - and profitable. I was once working for the Corps of Engineers with a handful of other young college boys, all Northerners. Somehow we ended up in a noisy, crowded bar in South Carolina, and somehow some good ol' boy was saying he could find us women. One of the guys would ask him something. He'd smile and say, "I don't give a shit" then tell us a little more. Steve, the boy from Boston asked what they looked like. He said "Oh, they're fay." Steve said earnestly, "We don't want fat girls." "No, I said they was fay." Fay, fay - oh fair! They're fair. Not too promising. I'm sure we'd all read The Catcher in the Rye, and were worried about meeting up with some bored, frowsy Sunny - and her pimp. Eventually our genial friend realized that we were far too giggly to be taken seriously.
 
Nevada Politicians Debate an Older Profession

Brooke Taylor voted for Harry Reid in his battle for re-election to the Senate last fall. But now she is incensed. Mr. Reid recently visited here and took a firm, if unexpected, stand: he called for an end to legal brothels.
 
For five years Ms. Taylor has worked at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, the Nevada brothel featured on the HBO show Cathouse, a few miles outside Carson City, the state capital. She has fashioned herself as the public face for legal prostitution throughout the state, a role she has embraced in adult magazines, on cable television and even on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
 
Now Mr. Reid's comments are reopening the oldest debate about the oldest profession. And Ms. Taylor is rallying her army of fans and clients to fight back.

From the customer's standpoint, I can rationalize prostitution as no worse than blowing all your money on lottery tickets. From the prostitute's standpoint, however, it has to be fairly bleak, as described by Nightmare Brunette, who is a far cry from Sunny.

As for our physical interaction. It is rarely that wrong, but: when not a shred of attraction is in evidence, when the sex is so awkward that someone watching who was new to the human race might well assume it was a disastrous modern dance choreographed by the world's worst artistic director, when the intercourse is so bad that I call it "intercourse," the sullen child in me wants to say "may I be excused?" as soon as it's over, like I'm requesting to leave the table after a particularly nauseating meal. It is a great indignity to be required to keep offering your genitals to someone who is clearly not qualified to handle them.

Again, do we legislate morality and safety, become the nanny state, or leave adults free to decide for themselves? The answer seems to be that we do both and fight like hell if it costs us money or offends our personal morality.

BTW Nightmare Brunette includes the Smooth Criminal duet above on her More of Me tumblr site, which is nowhere near safe for work.