Twitter user @SatanKotah, otherwise known as Dakotah, asked her father for a gay pride flag this year. Not only did she receive the flag, she also received a genuinely sincere, moving response from her father, a United States Marine.

His gift of a flag came with a special note.

"When I saw that a gay pride flag was on your list, at first I thought it was an odd request. But after thinking about it, I think I know why. I reckon that you feel that everyone else in the family, except grandma, has a flag that represents someone we were/are a part of. I have the Marine Corps, Grandpa and Mom have the navy, and Darr has the army. So it makes sense that you would want a flag to represent something you are a part of. I present you with this flag, to display how you would like. In the spring, when I hang the flags up, I would be proud to hang yours up."

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Matriarch of millennial women: Speaking of "Force Awakens," when Fisher returned as Leia with a promotion from princess to general, it was everything — and credit where credit was due. You can't consider contemporary characters like Katness of "The Hunger Games" or Tris in "Divergent" or now, Jyn Erso of "Rogue One" without putting them in the context of Leia.

In the real world, Fisher's cultural imprint may be even greater. The little girls who saw "Star Wars" in their childhood, either at the movies, on cable or DVD, have grown up to be the women who run businesses, support families, raise children and hold political office – sometimes all at the same time. Fisher was an icon of being on equal terms with men and having equal commitment to causes. By rocking it in a work of fiction, she showed the generations who followed her that they could do the same in their own lives.

And by being open about her battles with drugs and mental illness, Fisher became an advocate who helped change perceptions of those conditions. And by refusing to cave to the patriarchal entertainment industry that makes women more invisible the older they get, Fisher was a beacon for being kick-ass at any age.

"There's no way to prepare for seeing yourself rendered as a 12-inch plastic doll," she once told Esquire of her "Star Wars" fame. Fisher probably wouldn't have been prepared for pop-culture immortality, either, but we're all the better for her having achieved it.

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Welcome to the Bates Motel ladies and gentlemen! The set from Alfred Hitchcock’s cult movie Psycho, in gingerbread! Aaron is a young filmmaker himself and pays huge attention to detail. With every he photo uploaded to the net, he gives details of how the gingerbread house came together. Everything except for the base and lights is edible…

Vladimir Putin and the nation he leads lurked in the background of the 2016 campaign for months and months, perhaps even shaping the outcome of the race. And now Putin’s preferred candidate, Donald Trump, appears ready to embrace him as an ally — a stunning shift in US-Russia policy.

This is a source of growing alarm among cosmopolitan-minded liberals. Putin is bad, they say, and so are the European far-right parties that are aligning with him — a multicontinental alliance undergirded by Islamophobic politics that alarms respectable opinion throughout the West.

And among political elites there really is a fairly firm consensus that this is, in fact, bad. America’s military leaders have repeatedly called Russia the greatest threat to the US-led world order. Among Republicans, it’s the ones focused on national security who put up the greatest resistance to Trump, and since the election he’s gotten more pushback from Senate Republicans on the Russian hacking issue than on anything else. Hillary Clinton’s campaign clearly sought to make hay out of this, arguing that Trump would be Putin’s puppet.

But the mass public is relatively indifferent to foreign affairs and mostly doesn’t seem to care about this. Foreign policy is the classic sort of issue that doesn’t matter in politics until something goes badly wrong, at which point it starts to matter a lot.

National security leaders across the spectrum worry, with good reason, that the kind of friendly arrangement Trump seems to want to make with Russia would only shift the ratchet and end up involving the United States in more direct military engagements in Europe that we’d rather not put to the test.

But the Cold War has been over for a long time, and both the US-Russian relationship and Russia’s approach to Europe have changed while most Americans weren’t paying attention. Here, then, is an attempt to answer some of your most basic questions about the contemporary US-Russian relationship and where it might head in the Trump era.

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The father of two 14-year-old students at Middleburg Heights Junior High School says he was angry when they showed him a photo they snapped of their algebra lesson from earlier this month.

It reads: "Tony can send 5 texts and 3 nudes in 19 minutes. He could also send 3 texts and 1 nude in 9 minutes. How long would it take him to send one text and one nude?"

"We addressed the teacher and kind of clarified exactly what happened, and in this case provided what we thought was the appropriate consequence, which was clarification that that was inappropriate," said school superintendent Michael Sheppard.

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"He's a good teacher, and just in this case used the inappropriate word," said Sheppard.

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Fox 8 requested Daniel Rapp's personnel file, but officials said they could not make it immediately available. The superintendent did reveal that the teacher had a similar reprimand in his file.

Yes, the election results were generally awful. But the untold story of 2016 is that grassroots activists, bold campaigners, and the movements they embraced frequently prevailed—and their successes showed progressives how to press forward even in the most frustrating and difficult of times. Our 2016 honor roll of the most valuable progressives is a chronicle of the fight that has already begun, and a road map for the resistance yet to come.

Most Valuable Campaign
Bernie Sanders

“So, are you guys ready for a radical idea?” the Vermont senator asked as he kicked his 2016 presidential campaign into high gear. Sanders was speaking about creating “an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.” But he could have been referring to the idea of a presidential bid by a seventysomething democratic socialist from a small state that began, as Sanders likes to point out, at just 3 percent in the polls. “We had no campaign organization and we had no money. And we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America,” the senator recalled. Yet his rallies would soon fill the largest halls in the country, and he would go on to win more than 13 million votes, 23 primary and caucus contests, and more than 1,800 delegates. That wasn’t enough to clinch the nomination, and Sanders is the first to admit that his campaign made strategic mistakes in its initial outreach to key Democratic constituencies and superdelegates. Yet he won overwhelming support from young people; he forged a coalition that energized Native Americans, Arab Americans, rural voters, and displaced and disappointed workers across the country; he opened up transformational debates about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and about pipelines and climate change; and his supporters played a crucial role in writing the most progressive platform in the modern history of the Democratic Party. Most important: Sanders encouraged his backers to build an organization, Our Revolution, to extend the energy of his progressive populist campaign beyond 2016.

Most Valuable Struggle
Stand With Standing Rock

By the time most Americans had heard about the Dakota Access Pipeline project, it was close to completion. But the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota kept raising objections to the project’s plans to tunnel under the Missouri River, which would threaten not just sacred lands but access to safe drinking water for the Sioux and for millions of people living downriver. Tribes from across the country and indigenous peoples from around the world recognized the importance of the struggle to prevent completion of the oil pipeline as planned. They were joined by Bill McKibben, 350.org, and other climate-change activists in standing up to the fossil-fuel industry. Against daunting odds, this intersectional movement delayed the project and, in early December, the US Army Corps of Engineers refused to issue the permits needed to complete it. The feds will now consider “alternative routes.” Despite this major victory, the struggle is far from over, as Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline’s developer, has powerful allies in Congress and the incoming administration. Yet, as Naomi Klein says, the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline has shown “people everywhere that organizing and resistance are not futile.”

Most Valuable Strategy
A Day Without Latinos and Immigrants

As Republican presidential candidates were outdoing one another giving voice to anti-immigrant bigotry last February, Wisconsin Republican legislators suddenly backed off a plan to penalize municipalities that respected the rights of immigrants in their interactions with police. The announcement that the scheme was “not a high priority for any of [the GOP] members” came just hours after the “Day Without Latinos and Immigrants” protest, which saw 20,000 restaurant, grocery-store, warehouse, and dairy-farm workers leave their jobs to surround the Capitol. “The mass general strike was an undeniable statement of the essential and positive contributions that immigrants make to our economy and our society,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the activist group Voces de la Frontera. That statement was heard, loud and clear, by the state’s Republican legislators, who finished the session without taking up the bill.

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These comments are a small part of the profound discussion going on right now about gender. Our January issue focuses mostly on young people and how gender roles play out around the world. For one of our stories, which we also turned into a series of videos, we went to eight countries and shot portraits of 80 nine-year-olds, who talked to us in brave and honest ways about how gender influenced their lives.

One of them was Avery. She has lived as an openly transgender girl since age 5, and she captured the complexity of the conversation around gender. Today, we're not only talking about gender roles for boys and girls—we're talking about our evolving understanding of people on the gender spectrum.

The portraits of all the children are beautiful. We especially loved the portrait of Avery—strong and proud. We thought that, in a glance, she summed up the concept of "Gender Revolution."

Like her, all of us carry labels applied by others. The complimentary ones—“generous,” “funny,” “smart”—are worn with pride. The harsh ones can be lifelong burdens, indictments we try desperately to outrun.

The most enduring label, and arguably the most influential, is the first one most of us got: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” Though Sigmund Freud used the word “anatomy” in his famous axiom, in essence he meant that gender is destiny.