By Stephanie Yang, Los Angeles Times

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A small-town hockey player who’s become a national superstar, a high-school sweetheart who’s scrubbing toilets, and a secret that will change everything:

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“He can never find out that he has a daughter!”

The series pilot for “Breaking the Ice” has all the hallmarks of a dramatic, and cheesy, saga of deception and betrayal — all in 132 seconds, the perfect length for the TikTok and Reels generation (the many mini episodes of “Ice” have generated 272.9 million views).

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to know how this ends,’” said Shannon Swicegood, a 31-year-old mom in Columbia, South Carolina, scrolling to watch the next two episodes on the ReelShort app.

The shows, known as micro dramas or vertical dramas, are reminiscent of soap operas or telenovelas, but they’re typically divided into 50-100 tiny chapters. Users can unlock new episodes by watching ads, paying per clip or signing up for unlimited viewing. Swicegood, for example, pays a $200 annual fee to ReelShort for continuous access to the stuff of romance novels: windswept hair, smoldering stares, glittery ingenues and adorable children who may ask: “Are you really my daddy?”

Her husband likes to tease her for watching her “dirty little shows,” with their outlandish and corny plot lines. But Swicegood believes they are filling a void among the streaming networks. “I don’t feel like (the streamers) are coming out with anything that appeals to the demographic I’m in,” Swicegood said. “Instead of sitting down and trying another show about someone solving a crime, I can pull up ReelShorts and just watch two people fall in love.”

Micro dramas emerged in China just as watching short, vertical videos on smartphones became a cornerstone of everyday life. According to DataEye, a digital research firm based in Shenzhen, revenue from micro dramas reached $6.9 billion in China last year, surpassing domestic box office sales for the first time. Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm that tracks mobile app data, reports that short-drama apps outside China made $1.2 billion in 2024, with 60% of that coming from the U.S.

By comparison, the U.S. box office revenue was about $8.75 billion in 2024.

For now, the U.S. micro drama market is dominated by Silicon Valley-based ReelShort, which has outpaced more than 40 international rival apps in mobile downloads and revenue, according to a report last year from Sensor Tower.

Five years ago, another U.S. company, Quibi, famously launched by Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenburg, tried to remake the business of short-form video, but the effort shut down fewer than seven months after its launch. Investors were told that the service failed to attract viewers willing to pay to watch its shows. Will this wave of new platforms be able to reconfigure the global entertainment industry as it struggles with streaming wars, rising production costs and a sluggish return to theaters?

: : :

A funeral for a young woman who was destined to be married off to a divorced pig farmer, a horrified crowd that watches her rise from the dead — and a terrifying realization.

“I’ve traveled through time!”

The first episode of “I Became a Stepmother in the 1980s” got Selina Huang hooked on micro dramas. Their popularity surged during the pandemic, and Huang, a 20-year-old college student in Xi’an, China, became obsessed with the short mobile shows during a holiday break with her family. “The way they could quickly stir up emotions made us so excited that we just couldn’t stop,” she said. “It was like a whole new world for us.”

Their brevity also meant that she could fit a show in during meal time or between classes once she returned to school — though, at times, starting a series before bed would lead to an unintended all-nighter.

She said she spends about $1.40 to $2.75 to access a full show when she’s too impatient to wait through ads and estimates she’s watched more than 100 titles.

Joyce Yen, a producer and former screenwriter in China, moved into the micro drama industry in 2022. Compared to a traditional television or streaming show, vertical dramas are significantly cheaper to produce, he said. A series of about 20 or 30 episodes, each about half an hour long, could cost upwards of $8 million. A micro drama series could be shot for as little as $14,000, though he said the average is closer to $110,000.

Cassandra Yang, founder of a Chinese micro drama content distribution and licensing company called RisingJoy, points out that micro dramas can make a profit within one or two months, compared to movies made for the big screen.

“It is a very exciting signal for us compared with the traditional film and the traditional TV series, because it has more flexibility and more imagination,” said Yang, who was the head of content at Turner Broadcasting System in China before it closed in 2019.

For now, most micro dramas that RisingJoy distributes are made in China, where the nascent industry is the most mature. But eventually, Yang believes, localizing production will be necessary to better expand in promising markets including Japan, Korea and Singapore.

In the meantime, the U.S. is one of the fastest growing markets for micro dramas, along with Indonesia, Brazil, India and Mexico.

“I think every region has great potential,” Yang said. “But I have to say, everyone wants in on the U.S. market, because the ROI is better.”

ReelShort CEO Joey Jia says the greatest advantage of micro dramas is the ability to constantly adapt based on how audiences respond to the platform’s content. He founded the studio seven years ago, but it took a while to figure out what worked. The company pivoted from mobile gaming to interactive stories to mini dramas. Back then, he said the app’s retention rate was near single digits, and 80% of dramas failed to gain an audience.

Producing many variations of similar story structures to see which ones succeeded led the company to a content library that is filled with titles like “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” (451.2 million views), “Playing by the Billionaire’s Rules” (26 million views) and “Baby Trapped by the Billionaire” (32.9 million views).

“We know which story can make more money and which story has problems,” Jia said. “That’s the missing portion for traditional Hollywood. They don’t have a feedback loop.”

Jia estimates that ReelShort released almost 200 titles last year, and aims to double that this year. In September, the company opened a studio in Los Angeles. He said that while he believes some content — such as franchises that rely heavily on a fictional world or characters like Star Wars or James Bond — is ill-suited for micro dramas, he hopes to expand into other genres like science fiction or reality TV.

“The biggest question is, ‘How fast can the micro drama evolve?’” he asked. “I still see the short drama as a baby that grew up very fast.”

Katherine Ford, a 47-year-old grade school teacher in Kernersville, North Carolina, would eventually like to see ReelShorts expand its content as well.

After she ran out of English titles, she started watching Asian micro dramas, which she said generally have better acting, writing and production values. She hopes that in the next six months they can branch out more, to period dramas or old Westerns or stories featuring plus-sized women.

For now, she’s paying $5 a week to replay her favorites dozens of times, including “Playing by the Billionaire’s Rules,” “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” and “Baby Trapped by the Billionaire.”

Ford’s family also subscribes to Netflix, Disney+ and Peacock. But if it came down to choosing one, Ford doesn’t know if she could give up ReelShort. “I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s my guilty pleasure watch and I enjoy it, even though it’s sometimes really cheesy.”

(Los Angeles Times special correspondent Xin-yun Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.)

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Amanda Hernández, Stateline.org

Firearm-related deaths among children and teenagers in the United States have risen sharply in recent years, increasing by 50% since 2019.

In 2023, firearms remained the leading cause of death among American youth for the third year in a row, followed by motor vehicle accidents, according to the latest mortality data released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The data shows 2,581 children aged 17 and under died from firearm-related incidents in 2023, including accidents, homicides and suicides, with a national rate of nearly four gun deaths per 100,000 children.

Young people in the United States were killed by firearms at a rate nearly three times higher than by drowning. This means that for every child who died from drowning in 2023, nearly three died from gun violence.

“Every single number is a life lost — is a kid that won’t go back home,” said Silvia Villarreal, the director of research translation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Children, she added, are an inherently vulnerable population, and this vulnerability is even more pronounced among children of color.

Black children and teens in 2023 were more than eight times as likely to die from firearm homicide than their white peers. Since 2015, firearms have been the leading cause of death for Black youth, according to CDC data.

Since 2018, firearm suicide rates have been highest among American Indian or Alaska Native and white children and teens. In 2023, American Indian and Alaska Native youth had the highest firearm suicide rate of any racial group.

Youth gun deaths don’t just affect family members, close loved ones and friends; they ripple through entire communities, making it difficult for people to heal, Villarreal told Stateline.

“Communities that have suffered really high-impact losses are never the same, and I don’t know if it’s possible to be ever the same as it was before,” Villarreal said.

One of the major policies championed by gun control and safety groups to address youth gun violence is safe storage laws, which establish guidelines for how firearms should be stored in homes, vehicles and other properties. In recent years, some states also have proposed and adopted measures to create tax credits for purchasing gun safes.

Twenty-six states have child access prevention and secure storage laws on the books, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control research and advocacy group.

A report released in July by RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, found that laws designed to limit children’s access to stored firearms may help reduce firearm suicides, unintentional shootings and firearm homicides among youth.

This year, lawmakers in states across the country — including in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin — have considered gun storage policies.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Jeremy Reynolds, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

Playing music for plants can help them to grow, and it turns out that the same might be true for humans.

In a new study published in the peer-reviewed science journal Chaos, researchers played classical music for third-trimester fetuses using headphones on the mothers’ stomachs and measured the fetuses’ heart rates.

They found that the vibrations from the music helped to stabilize the fetuses’ heart rates, which researchers said “could stimulate the development of the fetal autonomic nervous system.”

The study, “Response to music on the nonlinear dynamics of human fetal heart rate fluctuations,” is another in a long line of studies suggesting that listening to classical music can, among other things, help people develop spatial-temporal skills or aid in scheduling and ordering tasks like packing a car trunk full of suitcases on the first try. A true superpower.

The scientific literature on music is historically murky, however, with lots of correlative and anecdotal data and studies with small sample sizes. The new Chaos study only analyzed data from 37 pregnant women and also noted that the babies’ hearts stabilized more to the sound of Spanish guitar than to orchestral music.

But as science has developed new ways to image the brain and body, researchers are gaining clarity on the specific ways music affects us.

Lately, much of that research has concentrated on childhood development and the therapeutic aspects of listening to and learning to play music, and 2025 has seen a spate of data emerging about music and pregnancy.

Sonata snacks

The study about fetal heart rates follows in the footsteps of a 2023 study published in Scientific Reports that found that listening to Beethoven’s music live synchronized listeners heart rates and breathing. This was particularly true when listeners were emotionally moved by the music:

“There were links between the bodily synchrony and aesthetic experiences: synchrony, especially heart-rate synchrony, was higher when listeners felt moved emotionally and inspired by a piece, and were immersed in the music,” researchers wrote in “Audience synchronies in live concerts illustrate the embodiment of music experience.”

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For the fetal study, researchers only used two pieces of music. First was “The Swan” by French composer Camille Saint-Saens, himself a musical prodigy, with its serene, flowing cello solo. And then came “Arpa de Oro,” by Mexican composer Abundio Martínez, a pensive guitar melody with a groovier bass.

The latter produced more regular and predictable heart rate patterns, according to the study.

Pregnant mothers, too, have reported benefits to listening to calming music. An Indonesian journal in January published a paper found that “Classical music therapy has been shown to be effective in reducing anxiety in pregnant women.”

But again, the sample size was only 30 women.

The paper, “Classical Music Interventions to Reduce Anxiety in Pregnancy,” also had a few translation issues, but its conclusion doesn’t seem farfetched based on other published research. For example, a larger literature review published in August in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology MFM found that “a general positive effect of music interventions on maternal stress resilience,” but noted that the genre of the music wasn’t as relevant as whether the women enjoyed the music or not.

The actual takeaway: Listening to music you like might be good for your health.

The Mozart effect

Back in 1998, Georgia Governor Zell Miller, was so taken with the idea that he tried to use state funding to send every baby born in Georgia a cassette tape or CD of classical music.

The idea is as seductive as it is silly. It appeals to parents’ natural desire to give their kids a developmental leg up, and it appeals to classical record labels and producers who sought to cash in on the so-called Mozart effect.

Then again, another study, “A systematic review of the Mozart effect in adult and paediatric cases of drug-resistant epilepsy,” this one published in Epilepsy & Behavior found that children and adults alike experienced reduced seizures when exposed to a Mozart duet for two pianos, which the researchers are also terming a Mozart effect.

The literature does indicate that passively listening to music can help kids manage anxiety and that actively studying an instrument can have all sorts of far-reaching benefits like improving executive function, or the ability to prioritize and accomplish daily tasks and make decisions.

And this, in turn, can have all sorts of far reaching effects in terms of development and career and even the ability to bond, socially. The Mozart effect may not be as simple as we once thought, but it certainly bears further probing.

Jeremy Reynolds’ work at the Post-Gazette is supported in part by a grant from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Getty Foundation and Rubin Institute.

©2025 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — When Nikelle Inman started a new job coaching first-generation college students, she looked forward to meeting with them one-on-one to talk about how to surmount obstacles and find resources to succeed.

Instead, she and her fellow success coaches at a community college in North Carolina spent a year mired in paperwork, tasked with reviewing applications from aspiring undergraduates. They never did get to meet with students.

“Admissions work kind of took over what we were supposed to do,” Inman, 34, said. “I felt disengaged with the position, more so because I just didn’t feel valued.”

It’s disorienting when a job turns out to be completely different than advertised or morphs into something we didn’t expect. But more U.S. workers have reported feeling disconnected from their organization’s purpose and unclear on how to meet expectations since the coronavirus pandemic changed the way we work, according to a new Gallup analysis.

Just under half of U.S. employees who participated in a Gallup survey in November “strongly agreed” that they know what is expected of them at work, which is one of the factors the polling firm uses to measure employee engagement. In January 2020, the figure stood at 56%.

The new survey showed that new employees, younger employees, people in white-collar industries like technology, insurance and finance, and those in hybrid work arrangements were especially likely to report that expectations for their roles weren’t clear.

The findings make intuitive sense. Managers and employees have bushwhacked their way through disruptive changes since COVID-19 first upended public life five years ago. In late 2024, about one-quarter of employees with the ability to work remotely were doing so exclusively, up from around 1 in 10 in 2019, Gallup found. Another 55% were working in the office some days and remotely the rest, according to the 2024 data, up from about one-third in 2019.

More recently, layoffs at tech companies and in the government and other sectors have left organizations with fewer people to handle the load, and expectations aren’t always adjusted to the new realities.

“With all the rounds of layoffs, people’s scope and responsibilities are shifting constantly,” said Jeremy Guttenplan, an executive leadership trainer and coach based in New York. “You think about the ones left behind and the work is just getting piled on them.”

Here are some strategies for eliminating confusion when the scope and responsibilities of a job are ambiguous.

Establish expectations early

Spell out or make sure you understand what a new role or project entails — along with any relevant deadlines or performance markers — from the beginning so everyone agrees on what’s realistic and wanted. Writing it down in a shared document can help prevent future misunderstandings.

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When a successful real estate developer asked Amber Krasinski to film and produce 85 TikTok videos in three hours, she thought hard about whether she really wanted to take him on as a client. The job might be good exposure for her communications agency, IvyHill Stategies, but Krasinski knew it would be impossible to complete in so little time. She turned it down.

Krasinski regularly gives her client progress updates and tries to make a practice of asking clarifying questions before taking on new projects.

“Any time I have a conversation with a prospective client, I have that in the back of my mind,” Krasinski said. “Avoiding that people-pleasing side that says, ‘You can figure it out, you can do it.’ You don’t want to let anybody down, but you also need to set yourself up for success.”

Seek frequent feedback

No one wants to spend all day in meetings. But more frequent check-ins with a manager or supervisor may help staff members who are unsure if they are prioritizing their time appropriately or don’t know what they are supposed to be doing.

Organizations can explore different ways of building connection between employees and providing more opportunities for feedback, which can result in better understanding of workplace expectations. Brian Smith, founder and managing partner of IA Business Advisors, said his company hosts gratitude sessions for 30 minutes each week.

The first 20 minutes are led by a coach who advises attendees on issues such as how to effectively manage time or deal with challenging customers. Highlighting specific problems and strategies can help workers understand what’s expected of them. At the end of the session, participants have an opportunity to share what they’re grateful for.

Start the conversation

Workers don’t have to wait for a supervisor to seek feedback or clarify expectations. You can suggest a quick check-in at any point, if you’re unsure how to prioritize long-term goals or short-term deadlines,

“Managing upwards is going to make your life easier,” said Dale Whelehan, founder of 4 Day World, a think tank that explores new models of work. “Don’t assume that management has all the answers. They’re probably just as lost.”

However, in hierarchical organizations where questioning management may be viewed negatively, it’s important to be delicate, he said.

To initiate a feedback discussion, you can ask to meet with a manager about a current project. Whelehan outlined how to approach the conversation if the meeting gets scheduled. Start by sharing what you understand your assignment to be. Then request the manager’s confirmation or clarification by saying something such as, “I just want to make sure that there’s alignment here,” he advised.

Ask about anything else you need to clarify and close out the conversation by saying, “From what I understand from this conversation, my role is this. … Have I understood that correctly?” Follow up with an email restating what you agreed to, Whelehan said.

Trust your instincts

With workplaces experiencing so many changes, employees can find themselves jumping from one assignment to the other, distracted by new responsibilities picked up after colleagues were laid off, or adjusting to spending more time physically in the office.

If it all feels too chaotic, take a moment to pause. Revisit your priorities. And then work on the most important task.

“If something doesn’t feel right, don’t just accept it,” Inman said. “Whatever that avenue is, if it’s staying and trying to make it better or leaving, just don’t give up on what you know is right.”

Have you overcome an obstacle or made a profound change in your work? Send your questions and story ideas to cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well.