Growing number of US children taking melatonin for sleep - BBC News   

Melatonin use is becoming "exceedingly common" among American children, with nearly one in five under age 14 now consuming melatonin to aid sleep.

Parents are increasingly giving it to younger children. About 18% of children age five to nine are using it as a sleep aid, a new study suggests.

Last year, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a health advisory about melatonin use for young people.

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Abercrombie & Fitch CEO: A leadership master class on saving a retail icon - Yahoo Finance   

Inside a newly opened Abercrombie & Fitch store on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, a peek into the storied brand’s future appears.

Shoppers from around the world climb up and down the stairs at the two-story location. Joyous teens and aging millennials leave with the latest styles, at a brand formerly viewed as for youths only. A bright, open shopping environment seems to scream, “We are the new Abercrombie & Fitch.”

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Giving birth in Gaza amid shelling and power cuts - BBC News   

One month ago, Gaza resident Jumana Emad was in the final stages of pregnancy.

She was happily sharing pictures of her heavily pregnant belly, waiting to put her birthing plan into action.

She knew she was going to have a girl, her husband was excited, her hospital bag was packed and her four-year-old daughter Tulin couldn't wait to meet her baby sister.

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10 Performances That Pushed Emotional Limits -    

For our critic-at-large, the year was marked by the Black excellence of “Purlie Victorious,” the brutality of “Bottoms” and rage of “Beef.”

For me, 2023 was a year of entertainment that captured people pushed to their emotional limits, whether that was the rage of two bitter enemies, the desperation of a widow who only sees a future of annihilation or the pent-up aggression of a bunch of high school girls. But it was also a year of colorful, funny and biting Black stories on stages. Throw in a dancing goth, a freshly single New York City fashionista and a chronicle of a dying band, and you’ve got my top picks for everything that tickled my fancy in the past year across theater, film and TV.

Call me a masochist, but what I most loved about Rebecca Gilman’s devastating play was that it tapped into multiple registers of despair: individual, communal, ecological. Peg, a widow living on a prairie in Wisconsin, is nursing concerns about endangered animals and environmental catastrophe, and how everything is leading us to an uninhabitable planet. But alongside Peg’s global anxieties are a host of much more intimate sorrows — grief for her husband, a sense of hopelessness, and isolation — that are driving her to consider suicide. Gilman’s script offers black humor, suspense and a crushing ending. And the empathetic direction, by Robert Falls, of a stellar cast led by Mary Beth Fisher and Bubba Weiler, provides a sense of existential urgency to every minute. (Read our review of “Swing State.”)

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