The Brief

A "catastrophic pressure implosion" killed all five passengers aboard the Titan submersible, the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday, somberly solving a mystery that had captivated the public all week.

Some experts, however, weren't surprised — including film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron. The Titanic director is criticizing the safety of the vessel that was to have explored the wreckage of the Titanic in the depths of the North Atlantic and comparing the cause of the accident to the ocean liner's historic disaster.

In a series of television interviews, Cameron said he had suspected all week that the Titan had imploded on Sunday. (A senior Navy official has confirmed to NPR that an acoustic listening system detected such sounds on Sunday afternoon.)

Cameron told ABC News that he believes the Titan's hull began to crack under pressure and that its inside sensors gave the passengers a warning to that effect.

"We understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency," he said.

The Titanic director is no stranger to deep-sea exploration. He has made a whopping 33 dives to the shipwreck himself, even calculating that he's spent more time on the Titanic than its own captain did a century ago.

He also dove the Mariana Trench — the deepest-known point on Earth, about three times deeper than the Titanic wreck site — in 2012, in a 24-foot cylindrical submersible he spent seven years building.

"I think it's the explorer's job to go and be at the remote edge of human experience and then come back and tell that story," he told NPR that year.

Cameron and many others in the deep submergence community had long been concerned about the vessel's safety and OceanGate's experimental approach, he said on Thursday, lamenting that the company had ignored experts' calls to undergo a standard certification process.

"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet, he steamed up full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result," Cameron said. "And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that's going on all around the world, I think it's just astonishing, it's really quite surreal."

Cameron stressed that deep submergence diving is "a mature art," with very few accidents when it began in the 1960s and an even better safety record now, thanks in large part to the certification protocols that almost all such vehicles follow — except this one.

It's clear that OceanGate "shouldn't have been doing what it was doing," he told Reuters, adding that he had declined an invitation from CEO Stockton Rush to go diving with them this season.

Cameron described OceanGate's use of a carbon-fiber hull as "fundamentally flawed" and said he had warned another company several years ago against using that same design principle. He said he regrets not speaking up more this time around.

"Now there's one wreck lying next to the other wreck," he said, "for the same damn reason."

Cameron was convinced the vessel had imploded on Sunday

Cameron told CNN that he was out on a ship himself on Sunday, so didn't hear about the missing vessel until Monday morning.

He said he immediately made some calls to his network and found out within about half an hour that the Titan had lost communications and tracking simultaneously.

"The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion, a shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is," Cameron said.

Later that day, Cameron got more information "that was probably of a military origin, although it could have been research" suggesting there had been some sort of loud noise on Sunday consistent with that of an implosion.

"That seemed to me enough confirmation that I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged everybody to raise a glass in their honor on Monday," he said.

Cameron said it was difficult to watch the frantic search play out over the next few days, knowing it was futile but hoping he was wrong. He especially feels for the families who had to go through it.

The deep submergence community is small, Cameron stressed. He said he's known Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the "legendary" French submersible pilot who was one of the five people on board, for 25 years.

"For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process," he added.

James Cameron speaks in front of his Deepsea Challenger submersible near the U.S. Capitol in June 2013.

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Saul Loeb

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AFP via Getty Images

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Cameron's safety concerns echo those of other experts

Cameron reiterated concerns that others from within and beyond OceanGate had been raising as far back as 2018, namely about the vessel's carbon fiber hull and the company's decision not to have it certified by a third-party agency.

"I think it was unconscionable that this group did not go through that rigorous process," he told CNN.

He told the BBC he believed they hadn't done so because "they knew they wouldn't pass."

OceanGate said in a 2019 blog post that the certification process only assessed the vessels themselves — not operational safety, which it took seriously. It also said regulation was preventing innovation, echoing comments Rush told Smithsonian Magazine that same year.

Cameron said he personally never believed in the sort of carbon fiber cylindrical hull that the company used, telling Reuters it was a "horrible idea" that "just sounded bad on its face."

Pressure hulls should be made out of contiguous material like steel, titanium, ceramic or acrylic, he explained, in order to do modeling and finite element analysis to "understand the number of cycles that it can take." That's not the case with a composite material, like carbon fiber, made of two different materials blended together.

"And so we all knew that the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water ingress and ... what they call cycling fatigue," he added. "And we knew if the sub passed its pressure test it wasn't gonna fail on its first dive ... but it's going to fail over time, which is insidious. You don't get that with steel or titanium."

Cameron told ABC News that the risk of implosion is "first and foremost in our minds as engineers."

When creating the submersible he would eventually take to the Challenger Deep (the deepest part of the Mariana Trench), Cameron said his team spent more than three years working on a computerized model of the hull before even building it, let alone repeatedly pressure testing it.

He remembers first hearing about a move toward composite hulls around this time, when British entrepreneur and astronaut Richard Branson was working on his own competing sub to dive into the Challenger Deep (the mission was later shelved).

"I told those guys ... 'Somebody's going to get killed in that sub or in a sub like it,' " Cameron said.

Titanic dives can be dangerous no matter the vessel

Comparing OceanGate to his Titanic dives is like "apples and oranges," Cameron told ABC News.

He dove with Russian submersibles that he said used "very, very well-understood design methodologies" and had a "flawless operating record" throughout their career.

While he always had confidence in the vessel, he acknowledged that the Titanic shipwreck is a hostile and dangerous site to dive.

"You've got this eight-story, 10-story-high structure with overhanging metal structures," he explained. "It's a twisted mess, you can get entangled."

Cameron said he always used a two-sub system so that if one of the vessels got ensnared the other would be there to help manage the situation.

He went to similarly great lengths to prepare for his record-breaking Challenger Deep dive seven miles down in the ocean, as he explained to NPR in 2013.

That expedition involved using two 536-pound weights to pull his submersible down, spending about three hours on the ocean floor and then disconnecting the weights to rise back up.

Cameron said there's always a sigh of relief when things work the way they should.

"We treated it like a space mission, and you have to go in with a lot of redundancy in the way you design it," he told NPR's Melissa Block. "So I wasn't surprised when it worked. But you're always a little bit relieved because the alternative is not pretty."

Many Southern California cities and institutions are dropping big, grabby news today. Before you go "what the what" — remember, it's the first day of April.

Here's a roundup of some of the April Fools' news dump items.

Irvine, the 'pickleball-only' city

Irvine announced that it'll be converting all tennis courts into pickleball courts by 2027. That's one notch for Team Pickleball in the ongoing turf war between tennis lovers and pickleball players over the fight for court space to engage in their beloved sport.

"Starting today, April 1, all tennis courts are being converted to pickleball courts as part of a citywide effort to make Irvine a pickleball-only City by 2027," the post stated. "We don’t just think this is a good idea … we dink it’s a great one."

Catch that? They "dink" it's a great idea.

All hail Queen Latifah in Long Beach

Over in Long Beach, Mayor Rex Richardson announced the city's reigning royalty, the Queen Mary, will be renamed after another queen.

"After careful consideration, I am proud to announce that the Queen Mary will officially be renamed the RMS Queen Latifah," he said. "Long Beach is stepping into a new era as a major music destination — with a new amphitheater, a deep cultural legacy, and a future built on sound. It’s only right that our most iconic Queen reflects that energy."

In real-real news, LBC native and everyone's favorite Olympics commenter Snoop Dogg is headlining the grand opening show of the Long Beach Amphitheater in June. That's the new waterfront venue near the RMS Queen Latifah.

Prolific author gets his own library branch

Suspense writer James Patterson has more than 200 novels to his name, selling more than 450 million copies. If anyone deserves his own namesake branch, it would be Patterson, no?

The Los Angeles Public Library certainly dinks so, announcing today the James Patterson Canoga Park branch, "with wall to wall Patterson books and programming centered around this prolific author."

Eau de corpse flower

The opening of the corpse flower has become an annual event at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. The event brings legions hoping to get a whiff of the famed flower's "pungent aroma."

The San Marino institution announced that it's bottling the scent, as part of its new "The Huntington's Stank Collection."

"A musky gym sock note opens this unique fragrance, with a sweet, rotten-egg base to ground it. Smells like you – but smellier," the post explained.

Adopt something you can just leave at home, always

Pasadena Humane got in on the fun with a special event — today only — where you can adopt a rock.

"Adoption ROCKS! And today only, you can adopt a friend you won't take for granite," the message said.

Los Angeles may not be the fashion capital of the world, but it could contend for best thrift, at least in our humble opinion!

The key is knowing where to look.

Here are some of the best thrift and resale stores in different parts of Southern California according to our listeners and (very stylish) LAist colleagues.

Pasadena

Pasadena City College Flea Market

The pinnacle of Pasadena and open every third Sunday of the month, the flea market houses 400 vendors with goods ranging from antique furniture to unique second-hand clothing.

1570 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

Ritz Resale

For high-end designer clothing, Dee in Pasadena, who likes handbags, recommends the consignment boutique, Ritz Resale.

“I found a Coach bag that I paid about $19 for that I use all the time,” she said.

2028 E. Villa St., Pasadena

Hotbox Vintage

If you’re looking for more affordable clothing and household items, Delaine Ureño, LAist senior institutional giving officer, frequents Hotbox Vintage in South Pasadena.

1125 Mission St., South Pasadena

Los Angeles

The Ticktocker Thrift Shop

This thrift shop in San Pedro is owned and operated by the Peninsula Chapter of National Charity League and comes recommended by Mel in the South Bay, who says proceeds support local charities and scholarship funds.

353 W. 6th St., San Pedro

Public Estrellas

If you’re ever in Lincoln Heights, Sarah Steinman, LAist's membership manager, encourages people to check out her neighborhood thrift store.

2701 N. Broadway, Los Angeles

Society of St. Vincent de Paul

This thrift store rec near Elysian Park comes from Lulu in Glendale, who says shoppers can grab a cute pair of pants along with unique furniture to put them in.

210 N. Avenue 21, Los Angeles

Berda Paradise

“Full of treasures and benefits the Hollywood Health Clinic, which is a few doors down,” said Malka Fenyvesi, LAist's major gifts officer.

3506 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles

The Left Bank

LAist's Lucie Russo recommends The Left Bank in Frogtown if you’re looking for something more curated.

2479 Fletcher Dr., Los Angeles

Far Outfit

Anything on Long Beach’s aptly named Retro Row is worth hitting, according to AirTalk producer Manny Valladares. His favorite spot is Far Outfit. They have unique finds mostly from the early 2000s with a self-described “weird” factor.

2020 E. 4th St., Long Beach

Orange County

Laura’s House

With several locations throughout Orange County, including Costa Mesa and Aliso Viejo, LAist reporter Yusra Farzan recommends Laura’s House, noting they have a great curated collection and proceeds help domestic violence victims.

23635 El Toro Road, Suite F, Lake Forest

Timeless Vintage

Old Towne Orange is home to many great thrift stores and antique malls. If you’re looking for some good streetwear and sports jerseys, Timeless Vintage is a good choice. They have a great selection of 90s Looney Tunes and Disney graphic tees as well.

110 1/2 S. Glassell St., Orange

Retropolis

Another O.C. favorite is a fairly new addition to downtown Fullerton. Retropolis has a wide selection of apparel, but I like to go there for their chunky 80s sweaters and colorful jackets.

206 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton

And Beyond

Eco Thrift

“[Eco Thrift] has really good discount days on top of already affordable clothing,” said Dañiel Martinez, LAist’s Weekend Edition producer. “Tons of good vintage and designer finds hidden in the racks.”

1190 S. Garey Ave., Pomona

Revivals

“I went to Palm Springs where they have some of the best thrifting,” said AirTalk listener Monica in Artesia. She bought a pair of Ferragamo shoes for just $8.

Kevin Tidmarsh, LAist’s All Things Considered producer, specifically recommends Revivals, a thrift chain with locations throughout the Coachella Valley.

611 South Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs

Some of Los Angeles’s most iconic eateries — Papa Cristo’s in Pico-Union, Guerrilla Tacos in Downtown and French eatery TAIX in Echo Park — have closed their doors, prompting hand-wringing about the decline of the city’s rich and diverse food scene.

But those closures obscured a more notable achievement; 758 new restaurants opened last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024, when 729 restaurants opened.

The split-screen view of dining in Los Angeles is part of a broader transformation that is reshaping the industry nationwide.

The explosion of digital-order services has rewritten the business model for restaurants, which are now operating with less space, reduced staff and tighter margins. Many of the new eateries do much of their business from behind a screen—either through self-service tablets or off delivery apps such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats.

So-called “limited-service” restaurants now account for nearly a third of all newly opened establishments. The number of traditional, or full-service, restaurants has also been growing, hitting 539 openings in 2025, and a record-high 587 the year before. If you count the number of coffee, smoothie and snack joints, the numbers rise even further.

Pizza to go

Many of Los Angeles’s restaurateurs are adapting to this burgeoning business model. Last year, Liz Gutierrez turned her pop-up restaurant, Fiorelli Pizza, into a small brick-and-mortar location in Beverly Grove with just a couple of stools at a counter for seating. As she saw restaurants closing their doors, the advantages of the new business model quickly dawned on her.

“This was something that could be operated with minimum labor, it could be way more manageable in terms of fixed costs and expenses, and we could still deliver restaurant-quality [food],” Gutierrez said.

The bevy of new food establishments opening their doors is a lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak economic picture: The total number of new businesses opening in the city is nearly half what it was a decade ago. That is driven in part by some of the same forces, such as Amazon.com, Inc. and other online retailers that put pressure on businesses operating out of traditional storefronts.

But the flourishing restaurant industry has been able to buck that trend so far. While Amazon can deliver clothes and even groceries, it still can’t deliver a fresh pizza or poké bowl.

The QR code will take your order

Linchi Kwok, a hospitality management researcher at Collins College of Hospitality Management at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said a lack of interest in working in the hospitality industry, paired with rising labor costs, has pushed restaurant owners to find cost-effective workarounds to run their operations with fewer people.

“Limited-service restaurants don’t have to hire many people to do the work. It saves labor costs, saves space, and saves the service turn-around time. They don’t have to worry about it,” Kwok said.

Restaurants must share a portion of their already slim profit margins—usually between 2-4% in L.A.—with an app service and the driver. To offset that, restaurants have cut down on staff, letting go of waiters, hostesses and dishwashers, many of whom are no longer needed when orders are increasingly being delivered in disposable containers.

Despite the record number of openings, running a restaurant in the city has not gotten any easier. Jot Condie, president and chief executive of the California Restaurant Association, noted that in 2024 taxable restaurant revenue hit $11 billion, which, when adjusted for inflation, is on par with 2012 levels.

“The piece of the pie that each restaurant gets is slimmer.”

Condie also said that the hollowing out of entertainment work, increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and stricter regulations “are conspiring against the L.A. restaurant scene.”

Condie said that regulations from city hall, such as stricter labor oversight and a proposal for a $30 minimum wage for some workers, are making it even tougher.

“The business environment is bad generally in L.A., but the city council and the mayor seem to be throwing salt in the wound.”

As the number of new restaurant openings has spiked, so have the number of closings reported to the city. However, business closure figures are not as reliable as business opening data, as some establishments close without reporting it to the city. Since 2021, 593 full- and limited-service restaurants have reported closing, compared with 3,148 openings.

Jimmy Chu spent several years working in fine dining, which inspired him to start his own restaurant. He knew it would be expensive. Rather than opening another fine-dining establishment, he opted for a limited-service restaurant where customers could order at the counter, no waiters involved.

Chu quit his job by the end of 2024, and in May 2025, he opened Bomb Hot Dog in Downtown Los Angeles. He estimates that his eatery gets roughly a third of its customers through mobile delivery orders.

Ghost kitchens

Ghost kitchens, or private kitchens used exclusively for delivery and takeout, have become a business model of their own. At Beverly Bites, 56 restaurants operate out of one facility serving the densely populated Beverly Hills and Beverlywood neighborhoods, though not all of them are open simultaneously. At Echo Park Eats, 40 restaurants are now within a five minute walk of Dodger Stadium. The Los Angeles Dodgers schedule was hung on the wall inside the facility, so owners can anticipate heavy foot traffic and delivery orders during home games.  

Last December, Ali Elreda rented out a space for his Mediterranean-Mexican fusion restaurant, Fatima’s Grill, at Echo Park Eats. 

Elreda operates four brick-and-mortar Fatima’s Grill locations, and this is his first time renting a ghost kitchen. He said the decision to start a delivery and takeout location was both a matter of savings and efficiency.  

“A lot of people are going the ghost-kitchen route because it’s quicker, it’s faster,” Elreda said. “You avoid a lot of overhead and foot traffic and having to find staff these days with the expensive economy out there is kind of tough.” 

With ghost kitchen facilities, business owners also no longer have to compete with each other to find prime real estate in Los Angeles.  

“You don’t have to do that research where you’ve got to find the right location. It’s just right there waiting for you,” Elreda said. 

How we did it: We examined more than 15 years of business license data reported to the Los Angeles Office of Finance.  Have questions about our data or want to ask us something? Write to use at askus@xtown.la 
Hyperlocal News

VAN, Turkey — It has been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The U.S. says it has hit more than 10,000 targets. But U.S.- and Norway-based human rights groups estimate that at least hundreds of Iranian civilians have also been killed.

The war has also widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.

"There is difficulty [with the bombing], but we are not that weak," says one Iranian woman from Tehran, traveling to Turkey for a short break, given that her work has stopped due to the U.S. and Israeli bombing of the capital city. "In the past few years, the Islamic Republic [of Iran] has proved to us that we cannot trust them. But we were in war with Israel in the summer [during the 12-day war], and we saw how precise their targeting was, so we trust them."

"We are going to build a nuclear bomb now, because there's no fatwa against it anymore," interjects an Iranian man, overhearing her remarks, referring to a rumored religious ban on nuclear weapons issued by Iran's former supreme leader, whom Israel assassinated with U.S. help at the beginning of the war in late February.

Like all the Iranians in this story, the two people asked to remain anonymous. They have received texts from the Iranian government and have seen signs coming out of Iran warning them not to speak to foreign media on pain of arrest.

A microcosm of divergent opinions

Just across the border with Iran, in eastern Turkey, the Turkish city of Van is just as full as during prewar times, with thousands of Iranian workers, consulate employees, students and tourists, who are traveling despite the war in their home country. Van has also become a microcosm of the full range of divergent opinions that Iranians have about the war.

"There is no such thing as hardship in Iran," says one Iranian man, who crossed into Turkey for his job last week. "Everyone lives freely, woman or man."

Next to him, a second Iranian man looks at him, wide-eyed and shaking.

"In two days, the government killed 40,000 people," the man says, referring to a government crackdown in January on protesters. A U.S.-based human rights group has confirmed over 7,000 deaths, but many Iranians believe the death toll is far higher.

NPR has not been able to travel and report inside Iran, so it has been interviewing Iranians traveling through border areas, including in eastern Turkey.

The dozens of Iranians NPR has interviewed transiting through Van may not be representative of all Iranians in the country. Many Iranians in Van are those wealthy enough to travel. But there are also poorer Iranians working, often under the table, in Turkey. A few Iranians I met and interviewed say they are heading off to study abroad.

The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go.

"Our pain is something you have to feel for yourself [to understand]," says one Iranian man who has been working in Turkey for the last year. He spent the previous seven years in prison, he says, after being accused of being an anti-Islamic heretic. "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain. They are pain incarnate," he says, so much so, he is willing to lose all he has, even his family in Iran, for his government to be wiped out.

"The war should never have started," says one Iranian university student. "But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," she says, meaning toppling Iran's regime.

"Met with bullets"

Some Iranians who support the war against their own country say their perspectives are indelibly shaped by that government crackdown in early January. This year's killings of demonstrators finally made them realize, they say, that decades of popular resistance would never change their government.

"Three of my own friends were killed" in the crackdown, says one Iranian man. He crossed into Turkey last week to earn money, more than he could make in Iran. "My friends were all young. I knew them all my life. Yet the government killed them so easily."

"Every two years, there is a big protest," he says. Research from Stanford University published this year found thousands of instances of dissent over the last decade and a half, averaging to one protest every three days inside Iran.

But this time, his hometown, in Iran's western Kermanshah province, was brutally punished by government paramilitary groups for people in his town participating in January's protests.

"It is as if my town has been burned down. Nothing is left of it," he says. "I see no future for my children in Iran." His only hope now, he says, is a foreign intervention. "Our only hope is Trump. Our only hope is that Trump and Bibi [Israel's prime minister] make the right moves."

"We are scared of the bombing," an Iranian woman says. "But we are happy thinking that there might be a light at the end of this darkness. When our young people went out and protested this January, they were met with bullets. With slaughter. With executions."

Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Migration data from the United Nations shows fewer Iranians are leaving Iran for Turkey than before the war.

"We are not fleeing," says one young Tehran resident. Even though she almost lost an eye in the anti-government demonstrations this winter, she says she is going back to Tehran in a few days. "We are determined to rebuild our country, and if the government changes, I will work, for free if needed."
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