Topline:
A couple of years ago, a company called Camp Snap began to sell point-and-shoot cameras for kids to use — just a viewfinder, a flash and no way to see the photos until the camera was hooked up to a computer.
Why it matters: What the company didn't see coming was the demand from adults.
And why? Why are people who weren't born 25 years ago snapping up the digital camera of that era? Blame Taylor Swift, trend cycles, childhood nostalgia and smartphone fatigue.
A couple of years ago, as summer camps began to ban screens, a company called Camp Snap began to sell a screen-free camera that children could take along. The point-and-shoot had the vibes of a 1990s Kodak: just a viewfinder, a flash and no way to see the photos until the camera was hooked up to a computer.
What the company didn't see coming was the demand from adults.
"All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a lot of Gen Z, millennial demographic started buying them," says Camp Snap President Trevor George. "We realized very quickly that, OK, this is way beyond kids at summer camp."
Perhaps it was only a matter of time after the cool kids put on low-rise jeans like Britney Spears that photo trends would cycle around too. But they come also as a whiplash —against the era of the smartphone.
Digicams have flooded bars, music venues, festivals and family gatherings. Canon told NPR that sales of the PowerShot, its renowned point-and-shoot, jumped nearly sevenfold from 2022 to 2025. Camp Snap says its sales more than doubled in the past year.
Last year, Camp Snap launched a screen-free retro camcorder too, and it showed up in the hands of celebrities including Selena Gomez and Joe Jonas. One was spotted at Taylor Swift's wedding.
Jaden Williams, 16, first picked up a point-and-shoot in his yearbook class. The photos "felt more genuine," he says. Soon enough, he was noticing digicams all over TikTok and among friends. Last month, he requested — and received — one for his birthday. He uses it alongside his phone.
"If I'm about to take pictures of food or something, then I might use my phone," says Williams, from North Carolina. "But if I'm out with friends or at a party, I might use the camera for a more, like, warm vibe."
The turn-of-the-millennium digital photo is hard to mistake: a bit grainy, sometimes fuzzy, overexposed in the center with a blinding flash, often date-stamped in red or orange. A nostalgic haze gives photos the feel of an instant memory.
"The brightness and also the crispness of the photo — but having that blur and grain somehow added in as well — makes the photos look very flattering," says Katie Coyne, 24, from New York.
She'd bought a digital camera for a safari vacation but lately has lent it to her younger sister, Gwen Coyne, who lives in Philadelphia. They both find the vintage blur refreshing in the sea of hyper-sharp smartphone photos.
"I feel like iPhone cameras look just so ... sometimes it looks a little too real," says Gwen. She recently brought the digicam on a trip, where she photographed palm trees against the sky and the ocean. "And I don't really know how to put it into words, but it gave such a vacation vibe."
The sisters think that for the vast majority of people on social media, the digicam is purely a trendy aesthetic. First came the 1970s-style Instagram filters, then the revival of Polaroid-style photos, now this.
But for many people, it's also a rebellion against their smartphones.
Christina Berkett, 34, has been carrying her point-and-shoot to avoid her phone.
"I think you get caught up in the digital world, where — OK, I'm pulling out my phone to take a photo and then I see a notification or I'm checking my email," says Berkett, from New Jersey.
And with a digital camera? "You put it in your bag, you don't think about it, and then at the end of the night, you go through all the photos and kind of relive that moment."
This makes the digicam trend a small part of a growing movement of people un-phoning or de-phoning their lives. Camp Snap's George sees it as an analog reboot after decades of internet-connected everything, from watches to washing machines. eBay told NPR that it's seeing a surge of searches for old-school tech like iPods, CDs and Walkmans.
Berkett, who's a wedding photographer, says couples are printing real-world photo albums. They still request iPhone video footage for social media content, but many also pay extra for her to film ceremonies or speeches with an old-school camcorder — like she's someone's aunt, just a guest.
"They want it to feel like it's a home video," Berkett says. "I don't think they want something that's grainy. I think they want something to feel real."
She does hold the camcorder differently from how her parents once did when they made home videos. The device sits on her palm flipped to its side, so that the video Berkett films is vertical rather than horizontal — because most people will still watch it on their smartphone.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
SoCal has become a proving ground for some of the country’s fastest-growing Asian and Asian American retailers, giving chains like Miniso and 99 Ranch Market an early test of broader U.S. appeal.
Growing fast: On the National Retail Federation’s 2026 Hot 25 list, Miniso ranks No. 1, Daiso No. 3, Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing No. 6 and 99 Ranch Market No. 15.
Backstory: All four have had a Southern California presence for years, giving them experience in one of the country’s most diverse and competitive retail markets.
Southern Californians who’ve long shopped at Daiso, Miniso, Uniqlo or 99 Ranch Market may not be surprised to see the Asian-rooted chains expand across the country.
But that growth is now showing up in the numbers.
The National Retail Federation’s Hot 25 Retailers list ranks retailers by U.S. sales growth from 2024 to 2025. Miniso tops the list, with sales up nearly 53%.
The Chinese chain of gift shops opened its first U.S. store in Pasadena’s Old Town more than nine years ago and is now aiming to grow its American footprint to nearly 500 stores this year.
“If you can make it in Southern California, that's great,” said David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology at Kantar and an author of the NRF list.
Marcotte says succeeding in California’s highly competitive retail market can teach chains lessons that translate elsewhere.
“The stone-cold reason is quality. The second one is experience,” he said. “Those are the two things that when shoppers go into any retailer, they’re looking for.”
Daiso ranks third, with growth of nearly 26%, while another Japanese company, Fast Retailing — the parent company of Uniqlo — comes in sixth.
99 Ranch Market, an American supermarket chain founded in Orange County that specializes in Asian groceries, comes in 15th.
Marcotte says Southern California has been a logical landing spot for these companies because of its proximity to Asia. But Marcotte says it can also be an unforgiving place to launch because of the competition, and he often encourages the clients he advises to consider smaller markets.
“I said if you open in Southern California, open one store, get it right,” Marcotte said. “If you get it wrong, you're dead. You'll never recover. You'll have to leave the country and come back in.”
The supermarket industry is particularly tough to break into because customers here, he says, have plenty of alternatives if the quality, selection or experience falls short.
He also emphasizes a retailer in California focused on Asian goods will see more success serving Chinese, Filipino and other Asian customers rather than designing around a particular ethnic group.
“That type of diversity of Asian customers that you have to address in the same store is what really proves to be the difference for an Asian retailer in the California market,” Marcotte said.
That’s part of the business model for 99 Ranch, which was founded by a Taiwanese immigrant who opened the first location in Westminster's Little Saigon in 1984.
Topline:
Radiologist Hong Pham has an unusual side hustle — cooking and selling Peking and roast ducks from his South Pasadena backyard.
The backstory: That Peking Duck Guy started out as a social media account documenting Pham's culinary journey to make the perfect duck. It then became a side hustle when strangers and neighbors offered to buy his birds.
Read on ... to learn about how Pham got started and how he cooks his ducks.
Got a taste for ducks cooked the Chinese way? Your quest may take you to a quiet suburban backyard in South Pasadena.
That's where That Peking Duck Guy cooks and sells his birds. His clients, he said, include Phil Rosenthal and Roy Choi.
The guy behind That Peking Duck Guy is Hong Pham, who started the social media account in late 2025 as a way to document his latest culinary obsession: making the perfect duck, be it Peking or Pipa (deboned and flattened into the shape of the namesake Chinese string instrument).
The intention was not to sell. "I have a day job," Pham said. A radiologist, to be precise.
"I was actually making so many that neighbors wanted to claim it and offered to buy it," he added. "So I'm like, 'OK, that makes it easier 'cause I don't have to eat it all.'"
Soon came DMs from strangers asking for the same thing.
These days, That Peking Duck Guy caters events and holds takeout pop-ups where people can purchase and pick up a duck (which comes with sides and duck soup) from his South Pasadena backyard — right where he cooks them.
Duck is not his first rodeo. Pham said he and his wife are foodies who've always been curious about delving into Vietnamese and other Asian culinary traditions. For Pham, that also means replicating some of these dishes at home, from scratch.
He'd gone on a tofu bender — making gallons of the stuff, as blocks, drinks and pudding — and also a bánh cuốn spree, or Vietnamese steamed rice rolls. He landed on duck as his latest subject only because he had wanted to make better heo quay, or Vietnamese roasted pork belly.
He researched how to get that extra crisp online and landed on an oven people in Asia use to make roast and Peking ducks.
Pham hosts takeout pop-ups from South Pasadena backyard. Follow That Peking Duck Guy's Instagram for updates.
Visit the official website for catering requests.
"It was called the Apollo oven 'cause it looks like an Apollo space capsule," he said.
He bought one and then another. In between, he experimented cooking different meats with the new oven to get a feel before turning to the waterfowl.
He even got advice from Top Chef winner Mei Lin, whom he messaged cold: "She's like, 'Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Keep it traditional.'"
Hundreds of ducks later, Pham said he still learns something new. That's one reason why his side hustle has stuck around.
"I didn't create like, you know, That Bánh Cuốn Man," he said. "Yeah, duck's gonna last."
Pham starts 7 to 10 days before cooking. Here's the preparation process:
When does he know they're done? "Well, you know the color, we're looking for that beautiful mahogany glistening skin, you know?" Pham said.
Topline:
Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.
Why it matters: A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes.
Why now: This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.
Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.
The clues, they say, lie in the murky space between genes and disease — where key proteins come together and interact.
A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes. This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.
"It's an unprecedented resource for the field," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology, and psychiatry at UCLA who was not involved with the study. "A lot of people interested in understanding autism and drug development are going to be using this."
For families affected by profound autism, it offers hope for eventual drug therapies. "This is the kind of scientific advance we have been waiting for and praying for," says Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation, who has a daughter with severe cognitive impairment. "There's still a lot of work ahead, [but] this paper makes the path from genetic discovery to treatment much clearer."
The work builds on progress made in recent years to identify single genes that harbor mutations found in a subset of individuals with profound autism.
People with profound autism often live with severe intellectual disability and require around-the-clock care. They're nonverbal or minimally verbal, and often have serious medical conditions like epilepsy.
Pinning down the biology behind profound autism has always been a complicated endeavor — while both genes and environmental factors play a role, those factors can vary widely from person to person.
In the past decade or so, some genetics researchers have had remarkable success in identifying high-impact genetic differences in a subset of people with profound autism.
"They've discovered several hundred genes and corresponding mutations that are prevalent in [these] individuals," says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco.
"But they kind of hit a wall," he added — because scientists haven't been able to turn those gene discoveries into many promising drugs and treatments.
"There was this huge missing piece," says Dr. Matthew State, a clinical psychiatrist and geneticist at UCSF: The genes serve as blueprints for making proteins that drive brain development, but researchers lacked visibility into how those proteins do the work.
State has been a pioneer in identifying high-risk genes, and the mutations in those genes, that are associated with profound autism. Krogan has been at the forefront of using new technology to look into protein interactions.
More than a decade ago, the two researchers were introduced by their mutual boss, the chancellor at UCSF, who encouraged them to collaborate. "[State] had the genes and the mutations. I had the technologies to look at the corresponding proteins," Krogan says.
They focused on filling a knowledge gap. "What we've been missing is the mechanistic understanding of how these mutations [on the genes] are seemingly resulting in autism," Krogan says. "In order to understand that, you need to go to the proteins."
Proteins are the complex molecules that come together to build the body, based on instructions encoded in the genes. "What makes an eye cell an eye cell, and a muscle a muscle, are the proteins and how they work together," State says. "They are the machinery of life."
In this case, the researchers wanted to find the molecular machinery of profound autism — to understand which proteins came from those high-risk autism genes, and how those proteins worked together.
The research was slow at first, but more recent advances in technology — including artificial intelligence — have sped things up.
To start, the researchers went on a "fishing expedition" for protein interactions. They chose 100 proteins from these high-risk autism genes, injected them into lab-grown cells, and then pulled them out, along with the additional proteins that attached to them.
Then, they used an AI system called AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, to help determine which proteins in the clumps were directly touching. "Where AI is playing an important role is being predictive about who's talking to who," says Krogan. "Sometimes they take years to figure out. Now, we can get these insights in an hour." While imperfect, the system has worked well enough to save significant time and money, Krogan says.
Then, they wanted to see what happened to the proteins when the genes got tweaked. They introduced mutations that appear in patients with profound autism, and assessed what changed. "We broke the proteins in the way that they're broken in autism," says State. "That allows us ultimately to answer the question of, when they're going wrong in autism, how are they going wrong?"
They conducted this research in frogs and in organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that model the human brain. In one example, the mutations weakened the connection between two proteins related to which genes turn on and off in a cell. Then, one went rogue, turning on other genes that led to neurodevelopmental defects in organoids.
There are hundreds of rare, high-risk autism genes, acting in more than a thousand different ways.
But in mapping more than 1,800 protein interactions, the researchers found that many of them moved along shared biological pathways — particularly those related to early brain development, such as how synapses get constructed, and which neurons develop and when.
The convergence found in this study aligns with other recent publications, adding to an emerging understanding in the field, says Dr. Geschwind of UCLA.
"If we look at multiple mutations and they converge on the same process, that's strong evidence that you're dealing with the things that you want to treat," State says.
Identifying this more limited set of protein complexes that likely contribute to the development of profound autism could change the approach to treatments, says Singer with the Autism Science Foundation. "We've been working gene-by-gene to correct mutations," she says.
And if future drugs could target these shared protein pathways, she adds, "we may not need that separate therapeutic strategy for every autism gene."
It takes years to go from a biological discovery like this to an approved drug that treats humans. The findings would need to be translated into drug candidates, then tested for safety and effectiveness.
"It takes time and a lot of persistence and focus," State says. "This [paper] is unlikely to lead to therapies tomorrow — but it lays an important foundation for them."
Most human drugs are made to target proteins, Geschwind at UCLA says, so the newly published map of protein interactions offers an accessible entry point for pharmaceutical development.
And researchers hope to combine recent technological advances in ways that accelerate that progress even more. "When you put together the ability to borrow from successes in other fields [such as cancer treatments], and the development of AI, we're at an inflection point that will hopefully shorten the time cycle," State says.
Last week, Krogan's Quantitative Biosciences Institute received a $46 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative, funded by philanthropist and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The researchers are already working on next steps.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Light rain is expected across Southern California over the holiday weekend and forecasters are warning of dangerous swimming conditions at the beach.
Beach hazards: There’s a high risk of potentially life-threatening rip currents and large waves over the weekend along the coast. Waves could reach 10 feet in places. Beachgoers should swim near lifeguards and stay off of rocks and jetties. There could also be some coastal flooding. The National Weather Service has issued coastal flood and high surf advisories beginning Saturday morning that will remain in effect through next week.
Rain forecast: Most of the rain is expected to come on Sunday. It will likely remain light, with less than half an inch falling in most places. The rain will also come with a low chance of thunderstorms. Cloud cover could also stick around this weekend, with or without rain. Temperatures are supposed to remain relatively mild, but because of the clouds, they won’t drop down as much at night.
How we got here: The moisture and surf is being driven to Southern California by Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean. Marie is the latest in a sequence of tropical storms that have formed off the coast of Mexico and moved northeast. Forecasters say this summer’s Pacific hurricane season has been more active than normal, in large part because of El Niño.
