Lifestyle
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Kamasi Washington
To say that jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington is a fan of Los Angeles is an understatement. “I love how big L.A. is and how it’s like 10 different cities in one,” said the Grammy-nominated Washington, who released his third full-length album, “Fearless Movement,” earlier this year. “I love how you can kind of go and immerse yourself into almost any culture you can think of.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
A native Angeleno, Washington grew up in South L.A., attended Hamilton High School on the Westside, and earned a degree in ethnomusicology from UCLA. As an undergraduate, he toured with rap superstar Snoop Dogg, a reflection of Washington’s immense musical talent and a harbinger of good things to come. Only in L.A.
After college, Washington and several of his closest friends, including bassist Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, drummer Ronald Bruner Jr., pianist Cameron Graves, trombonist Ryan Porter, and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin, among others, began performing weekly at the Piano Bar in Hollywood, an engagement that lasted several years. The collective, known as the West Coast Get Down, helped revive the formerly moribund L.A. jazz scene and created a pipeline of young talent. Some group members, including Washington, went on to play on rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 classic “To Pimp a Butterfly.” To this day, the friends often tour together and appear on one another’s albums.
The rare jazz artist with crossover appeal, Washington has played Coachella and Bonnaroo, averaging about 100 shows a year. But even when he’s thousands of miles away, his city, wife, Fatima, and their 4-year-old daughter, Akili, are never far from his thoughts. In a Zoom interview from his Inglewood home, Washington talked about how he’d spend a blissful Sunday with his family.
8:30 a.m.: Wake-up time
I’ll give the disclaimer that in my life every day is kind of different, but Sunday is the most consistent for me. I wake up around 8:30 and then have a light breakfast with my wife and daughter.
11 a.m.: Church bells ringing
My mother likes to take my daughter to church, Saints Tabernacle Cogic on Jefferson. We’ll pick her up at about 10. My aunt runs and sings in the choir, and my daughter loves, loves singing with them.
I grew up going to church. As I got older, busy and gone a lot, it kind of became a less of a constant thing for me. And so when my mom brought up that she wanted to take my daughter to church, it felt good to me to kind of reconnect on that level. I remember hearing my aunt sing when I was a kid, and so going there and hearing her singing, and seeing how much my daughter enjoys it, and having a sense of community there feels so familiar to me. It’s a real small, little, itty-bitty church, and there’s a lot of love among the people.
1:30 p.m.: New restaurants — and old standbys
We kind of do this thing where we’ll pick a new area. I recently discovered a huge Japanese community in Gardena that I didn’t know about. And so I’ve been finding all these really great restaurants and shops. I love Japanese culture, and I’ve been enjoying just finding this new space.
We recently found this really cool Yemeni restaurant in Westwood called House of Mandi. We had two different lamb dishes. They were both great. One of them was cooked underground. It’s my first time having Yemeni food, and it was so good. Sometimes we’ll go closer to church to Harold & Belle’s, which is New Orleans-style food.
3 p.m.: Akili’s big adventure
After we eat, we try to find something that my daughter, Akili, likes. She likes a lot of different stuff, but hearing music is her favorite thing. There’s a ton of outdoor music events in Los Angeles, especially around the summer months, but really all year round. And we can always just listen to music in a park.
Akili also likes going to the beach, so sometimes we’ll head to Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach. Or we’ll visit the Natural History Museum. Akili loves dinosaurs and animals. And since she now wants to be an astronaut, she likes space and looking at the space shuttle.
All this is fun for me. I mean I’m still pretty childish myself. I like to look at the dinosaur bones too.
5:30 p.m.: Chill out
If we were out somewhere and walking around a bit, maybe we’ll just go out to dinner. There’s a great Italian restaurant called Rossoblu in downtown that we like to go to. There’s a restaurant called Verse. It’s one of our favorites. There’s another place called Holbox, which is kind of near USC. Or maybe we’ll go to a movie.
A lot of the time we go home to kind of round off the day. If we went to the museum, what we like to do is listen to vinyl. I’ll let Akili pick a few records out. She’s pretty wide open and into jazz artists like Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. She really likes Michael Jackson right now. Her favorite is “Bad.”
7:30 p.m.: ‘Homemade’ red sauce
Both my wife and I are good cooks, and we’ll determine during the day who’s going to cook. My specialty is pasta. I make a really good one with red or white sauce, but my red sauce is the No. 1 thing on the menu.
I’m not going to tell you all my secrets, but for a meat sauce it’s usually a mixture of different meats like ground beef and maybe with some type of sausage. I use a lot of different peppers like serrano and bell peppers and maybe some jalapenos. I’ll chop all those up, add them to some tomato paste and some tomatoes. I usually make a hybrid: homemade sauce with a pre-made sauce. It feels like it’s all the way homemade, but it’s not.
8:30 p.m.: A daughter’s tale
At about 8:30, it’s Akili’s bedtime. We’ll read her story or make up a story together and kind of hand it off. The stories could be about anything. Sometimes they’re about her. Sometimes they’re about some imaginary creatures. Akili’s pretty avant-garde, and usually she kind of gives them a weird twist, like “then the soldier turned into a cloud.”
She’s asleep by 9. Sometimes, Fatima falls asleep with her. Otherwise, we’ll hang out for a while.
10 p.m.: Kamasi creating
This is when I get to write, practice, work on music. I go to the other side of the house and stay there until 1 or 2 in the morning. This is just the time I can do it.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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