Lifestyle
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Molly Baz
Molly Baz ended up in Los Angeles by chance. In March 2020, she was vacationing in L.A. with her family when government officials issued a stay-at-home order due to COVID. She didn’t feel comfortable going back to her crowded apartment building in New York.
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.
“So I just ended up extending my stay out here and then we just never went home,” says Baz, a recipe developer, food personality and author of the cookbooks “Cook This Book” and most recently, “More Is More.”
Baz and her husband, Ben Willett, a creative director and spatial designer, along with their 6-month-old son Gio and wiener dog Tuna, have been living in their Altadena home ever since. Their property is adorned with nearly 40 palm trees — an important selling point for Baz. When asked what she loves most about living in L.A., she says: “This is so f—ing cliche, but I love palm trees so much. Palm trees have been symbolic of vacation to me forever, so now I’m like, I get to live in a place that feels like vacation. Even though I’m in a city, every time I see a palm tree, I’m like ‘We’re chillin.’ ”
Her latest project, a mayonnaise brand called Ayoh (pronounced “A-yo”), is partially inspired by her move to L.A. During the pandemic, she hosted a podcast called “The Sandwich Universe” and made tons of sandwiches. She’d often mix her mayo with Marconi hot giardiniera relish to make her own sauce, which sparked the light bulb moment.
“I was like, this is exactly what sandwiches need, and then that kind of opened my mind up to all the other flavor profiles that I could introduce to mayo in order to make multi-textural, really interesting, delicious sando sauces as we’re calling them,” Baz says.
Just days before the launch of Ayoh, we caught up with Baz to learn about how she’d spend her ideal Sunday in L.A. On the menu is hiking in Altadena, eating a sandwich at Bub and Grandma’s and buying fresh fish from a Japanese marketplace in San Gabriel for homemade sushi.
8:30 a.m.: Snuggles in bed
In my ideal world, my baby and I are sleeping until like 8:30 a.m., which is sleeping in for us. The baby and I will do snuggles and I’ll nurse him in bed. Then I’d have my husband go to the kitchen and make me my first coffee — a pistachio milk cappuccino — which he’d bring to me in bed. We’d hang out in bed with the baby and the wiener dog, Tuna, for like 45 minutes to an hour before we walk out and face the rest of the world.
9:30 a.m.: Neighborhood walk or hike
I don’t really eat breakfast, so the next thing we’d do is go for a walk in the neighborhood. There’s lots of hikes around that we sometimes do, but we always try to do morning walks on the weekends and sometimes during the weekdays as well just to get sunshine in our eyes. I go to Eaton Canyon a lot. Cobb Estate is a really nice one as well. We’ll do one of those hikes if we’re feeling really ambitious.
10:45 a.m.: Breakfast time
I would probably be hungry by now, so we’d go to Bub and Grandma’s, which is where I had my launch party a couple of weeks ago. I’m a freak for sandwiches and they pretty much only sell sandwiches. Also, I just love big, cozy booth vibes. I love hanging out in a booth and sitting in a restaurant for a long period of time. You typically find booths at nighttime restaurants like Houston’s, which is another place that I spend a lot of my life, but Bub’s presents a morning booth option so I really like that.
We’d order breakfast sandwiches. They have a really delicious scrambled eggs, onions and cheese on a house-made brioche bun called the Onion Breakfast. It’s like a really overly simple breakfast sandwich, but it’s so good. The bread is so soft and the eggs are so supple.
1 p.m.: Caffeine pick-me-up
After our long, linger-y Bub moment, we would drive over to Kumquat, which is my favorite coffee shop and it’s near Bub. I would get my second coffee of the day, which would be their Cloudy with a Chance of Peanuts drink. It has this delicious, salty peanut milk and it’s a beverage that’s both hot and cold. It’s like a cold milk with a hot shot of espresso dropped into it, so as you’re drinking it you’re meant to experience hot and cold at the same time. It’s very crazy and delicious.
2 p.m.: Play cribbage at the park or go to Huntington gardens
The next thing I would do is either go to Lacy Park to play cribbage, which is a card game with a peg board that my husband and some of my friends play. We’d sit in the park and play cribbage for a couple of hours or do crossword puzzles. That’s another pastime that I love. Or we’d go to Huntington gardens. I went there the day after the election when I was feeling suffocated by politics, the news, doom scrolling, social media and everything. I left my phone in the car and I felt like I was breathing different air there than I did at home or anywhere else. There are so many plants at Huntington Gardens that the air feels and smells different. It feels fresh and alive. It’s a really amazing place to just reset your equilibrium.
4 p.m.: Pick up fresh fish for sushi
Typically we try not to go out to dinner on Sundays, so what I’d do from there is drive to a place called Yama Sushi in San Gabriel. It’s a tiny, Japanese fish market and they have Japanese groceries and a fish counter with really, really high-quality sushi flown in from Tokyo. They will prepare the fish any way you want, then you can take it home to make sushi. So my absolute ideal Sunday night dinner would be sushi night at home with homemade sushi. We normally get their salmon and we keep the salmon skin so I can crisp it up for salmon skin hand rolls, which are so good.
4:45 p.m.: Take a nap before dinner
We would come home with our sushi then take a nap for about an hour. Naps are a huge part of Sundays. We’re big nappers. Then we’d start making sushi and we’d sit in the living room on the floor. We eat most of our meals on the floor. I just like to be low to the ground and cozy at our coffee table. We like to play music and light candles while we’re eating. We might have a glass of wine. Just very cozy and mellow with us just chatting. I feel like dinner times are really important moments for connectivity with me and my husband because we just crank on work all day long during the week, so dinner time is kind of sacred.
7 p.m.: Unwind with an ice cream sandwich and TV
Next, we would give the baby a bath and put him to bed about 7:30 p.m. Then my husband and I would eat an Oreo ice cream sandwich and watch something on TV before bed. At the moment we’re watching “Bad Sisters.” And then lights out, for me, at 9:15 p.m. would be ideal so I can get like 10 hours before the next day.
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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