Lifestyle
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Sasheer Zamata
Here’s a shortlist of American cities Sasheer Zamata has called home: Brooklyn, N.Y.; Charlottesville, Va.; Indianapolis; Lexington, Ky.; San Antonio; and Riverside.
The actor, comedian and former “Saturday Night Live” star was a self-described military brat, born in Okinawa, Japan, and never staying in one place for more than two years throughout her childhood. The experience gave her a great sense of perspective, but now, after living in Los Angeles for the last six years, she says, “This is the most rooted and grounded I’ve felt.”
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.
Zamata settled in East Los Angeles because “when I moved to L.A., I was told by all my friends, ‘If you want to see us, you have to be on the Eastside, otherwise you won’t,’” she said.
This month, she’ll appear in Disney+’s hotly anticipated “Agatha All Along,” a spinoff of the streamer’s acclaimed “WandaVision” series. She plays a witch named Jennifer Kale who finds a kindred spirit in Kathryn Hahn’s titular Agatha Harkness. “All of the characters are coven-less witches so we are all loners, misfits and bandits who come together for this common goal of achieving our dreams,” said Zamata. “My character Jen is pretty dry and sarcastic, like me, and she’s fun to play.”
When she’s not working, Zamata enjoys secondhand shopping and taking in the best of the Eastside’s culinary offerings. “Sundays feel nice and sleepy for me, but I do like making it a social time as well with brunch or a gathering of some sort,” she said. Here’s how she’d spend a perfect day in L.A.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
9 a.m.: Start the day with early-morning Pilates
I go to bed late, but my body is waking up earlier. Around 7 or 8 a.m. is when I’m waking up. I used to love sleeping in until 11 or 12 but my body can’t do that anymore. It’s not by choice, it’s not because I want to.
I’m trying to make Pilates a weekly tradition. It also helps doing it in the morning because it’s like, “I left my house, I can start the day, things are happening.” I’m always trying to strengthen my core. I have a really small waist that causes back problems and if you can strengthen your core, it does help your back and everything else. I’ve been recommended by so many chiropractors and masseuses like, “You should probably do Pilates.” So now I’m doing it and trying to be serious about it.
I like Wundabar Pilates. They have a jumpboard [reformer apparatus] and they make it very fun. The teachers are very accommodating and help you adjust and figure it out and it doesn’t feel too intimidating to me.
11:30 a.m.: Meet friends for brunch
After Pilates, I will probably go to brunch and meet up with some friends. If no one has anything to do, we’ll be there for a couple of hours.
I love HomeState so much. I don’t even remember who introduced me to HomeState, but I learned about it pretty early on when I moved to L.A. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to come here every day.”
I have a couple of go-tos: I like their Tijuana Panther taco. Their Emo’s taco is a simple bean and cheese. And I like their Frito pie dish. It’s a Frito bag that they put brisket and onions and all this other stuff in and it’s very tasty. Something about eating out of a potato chip bag feels really satisfying. But all of their stuff is good.
2 p.m.: Go secondhand shopping
If the friends are down to hang, we’ll probably do shopping of some sort. I love doing estate sales. I’m always on Estatesales.net to look up what’s in the area, what’s happening that weekend.
The Frogtown Flea Crawl actually happens on Saturday, but sometimes there are still sales going on Sunday. I love being able to bop from multiple different parking lots and multiple different venues on a stroll and shop for hours and hours and hours. It’s very fun.
Currently I’m on a hunt for matching sets, like a top and a bottom, a suit, a jumpsuit or a romper. Those are very fun if they’re vintage-looking and old school. I think what draws me in is patterns. If there’s a really fun pattern or a really bright color, I just bull’s-eye right to it.
And I’m always, always looking at chairs. I certainly don’t need any furniture, but I love looking at it. I love chairs as a functional piece of furniture but also as decoration. Or sometimes I’ll find fun wall art. There’s actually a really great furniture place called Vintage Junktion and it’s huge. They have everything: armoires, dressers, tables, whatever you could possibly want. I got this great bench from there. [Another time] I found an armoire that I was so sad about because I had just bought an armoire that was much more expensive than this one. I have spent hours and hours there, because you can. I like an older piece of furniture because they’re also just built better, which is unfortunate. Thankfully there are people who save that stuff and want it to be reused, and I will happily reuse it.
6 p.m.: Refuel at Little Dom’s
Shopping always make me hungry so I probably will have built up an appetite. And I love eating at Little Dom’s. It’s such a cute vibe and also all their food and drinks are delicious.
Sometimes I’ll just get a traditional spaghetti and meatballs. Most of the time I’ll get the salmon. I do like their salmon a lot. And they have a side of spinach that I’ll get to pretend to be healthy, or an arugula salad. And their Penicillin [cocktails] are really good.
8 p.m.: Home for some comfort TV
Once I get home, I might watch some TV or a movie or something. I just finished that K-pop reality competition, “The Debut: Dream Academy.” It was really intense … they were training these 14- to 18-year-old girls for two years. They’re away from their families and risking it all to become a K-pop group. And then they did it and were actually a really good, talented group.
I [also] love cartoons. I’m watching “Solar Opposites” right now, which is really fun. I finished all of “Rick and Morty” before that and I’m waiting [eagerly] for the next season because I love that show so much.
After TV it’s bedtime. I would like to be the type of person that’s like, “Wow, it’s 9 p.m. I’m going to read a book, stretch, meditate, wind down.” But my brain always just stays busy, I’m sure from being on the phone all the time. I’m up until like 11 p.m. and then my body just crashes and it’s like, “All right, well now we’re sleeping on the couch.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
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
hide caption
toggle caption
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?”
-
Movie Reviews3 minutes agoBandar Movie Review: Bobby Deol roars in Anurag Kashyap’s unsettling legal thriller that refuses to spoon-feed
-
World11 minutes agoTaormina Film Festival Head Tiziana Rocca Says She Wants to Deliver a ‘Human Festival’ Amidst AI Boom, Asks Stars to Be ‘Generous’ to Local Audiences
-
Politics21 minutes agoVideo: Jan. 6 Rioter Hired by Pentagon
-
Lifestyle51 minutes ago
‘How to Rule the World’ explores education and power at Stanford University
-
Technology1 hour agoCyberdecks used to look like little laptops, but now they’re getting more personal
-
World1 hour agoPete Hegseth warns narco-terrorists as U.S. backs Bolivia’s government amid coup warnings
-
Politics1 hour agoDemocrats split over Tlaib’s Lebanon measure as Republicans seize on Hezbollah omission
-
Health1 hour agoPopular weight-loss diet shows surprising impact on serious mental health condition
