Lifestyle
Ilana Glazer appreciates how becoming a parent forced them to draw some lines
Ilana Glazer at Hulu’s “Hularious” stand-up comedy celebration.
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I met Ilana Glazer exactly 10 years ago. Ilana and their co-star Abbi Jacobson were riding high on the success from their hilarious web series Broad City, which went on to become a hit TV show. I interviewed both of them, but I was just back from parental leave for my second kid and I have to tell you, I was so deeply exhausted at that moment.
What sticks with me from that interview to this day is Ilana’s energy. Like capital “E” energy. They were just bursting at the seams with ideas and stories and potential. And I share this because the tired new mothers out there often feel sort of alone and separate from the well-rested, creatively fertile people.
So when I saw Ilana Glazer’s new comedy special on Hulu, Human Magic, which is about the bonkers part of life that is early parenthood, part of me was selfishly glad that they have crossed the Rubicon and get how exhausting it all is. But then I watched Ilana’s special and I saw the same “big E” energy, even though they’re now the parent of a toddler, and I realized this person is just built this way.
From where I sit, it looks like Ilana Glazer’s default setting is energy and enthusiasm, and I’m going to add joy to the mix because whenever I watch them perform, I come out happier than I was an hour or two before. Which is why I wanted them to join me for a game of Wild Card.
Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer in a scene from the film Babes.
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Gwen Capistran/Neon
Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer in a scene from the film Babes.
Gwen Capistran/Neon
This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.
Question 1: What was your form of rebelling as a teenager?
Ilana Glazer: I didn’t quite rebel very much as a child or a teenager. I was very good and I was focused on achieving. And my rebellion came later. Honestly, I was not secure in rebelling against my parents until a few years ago. L-O-L. I’m 37 years old.
It was really in the process of becoming a parent that I was like, “No. I am separate from my parents.”
But of course, I had some rebellion; it finally came in the form of having sex and smoking weed in my senior year of high school.
Rachel Martin: I mean, that’s pretty by-the-book rebellion.
Glazer: Yeah, standard – I would honestly say patriotic. So finally it came, as well as myself.
And then I feel like, really, becoming a parent has helped me feel like “I don’t care.” Do you know what I mean? I don’t care about being accepted. I care more about discovering who I am and what I need. I care about that more than crossing a line and being accepted back.
Martin: Wait, I need more on that. How does having a kid make you rebellious?
Glazer: Like, as long as I’m focused on fulfilling my needs and the needs of my family and child, then I can be unlikeable. I don’t have to fill the supportive role I was hoping to fill before.
I have found the limits of parenting really helpful to the rest of my life. It has forced me to draw lines that I never wanted to draw before. I want to be everything for everybody. And it’s so important to my health and my kid’s health. And it actually serves the world at large to give it the healthiest kid I can. So it’s been such a helpful reorganization.
Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson in a scene from Broad City.
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Question 2: How comfortable are you with being alone?
Glazer: I’m going to buck the binary with this answer and I’m going to say “increasingly.” Ooh — is your mind blown by all my therapy, Rachel Martin?
But that is the accurate answer — increasingly. But it’s tough. I really feed off people. I love people. I love intellectual intercourse. I love connecting and engaging, but I’m increasingly comfortable alone. And also, having such a high-needs, tiny individual needing me so often — it’s become more of a relief to be alone.
Martin: Yeah. Whereas before there may have been anxiety associated with that, and now it’s just in such scarce supply.
Glazer: Yeah.
Martin: I am someone who craves alone time.
Glazer: Yeah. Are you tall?
I don’t know. I think I’m 5’7″. My husband insists that I’m 5’6″ and 3/4.
Glazer: Oh, copy that. I don’t know if it’s changed, but in the early 2000s — I was a teenager at that time — the toxic messaging that I got was, for some reason I know, that modeling you have to be 5’7″. So you’re model height, babe.
Martin: [Laughs] Wait, is this just a random interstitial?
Glazer: I don’t know — I just feel like craving alone time and being tall, like I’m imagining you gliding through the streets of D.C. and like popping your collar and not wanting the bottom half of your face to be seen. I’m like, “Yeah she likes to be alone.” I’m like short and I’m like, [gremlin voice] “Hey everybody. Anybody want to hear a joke?” I don’t know I just wanted to picture it.
Martin: I want you to always think of me that way. It’s completely the opposite of how I am.
On Broad City, Abbi Jacobson (left) and Ilana Glazer play two single, 20-somethings living in New York City with dead-end jobs.
Walter Thompson/Courtesy of Comedy Central
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Walter Thompson/Courtesy of Comedy Central
On Broad City, Abbi Jacobson (left) and Ilana Glazer play two single, 20-somethings living in New York City with dead-end jobs.
Walter Thompson/Courtesy of Comedy Central
Question 3: Are you good at knowing when something should end?
Glazer: Yes, I am. With Broad City, we had signed our contract of seven seasons, and then we both came to the decision to end it after five — Abbi and I. Comedy Central was like, “Huh?” But yeah, that’s something I would say is elegant about me — knowing when things are at their end.
Martin: That’s an admirable quality because it’s not the same for everybody. And especially if you got something good going on and there are people telling you, “It’s good, just keep going,” and to have something tell you that it’s time to stop.
Glazer: Whew. Yeah. And like being able to trust that I am generative beyond this moment, whether it’s a creative project or anything — that I am secure, that I will keep generating new layers and like, do without thinking. That was something that the experience of pregnancy was so incredible. I’m such an overthinker and a planner. Creating a person without thinking about it was, like, “I’m not even thinking about this and my body knows what to do.” And when we get a scrape and, and the skin grows back. It’s just trusting in my own humanity.
Martin: Is it just a gut feeling on ending things? You’re just like, “I just feel we should stop?”
Glazer: Yeah. I was a drummer for many years. I miss it. I just loved percussion. For a time I was like, “I’m going to be an orchestra percussionist.” Can you imagine me on a timpani, like “dun duh-duh dun duh.” And I think it’s like a rhythm thing. You know what I mean? It’s a larger-scale rhythm thing of, “This is over,” you know, and accepting the loss too.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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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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