Lifestyle
My heart broke when we closed our shop in L.A. I’m beginning to see out the other end
On Saturday, Image co-hosted a party in memory of Género Neutral, the beloved retail shop in Echo Park that closed earlier this year. To mark the end of an era, Ashley SP, one of the co-owners of the shop, wrote the below piece, which is also a celebration of what’s to come. Interspersed throughout are photos from the party of all the friends and family who pulled up, as captured by none other than Glenjamn.
Piecing together the last 11 months felt like trying to laugh at a joke I didn’t quite understand — painful, cringe, and less and less funny every time I tried to explain it. The “so, how are you?” questions were earnestly plastered on the faces of everyone I’d been avoiding since April, when we closed our shop in Echo Park, Género Neutral, after three years. The questions got louder and louder and my voice, faint. I preferred being the young(ish) woman who did “cool” things, who was fun and held it together enough to turn chaos into chaotic good. I preferred being “that girl who owns that shop” instead of “that girl whose shop ended up closing,” and who felt like a failing live wire because of it. “I have no idea how I’m doing” became my typical — and honest — sad girl response to those daunting questions for all of spring and summer, until it became too much to let die another day, and I needed to figure out how to rebirth my business.
Emily and Bella De La Torre
Firmé Atelier’s Jonathan Lee looking into Estevan Oriol’s car.
Artist rafa esparza, left, and Bryan Escareño
My business partner, Jenni Zapata, and I were of course not alone in this experience of closing our doors suddenly and seemingly prematurely, as we watched so many fellow small businesses succumb to the quicksand of L.A. brick-and-mortar retail in 2024. We approached this past January with fresh energy as best we could, existing in survival mode most days and fairly detached from the social spaces we used to frequent. We weren’t ready to be vulnerable with others about the predicament we found ourselves in. I can’t fake any funk (and choose not to), so I started to slip away.
Our spirits were weary from a tough holiday season, from watching a few “bad” days turn into weeks, and then months. But we were determined to reignite the Género magic that helped us turn nothing into something during the pandemic, drunk on delusion and wine, replacing the seltzers of our days gone by. The truth is, whatever we did in the shop wasn’t going to be enough to sustain a new future, as too much became out of our control. We couldn’t throw the financial dice another month, let alone the rest of our lease term, or find the last loophole in an economy that isn’t built for independent small-business owners. My bank account knew this, my body knew this, but my heart was breaking. I met people I never wanted to live without in that shop; I met a version of myself I never imagined I could be when we opened our doors, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her.
Jordan Johnson and Bobby Cabbagestalk
Lupe Rosales and Ashley Alcantar
We were the exception to the retail rule for the bulk of our business, but for reasons that make sense only in hindsight. By the end of 2023, we’d sit on our conversation pit-style couch at GN in amazement at how many people would come to hang out and talk with us in a week, but who wouldn’t buy anything, or even try to pretend that’s what they came to do. What we sold on our racks mattered less and less to the bulk of guests that came through — it was the metaphorical space we created for people that kept them coming back. We witnessed a community form organically in our doorway, on our couch, on our bench outside, and on Sunset Boulevard, “[singing in non-English]” and dancing to some of the best DJs on the east side.
How do you put a price on that, let alone pay rent and next season’s invoices from it? You can’t, we couldn’t — so we stopped, albeit to the shock of a lot of our friends and peers who didn’t have to keep track of what success looked like the way we did.
Maurice Harris, the artist and floral visionary behind Bloom & Plume and the coffee shop of the same name, got it. In August, he closed his coffee shop nearby, on Temple Street, after five years. “I stayed in my own way for a very long time, and that’s been a hard pill to swallow,” he told me. “We all struggle with being in the hot seat and realizing, ‘Oh, I could be the problem here,’ and that you’re probably going to create that problem a few more times before you learn the lesson. My therapist and I talk about how you don’t change until it’s painful enough.”
Free Oribhabor, Bobby Cabbagestalk and friend
After closing his coffee shop and while exploring his cult-followed “Capitalism Doesn’t Care About Your Curiosity” series he self-produces on Instagram, Harris’s approach is changing, while rooted in authenticity. He’s journeyed his love of flowers into scent exploration, developing candles and fragrances. “I’m giving myself room to be more flexible in the world of doing this differently,” he generously shared. He’s focusing on the things that he’s discovered can be next, and new.
As small-business owners, we’ve all taken turns looking up to each other in the fight to be authentic, to reinvent, or to legitimize the risks we’ve taken. None of us really knows what we’re doing, which makes it that much more magical when something “works” — and relatable when it doesn’t. From a boutique perspective, the kisses of death looked like the ubiquity of fast-fashion culture and the now-eternal sale season, unreliable consumer attention spans, and the fact that people aren’t spending money like they did, as personal spending power tanked for so many post-pandemic. Factoring in the cost of living and operating in L.A., small retailers are becoming akin to islands in a sea of rents that only bigger chains can afford, which leaves us all a bit cynical and bored, as the “cool” factor is challenged in more and more neighborhoods. If these conversations-turned-therapy sessions with our peers told me anything, though, it’s that death and rebirth can coexist, regardless of how quickly we accept that transformation when confronted with it.
Eve Mauro and Estevan Oriol
For me, “changing” has sometimes looked like going on Do Not Disturb on my phone for the last 11 months. Other times, it’s been choosing to meet with our newest business partner — one of my best friends, Danny Jestakom — to talk about the ideas we’ve been poring over in remixing, recalibrating and growing GN into a certain afterlife, one with less constraints, or certain freedoms. Shedding the imposter syndrome in pivoting the business is something I’m still working on, as I tell myself I do this now instead of that, and I’m a better person for it. Sincerely, I still sometimes struggle to lean into how life is completely different now, until I wake up from my fever dream and remind myself none of this really matters anyway (Aquarius moon here, y’all).
Jaime Rosas and Anahi Pozos
Last Saturday, we threw our first event, a party in partnership with chef Enrique Olvera’s Ditroit Taqueria in the Arts District. It was our celebration in loving memory of the Género Neutral shop, and an honoring of what’s to come with GNLA, the older sibling of Género, which will still be about collaborating with our favorite brands, people and spots around Los Angeles. We came up with the name for the party, Siempre Juntos, or “Together Forever,” at the tail end of summer, long before ballots were cast, before our collective hearts experienced another guaranteed heartbreak. Yearning for the infinity of connection and for the opportunity to reunite, we wanted nothing more than to create a moment where we all could get together again, like no time had passed, like the good ‘ol days, like nothing had changed even if everything had.
Models April Kosky, left, and Sky Michelle
Carolina Isabel Salazar and Pablo Simental
Jonathan Lee and Eric Kim of Firmé Atelier
Image’s fashion director at large, Keyla Marquez, editorial director Elisa Wouk Almino, and staff writer Julissa James
I’m completely certain of what’s next — things being hard, growth being nonlinear, not knowing what I’m doing and doing it anyway, much like the approach we had when crafting Género Neutral from scratch. I smile again because of it, and because we have thousands of new friends now to see us through. If GNLA is the other side, then I hope to see you there.
Ashley S.P. is a writer and the co-founder of GNLA, a new multicultural agency rooted in the joyous and inclusive spirit of the Género Neutral shop in Echo Park.
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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