Lifestyle
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducts Cher, Foreigner, Mary J. Blige, Ozzy and more
Cher, left, and Dua Lipa perform during the 39th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Saturday at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
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Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
CLEVELAND — Pure pop kicked off the inductions at the the Rock & Roll Hall Fame induction ceremony on Saturday as Dua Lipa and Cher sang “Believe” before ceding the stage to a medley of rump shakers by funk masters Kool & the Gang, rock classics by Foreigner and Peter Frampton, and a powerhouse performance by gospel icon Dionne Warwick, bringing the house down at 83.
The inductees this year in a ceremony that stretched over five hours also included: Mary J. Blige, A Tribe Called Quest, Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Matthews Band and posthumous recognition for Jimmy Buffett, MC5, Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Norman Whitfield and Big Mama Thornton.
“Where do I even begin? Cher is not one person,” Zendaya said when inducting Cher. “Her name is just as legendary as her legacy.” Zendaya noted that Cher, 78, is the only woman to have a No. 1 hit on a Billboard chart in each of the past seven decades. “Cher has got the goods,” Zendaya said before the singer performed a rocking version of “If I Could Turn Back Time.”
In her speech, Cher said she was inspired by Cinderella and thanked her mother for instilling in her to always get back up after defeat. “The one thing I got from my mom is to never give up,” she said. “I never give up. I’m talking to the women — down and out, we keep going.”
Julia Roberts helped induct the Dave Matthews Band — she’s a self-avowed superfan and she appeared in the band’s video for the 2005 single, “Dreamgirl.” Roberts, wearing a band T-shirt, said the appeal of the group is “spontaneous abandon” and added that the first time she danced with her husband was to a Dave Matthews Band song.
The jam band, with their mix of funk, folk-rock, jazz, blues and pop, then played “Ants Marching” — asking the crowd to sing the chorus — “Crash” and “So Much to Say.” The arena was still full when they hit the stage after midnight, with the crowd singing along and swaying.
Matthews hugged Roberts, handed out the trophies to his bandmates, and called the class of 2024 impressive. “We’re swimming in very deep water here,” he said. He thanked the current and former members of the band and the bar owner who gave them a home in Charlottesville, Virginia. When he thanked the fans, they roared back.
Mary J. Blige speaks during the 39th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Saturday at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
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Dr Dre inducted Blige, who is credited with creating a completely new category of music — hip-hop soul. The nine-time Grammy-winner’s best-known song is ”Family Affair″ from her triple-platinum 2001 album “No More Drama.” “When you listen to Mary, you understand you’re not alone in heartbreak,” Dre said.
Blige, wearing shiny black hat, a sparkly dress and long black gloves and boots, sang a mix of her hits, including “Love No Limit,” “Be Happy” and “Family Affair.” At the end of her set, a dancer brought up a cloak to wrap around her, in an echo of James Brown. She thanked her fans, her mom — a single mother raising children in the projects — and Method Man and Dr. Dre, who helped her earn a Grammy and an Emmy. “Move with grace. Trust the journey,” she advised. “You are worthy.”
Chuck D inducted Kool & the Gang, saying “This is a long-due celebration.” The band had 12 Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 including the 1980 chart-topper “Celebration” as well as “Cherish,” “Get Down On It,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Ladies Night” and “Joanna.” They’ve been eligible for the hall since 1994.
The Roots helped the band do a medley of hits that got the crowd grooving led by Robert “Kool” Bell — bass guitarist, co-founder and last original member — and longtime singer James “JT” Taylor. Confetti shot into the arena and Taylor asked the crowd to use their cellphone lights as he read off the names of 10 members who were critical to the band’s success.
Robert “Kool” Bell of Kool & the Gang performs during the 39th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Saturday at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
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Warwick arrived at the ceremony only a few days after attending a memorial to her longtime friend and collaborator, Cissy Houston, in Newark, New Jersey. Teyana Taylor called her “truly one of a kind” as well as telling off the teleprompter operator for not putting “Ms.” before her name. Jennifer Hudson sang “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” and was joined by Warwick, who also sang “Walk On By.”
Warwick said this year was the third time she was nominated for the Hall. “I am so pleased to be here,” she said. “I’m just going to say this and get off the stage: Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Dave Chappelle helped induct A Tribe Called Quest — Q-Tip, Jarobi, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and the late Phife Dawg — the lone hip-hop group to make the cut this year. Chappelle said the group incorporated “jazz and soul in a way hip-hop had never seen” and they also proved you could be “cool and not necessarily gangster.” Queen Latifah, Busta Rhymes, Common, The Roots and De La Soul were on hand to perform a medley of Tribe hits, including “Bonita Applebum,” “Scenario” and “Can I Kick It?”
Sammy Hagar introduced Foreigner, and thanked their fans for their tenacity to demand inclusion. The English-American rockers — with hits like “Cold as Ice,” and “Waiting for a Girl Like You” — topped the charts in the 1970s and ’80s but never made it into the Hall — much less a ballot — until last year, despite being eligible for more than 20 years.
Hagar noted that Foreigner currently tours without any original members. “That’s how good the songs are,” he said. “Who deserves this more than Foreigner?” Demi Lovato and Slash joined the touring Foreigner for “Feels Like the First Time” and Hagar then took lead for “Hot Blooded.” Kelly Clarkson thrilled with a powerful “I Want to Know What Love Is” but the arena erupted when original singer Lou Gramm joined her. Gramm thanked guitarist Mick Jones, sidelined in New York by Parkinson’s disease.
Saturday’s induction ceremony was held at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, where the Hall has promised to return to every few years. A TV special with performance highlights will air on ABC on Jan. 1.
Jack Black, left, and Ozzy Osbourne appear during the 39th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Saturday at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
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Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Roger Daltrey of The Who inducted Frampton. “It’s about bloody time!” he said. “Peter has had the most amazing career of all time. It’s probably easier to name the people he hasn’t worked with than the people he has,” Daltrey said.
Frampton earned his way into the Hall in large part on the strength of his 1976 live double album “Frampton Comes Alive!,” buoyed by the hit songs “Show Me the Way” and ″Baby, I Love Your Way.” Daltrey noted Frampton has always played with a wide smile.
A fittingly grinning Frampton — who played at last year’s ceremony to honor Sheryl Crow — brought on Keith Urban to trade licks on “Do You Feel Like I Do” and showed why he is considered one of rock’s great guitarists. He hooked up his famous talk box effect and the crowd roared. “I really am a lucky guy to have this amazing career,” he said, thanking David Bowie for resurrecting his professional life after it had spun out.
Dave Matthews — before his band’s inducement — helped honor Buffett with an acoustic version of the late singer-songwriter’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” James Taylor then came out to call Buffett — who popularized beach bum soft rock with the escapist song “Margaritaville” — “larger-than-life but at the same time right-sized and always authentic.” Taylor, Kenny Chesney and Mac McAnally then performed Buffett’s “Come Monday.”
Musician-actor Jack Black toasted Osbourne, saying that “heaven opened up above me” when he first listened to the album “Blizzard of Ozz.” Black called Osbourne “the Jack Nicholson of rock” and joked that his reality TV show “The Osbournes“ was possibly “the most evil thing he ever did.”
Osbourne, seated in a throne, credited the late guitarist Randy Rhodes and his wife, Sharon, for career and life. This is the second time Ozzy has entered the Hall, the first time being in 2006 with the seminal metal band Black Sabbath, A tribute band to the Prince of Darkness — including Jelly Roll, Billy Idol, Maynard James Keenan, Wolfgang Van Halen, Steve Stevens, Robert Trujillo and Chad Smith — played “Crazy Train,” “Mama, I’m Coming Home” and “No More Tears.”
The In Memoriam section included tributes, among others, to Kris Kristofferson, Cissy Houston, David Sanborn and Liam Payne. Dave Matthews Band performed “Burning Down the House” as fans filed out.
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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