Good Names, Good People
A running, dated feed of short, positive profiles of real people — historic and present-day — who share popular names. New posts appear here on a regular schedule; every name's own detail page always shows the full set of profiles researched for it.
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October 16, 2026
Joshua Bell — Joshua
Joshua Bell has performed with the world's leading orchestras since childhood, and what I find most admirable is how deliberately he's worked to bring classical music to new and younger audiences who might otherwise…
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October 15, 2026
Andrew Lloyd Webber — Andrew
Andrew Lloyd Webber composed 'The Phantom of the Opera' and 'Cats,' bringing theater to enormous global audiences in a way most composers never come close to reaching, and honestly, even outside my usual sports lane, I…
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October 14, 2026
Andrew Wiles — Andrew
Andrew Wiles worked in near-total secrecy for seven years to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, a mathematical puzzle that had stumped people for 350 years, and something about that specific kind of patience resonates with me…
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October 13, 2026
Andrew Carnegie — Andrew
Andrew Carnegie gave away most of his industrial fortune, and the piece of that giving I find most beautifully designed, so to speak, is the libraries — over 2,500 of them, built specifically so that access to books…
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October 12, 2026
Paul Farmer — Paul
There is a particular kind of person I find myself unexpectedly moved by, precisely because their story is so unlike my own, and Paul Farmer is very much one of them. A physician and anthropologist, he co-founded…
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October 11, 2026
Paul Newman — Paul
Paul Newman founded Newman's Own on the literal principle of donating all the profits to charity, which even now, in an era where every brand claims to be 'giving back' in its marketing copy, is a genuinely rare and…
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October 10, 2026
Paul McCartney — Paul
Paul McCartney was part of the greatest 'team' in music history and then had to go build an entirely separate, celebrated solo career afterward, which honestly is its own kind of comeback story — plenty of great…
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October 9, 2026
Donald Knuth — Donald
Donald Knuth wrote 'The Art of Computer Programming,' a multivolume work that apparently shaped the entire field of computer science, and he also built the TeX typesetting system that scientists and mathematicians still…
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October 8, 2026
Donald Bradman — Donald
Donald Bradman's batting average in cricket is apparently so far beyond anyone else's, before or since, that it's become one of those statistics people use as shorthand for total, once-in-a-lifetime dominance in any…
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October 7, 2026
Donald Glover — Donald
Donald Glover does about three different jobs well enough that any one of them would make a person notable — acting, Grammy-winning music under the name Childish Gambino, and creating the show 'Atlanta,' which I…
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October 6, 2026
Anthony Trollope — Anthony
Anthony Trollope wrote an enormous number of novels — the Barsetshire and Palliser series among them — while holding down a full, demanding day job at the postal service, where he actually helped introduce the…
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October 5, 2026
Tony Hawk — Anthony
Tony Hawk basically did for skateboarding what an early startup founder does for a whole industry — took something niche and unglamorous and, through sheer relentless skill and visibility, turned it into something the…