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 4, 2026
Anthony Hopkins — Anthony
Anthony Hopkins has been acting for six decades, which by itself is the kind of career longevity most working people never get in any field, let alone one as unstable as show business. He won an Academy Award for 'The…
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October 3, 2026
Matthew Perry — Matthew
Matthew Perry was beloved for 'Friends,' a show I never much watched myself, being more of a Westerns and old movies guy, but what actually made me want to write about him is what he did in his later years: he became an…
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October 2, 2026
Matthew McConaughey — Matthew
Matthew McConaughey founded the just keep livin foundation to help high school students build healthy, active lifestyles and make positive life choices, which, as someone newly and exhaustingly deep in early parenthood…
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October 1, 2026
Matthew Henson — Matthew
Matthew Henson was part of the expedition credited with reaching the North Pole in 1909, and from what I understand, his navigational and survival skills were essential to the whole team actually making it there and…
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September 30, 2026
Daniel Kahneman — Daniel
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize studying how people actually make decisions, which is not something I ever expected to have opinions about, but 34 years on a mill floor and in union negotiations taught me plenty about…
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September 29, 2026
Daniel Boone — Daniel
Daniel Boone helped blaze the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, and I think about him sometimes the way I think about my own family, who've farmed the same forty acres in the Ozarks since the 1890s —…
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September 28, 2026
Daniel Day-Lewis — Daniel
Daniel Day-Lewis is famous for how completely he commits to a role, which even from the outside reads to me like an enormous amount of actual labor most people don't see, the kind that happens long before a camera ever…
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September 27, 2026
Christopher Wren — Christopher
Christopher Wren had to rebuild a huge chunk of London after the Great Fire of 1666, which is essentially the biggest infrastructure disaster-recovery project of his era, and instead of throwing something up quick and…
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September 26, 2026
Christopher Nolan — Christopher
Christopher Nolan makes movies I actually watch, which doesn't happen often for me since I mostly listen to audiobooks and podcasts on the road rather than sit through much scripted film — but 'Inception,' 'The Dark…
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September 25, 2026
Christopher Reeve — Christopher
Christopher Reeve played Superman on screen, and then, after a riding accident left him paralyzed, spent the rest of his life doing something genuinely harder than any role — becoming a tireless, effective advocate…
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September 24, 2026
Joseph Campbell — Joseph
Joseph Campbell spent his career studying mythology and figured out that stories across wildly different cultures kept following the same deep patterns — the 'hero's journey,' as it's known now — and that idea ended…
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September 23, 2026
Joseph Lister — Joseph
Joseph Lister basically found and patched one of the biggest bugs in the history of medicine — surgeons in his era were operating without any real understanding of germs, and infection after surgery was killing an…