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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April 30, 2026
Vivian Maier — Vivian
Vivian Maier's photography went almost entirely unrecognized during her lifetime and was only discovered and celebrated after her death, which I find myself returning to with a scientist's discomfort at how much quality…
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April 30, 2026
Vivian Vance — Vivian
Vivian Vance is remembered, rather charmingly and rather narrowly, for one role — Ethel Mertz on "I Love Lucy" — though she was an Emmy-winning actress with a career well beyond that single beloved part. I find…
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April 29, 2026
Empress Joséphine — Josephine
Empress Joséphine has always struck me as a woman one could genuinely discuss horticulture with, which I mean as the highest compliment I know how to give. Beyond her rather more famous role as Napoleon's first wife,…
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April 29, 2026
Josephine Baker — Josephine
I had a student once, back in the seventies, who could sing the paint off a wall and never got the chance this country owed her — Josephine Baker's story always makes me think of her. Baker left the segregated South…
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April 29, 2026
Josephine Cochrane — Josephine
Josephine Cochrane is credited with inventing the first practical mechanical dishwasher, a fact I find genuinely delightful to sit with, because it is precisely the sort of contribution that gets filed under "domestic…
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April 28, 2026
Adele — Adele
Now here's one I can actually get behind without any grumbling about the music these days not having a tune you can hum — Adele has a voice you can hum along to from the very first bar, and her chart-topping albums…
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April 28, 2026
Adele Astaire — Adele
One does love tracing a sibling act back through the genealogical record, and Adele Astaire's is a particularly charming one — she and her brother Fred performed together on Broadway and in the West End to great…
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April 28, 2026
Adele Goldberg — Adele
Okay, so, Adele Goldberg basically helped invent the graphical interface you're using right now to read this — Smalltalk, windows, icons, the whole vibe — decades before anyone called it "UX." As a backend engineer…
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April 27, 2026
Naomi Campbell — Naomi
Fashion's about as far from a truck cab as an industry gets, so I'll say upfront I don't have much natural feel for what makes a supermodel career like Naomi Campbell's actually significant beyond the obvious — one of…
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April 27, 2026
Naomi Klein — Naomi
I'll admit Naomi Klein writes about things well outside my usual reading — globalization and climate change, with books like 'No Logo' and 'This Changes Everything' that folks tell me were genuinely influential in how…
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April 27, 2026
Naomi Watts — Naomi
Naomi Watts is an actress known for 'Mulholland Drive' and 'The Impossible,' celebrated for her range across independent and mainstream film both, which tells me she never let herself get boxed into just one kind of…
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April 26, 2026
Eugenia Cheng — Eugenie
I never finished community college, dropped out for money and got my CDL instead, so I've built most of what I know about history and ideas out of audiobooks over twenty-two years of long hauls, which is its own kind of…