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 2, 2026
Bonnie Raitt — Bonnie
Bonnie Raitt has one of those decades-spanning careers that makes you realize 'blowing up' and 'having a real career' are actually two different things. She's been doing soulful blues-rock and winning Grammys for so…
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April 2, 2026
Bonnie Tyler — Bonnie
Bonnie Tyler had one of the best-selling singles of the entire 1980s with 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' a song so enormous it's basically become a load-bearing wall of pop culture at this point, the kind of hit that…
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April 1, 2026
Monica Bellucci — Monica
Monica Bellucci is widely regarded as one of European cinema's most celebrated leading women, which is the kind of reputation that, like a good sourdough starter, doesn't happen overnight — it takes years of…
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April 1, 2026
Monica Seles — Monica
Monica Seles won nine Grand Slam singles titles and is rightly enshrined in the Tennis Hall of Fame, and I will say that tennis is one of the very few sports about which I can speak with any real authority, having…
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April 1, 2026
Saint Monica — Monica
Saint Monica gets remembered, centuries later, mostly for one thing: she didn't give up on her son, even when it took years and years for that devotion to look like it was going anywhere. There's something almost…
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March 31, 2026
Marina Abramovic — Marina
Marina Abramovic has spent decades doing performance art that is, frankly, built entirely on endurance — sitting still for hours, letting a room full of strangers just look at her, turning discomfort into the whole…
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March 31, 2026
Marina Silva — Marina
Marina Silva grew up in poverty in Brazil and became one of the world's leading voices for protecting the Amazon rainforest, eventually earning the Right Livelihood Award for it, and this is the kind of story that…
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March 31, 2026
Marina Tsvetaeva — Marina
Marina Tsvetaeva is regarded as one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, known for intense, lyrical verse that people are still reading and translating a hundred years later, which is a strange kind…
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March 30, 2026
Louise Bourgeois — Louise
Louise Bourgeois built giant spider sculptures that turned into some of the most recognizable, influential works in modern art, and honestly, turning something most people find creepy into a globally beloved artistic…
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March 30, 2026
Louise Brooks — Louise
Louise Brooks was one of the great faces of the silent film era, a dancer and an actress whose bobbed haircut alone became a whole style movement, decades before anyone had a word for 'iconic.' What strikes me, working…
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March 30, 2026
Louise Erdrich — Louise
Louise Erdrich is a National Book Award-winning novelist whose work draws deeply on her Ojibwe heritage to explore Native American life and history, and I confess this is precisely the sort of profile that makes my…
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March 29, 2026
Judith Dench — Judith
Judi Dench has had a long, celebrated career on stage and in film, including playing M in the James Bond movies, and what strikes me about her is the sheer number of years that career has run — decades of steady,…