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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March 29, 2026
Judith Jamison — Judith
Judith Jamison led the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for over two decades, expanding its reach well beyond where it started, and I think about leadership like that a fair amount, having run my own rig as an…
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March 29, 2026
Judith Light — Judith
Judith Light is an Emmy and Tony-winning actress, well known for Who's the Boss?, but what I find most worth noting, and what perhaps deserves more attention than the television credits, is her decades-long advocacy…
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March 28, 2026
Irene Cara — Irene
Irene Cara's voice is basically the sound of an entire era's ambition — 'Fame' and 'Flashdance... What a Feeling' are both, structurally, anthems about wanting something badly enough to bet everything on it, which as…
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March 28, 2026
Irene Dunne — Irene
Irene Dunne got nominated for the Academy Award five times and never won one, which the more I think about it the more it bothers me, because from everything I've read she could do comedy and drama both, and that kind…
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March 28, 2026
Irene Joliot-Curie — Irene
Irene Joliot-Curie won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering artificial radioactivity alongside her husband, and yes, she was Marie Curie's daughter, a fact I mention not to diminish her own achievement but because…
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March 27, 2026
Virginia Apgar — Virginia
Virginia Apgar invented the Apgar score, that quick little test they run on newborns to check how they're doing right out of the gate, and something about that hit different now that I've had a baby of my own less than…
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March 27, 2026
Virginia Wade — Virginia
Virginia Wade won the Wimbledon singles title in 1977, one of the most celebrated moments in British sports history, and I bring this up mostly because winning your home country's biggest tournament on your home court…
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March 27, 2026
Virginia Woolf — Virginia
Virginia Woolf reshaped English literature with her modernist novels, Mrs Dalloway especially, and from what I've read she had the kind of financial cushion, and the time, that let her spend years developing a whole new…
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March 26, 2026
Rita Hayworth — Rita
Rita Hayworth in Gilda is one of those images that's basically pure composition — the hair, the gloves, the lighting, all of it engineered like a poster before it was ever a performance, and she was one of the biggest…
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March 26, 2026
Rita Moreno — Rita
Rita Moreno did the EGOT — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, one of the very few actual humans to pull off all four — and she didn't do it in some tidy five-year sprint, she did it over the course of an entire long career.…
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March 26, 2026
Rita Ora — Rita
Rita Ora's had chart-topping hits and built a career that stretches across music, film, and television, which sounds glamorous until you remember that 'wide-ranging' usually means somebody had to hustle across three or…
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March 25, 2026
Gloria Estefan — Gloria
Gloria Estefan helped bring Latin pop to a genuinely global mainstream audience and has sold over one hundred million records in the process, a figure precise enough that I feel obligated, as a scientist by training, to…