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 21, 2026
Bernard Hopkins — Bernard
Okay, I need everyone to sit with this for a second: Bernard Hopkins was already collecting Social Security age-adjacent respect by the time he became the oldest fighter ever to hold a widely recognized world title,…
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March 21, 2026
Bernard Montgomery — Bernard
Military history isn't usually where my head goes, but the idea of Bernard Montgomery commanding Allied forces at a turning point like El Alamein interests me mostly as a question of composition under enormous pressure…
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March 20, 2026
Lawrence Bragg — Lawrence
Lawrence Bragg becoming the youngest science Nobel laureate ever, working alongside his own father on X-ray crystallography, is a detail I find genuinely interesting from a family angle as much as a science one —…
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March 20, 2026
Lawrence Ferlinghetti — Lawrence
Poetry's not exactly my usual reading material, but Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founding City Lights Bookstore alongside his own writing tells me something I respect: the man didn't just want to be a poet, he wanted to…
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March 20, 2026
Lawrence Taylor — Lawrence
Football I understand a good deal better than fashion or foreign cinema, since half my former students' fathers coached Friday nights around here, and Lawrence Taylor's reputation as one of the most dominant defensive…
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March 19, 2026
Curtis Jackson — Curtis
Curtis Jackson building a career spanning music, film, television production, and business ventures under the name 50 Cent is basically the tech-world "pivot" concept except he did it across four completely different…
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March 19, 2026
Curtis Mayfield — Curtis
Curtis Mayfield's music has the kind of moral seriousness underneath it that I associate with the hymns I grew up with, which isn't an accident — "People Get Ready" pulls straight from that same gospel well, wrapped…
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March 19, 2026
Curtis Strange — Curtis
Golf isn't exactly the sport of people working three jobs, if I'm honest, but Curtis Strange becoming the first player in over three decades to win back-to-back US Open titles is the kind of specific, hard-to-repeat…
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March 18, 2026
Terry Bradshaw — Terry
There's a particular before-and-after arc I find interesting in athletes who become broadcasters, and Terry Bradshaw is a strong example: four Super Bowl titles as a quarterback, and then a whole second act built on…
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March 18, 2026
Terry Fox — Terry
Terry Fox running partway across Canada on one leg, to raise money for cancer research, is one of those stories that doesn't need any embellishment from me to land — the plain facts of it carry all the weight on their…
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March 18, 2026
Terry Pratchett — Terry
Terry Pratchett's later chapter is the one that stays with me most, because I've spent 28 years sitting with families as illness changes who someone is, and his public honesty about Alzheimer's did something rare — it…
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March 17, 2026
Marvin Gaye — Marvin
What's Going On gets called one of the greatest albums ever made, and having actually listened to it plenty of times on long shifts, I'd agree, mostly because it doesn't pretend everything's fine the way a lot of music…