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 5, 2026
Gladys Cooper — Gladys
A six-decade career with three Academy Award nominations is basically the sports equivalent of playing at a high level into your forties — Gladys Cooper just kept showing up and delivering, generation after generation…
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March 5, 2026
Gladys Knight — Gladys
Gladys Knight has earned, quite fairly, the title 'the Empress of Soul' across a Grammy-winning career including 'Midnight Train to Georgia,' a song whose emotional precision I admire in much the way I admire an…
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March 4, 2026
Edith Head — Edith
Okay, eight Academy Awards for costume design is an absolutely unhinged number and I feel like Edith Head does not get talked about enough compared to directors and actors from the same era, even though half of what…
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March 4, 2026
Edith Piaf — Edith
I'm usually talking sports metaphors with my players, but Edith Piaf's story has that same underdog shape I look for in any comeback tale — a voice that powerful coming out of a hard early life and turning into…
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March 4, 2026
Edith Wharton — Edith
I never did finish my bachelor's degree, raising four kids and teaching third grade the whole time, so I have a particular fondness for anybody who broke new ground doing hard, careful work most folks weren't expecting…
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March 3, 2026
Agnes de Mille — Agnes
Agnes de Mille reshaped the American musical by folding genuine, narrative-driven choreography into productions like Oklahoma!, which strikes me, as someone who spent thirty-eight years teaching physics, as a lovely…
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March 3, 2026
Agnes Martin — Agnes
Agnes Martin's serene, minimalist grid canvases helped define postwar American abstraction, and there is something in her disciplined, almost mathematical restraint that speaks directly to a physicist's sensibilities…
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March 3, 2026
Agnes Moorehead — Agnes
Agnes Moorehead had a distinguished career across stage, radio, and screen for decades before most people just remember her as Endora on Bewitched, which is honestly how it goes for a lot of people who put in the real,…
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March 2, 2026
Doris Day — Doris
I've listened to a lot of history and music on long hauls across this country, and Doris Day's cheerful on-screen persona and a long run of hit records carried a whole generation through some genuinely hard decades,…
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March 2, 2026
Doris Lessing — Doris
I do adore a good genealogical detective story, though Doris Lessing's own path to a Nobel Prize is less a matter of lineage than of sheer, sustained literary force — her sweeping, insightful novels earned her that…
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March 2, 2026
Doris Roberts — Doris
Doris Roberts spent a long career earning her craft before Everybody Loves Raymond made her broadly, belatedly beloved, which is a pattern I notice often and appreciate: recognition arriving well after the actual work…
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March 1, 2026
Ethel Barrymore — Ethel
There's a whole family of Barrymores in the acting business, but this one was the matriarch of it, and reading about her long career on stage and screen reminded me of the grandmothers who used to run our little…