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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February 21, 2026
Sidney Lumet — Sidney
Sidney Lumet directed 12 Angry Men almost entirely in one room, which as a designer is the kind of constraint I find genuinely thrilling — no sweeping vistas, just composition, faces, and tension doing all the work,…
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February 21, 2026
Sidney Poitier — Sidney
Sidney Poitier was the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, and everything I've ever read about him says he carried that honor, and every role before and after it, with a dignity that people still…
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February 20, 2026
Milton Berle — Milton
Milton Berle got called 'Mr. Television' because his early variety show basically helped convince an entire country that this new box in the living room was worth watching — he was, in a weird way, one of the very…
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February 20, 2026
Milton Friedman — Milton
Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics, and his ideas about markets and monetary policy went on to shape economic thinking rather significantly around the world, which I mention with the particular caution of…
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February 20, 2026
Milton Hershey — Milton
Milton Hershey built one of the world's most famous chocolate companies and then used a genuinely enormous chunk of that fortune to found a school for underprivileged children, which is the part of his story that…
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February 19, 2026
Clarence Birdseye — Clarence
Clarence Birdseye figured out flash-freezing and basically invented the modern frozen food aisle, which might sound like a small thing until you consider how many meals I've eaten out of a truck-stop freezer case over…
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February 19, 2026
Clarence Clemons — Clarence
Clarence Clemons played saxophone solos with Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band that are still, decades later, some of the most recognizable sounds in rock music — which is a genuinely wild kind of legacy, to be the…
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February 19, 2026
Clarence Darrow — Clarence
Clarence Darrow was a renowned defense attorney celebrated for eloquent advocacy in landmark trials, someone who built a whole career specifically around defending people the rest of the room had already decided to…
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February 18, 2026
Harold Bloom — Harold
Harold Bloom spent decades at Yale as one of the most influential literary critics of his era, championing what he considered the great works of world literature with a passion that apparently bordered on evangelical. I…
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February 18, 2026
Harold Lloyd — Harold
Harold Lloyd is remembered, most famously, for a single indelible image: hanging from the hands of a clock tower, a stunt so precisely dangerous that it required both genuine physical courage and considerable technical…
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February 18, 2026
Harold Pinter — Harold
Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for writing plays with dialogue so sharp and spare that it reshaped how an entire country wrote for the stage — the man basically figured out that what characters don't say can hit…
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February 17, 2026
Earl Campbell — Earl
Earl Campbell is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, celebrated as one of the most powerful rushers the NFL has ever seen, which as someone who spends her mornings kneading dough starting at 4 a.m. has given me an…