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 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…
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February 17, 2026
Earl Hines — Earl
Earl Hines developed what's called a 'trumpet style' of piano playing, and it's this technical innovation, more than any single recording, that's credited with helping shape the direction of modern jazz as a whole. As a…
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February 17, 2026
Earl Warren — Earl
Earl Warren spent years as Governor of California before becoming Chief Justice and leading some of the most important unanimous civil rights decisions in American legal history — the kind of rulings that actually…
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February 16, 2026
Barry Gibb — Barry
Barry Gibb is the last surviving Bee Gee, co-writer of some of the most enduring disco-era hits ever recorded, which means he's spent years now carrying an entire group's legacy essentially alone, still writing and…
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February 16, 2026
Barry Manilow — Barry
Barry Manilow wrote 'Mandy' and 'Copacabana' and ended up one of the best-selling music artists in history, and here's the underdog part of the story that a lot of folks skip past: songs like that don't become that…
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February 16, 2026
Barry White — Barry
Barry White built an entire beloved career around his remarkably deep, velvety voice and a catalogue of romantic soul ballads that made him one of the defining musical icons of the 1970s, a decade I remember rather…
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February 15, 2026
Stanley Kubrick — Stanley
Stanley Kubrick directed that space picture, 2001, the one my son-in-law is always going on about, and from what I gather the man was famous for being meticulous almost to a fault — reshooting things over and over…
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February 15, 2026
Stanley Matthews — Stanley
Stanley Matthews was the first person ever to win the Ballon d'Or, football's biggest individual award, and he earned the nickname 'the Wizard of the Dribble,' which honestly sounds like a rejected Harry Potter minor…
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February 15, 2026
Stanley Tucci — Stanley
Stanley Tucci is a versatile actor and director, beloved lately for travel and food shows celebrating Italian cuisine, which I will admit is a genre I had not previously taken seriously until my late husband Daniel, a…
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February 14, 2026
Gerald Durrell — Gerald
Gerald Durrell wrote beloved memoirs about his life among animals and founded a wildlife trust that's still protecting endangered species today, decades after he started it, which is the kind of institutional legacy…
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February 14, 2026
Gerald Edelman — Gerald
Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for research on the structure of antibodies, work that transformed the entire field of immunology, and I'll be honest, that's about as far from a steel mill floor as a subject gets in…
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February 14, 2026
Gerald Ford — Gerald
Gerald Ford became president right after Watergate and gets credit for helping restore some public trust in government at a moment when the country genuinely needed it, which strikes me as a specific, unglamorous kind…