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 9, 2026
Gertrude Bell — Gertrude
I've never left Pennsylvania much except for family, so a life like Gertrude Bell's, traveling deep into the Middle East and shaping diplomacy with what she learned there, is about as far from my own as I can imagine,…
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February 9, 2026
Gertrude Ederle — Gertrude
Gertrude Ederle swam across the English Channel quicker than every man who'd tried it before her, and became a household name, and I think what gets lost in a story like that is just how much unglamorous, repetitive…
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February 9, 2026
Gertrude Stein — Gertrude
Gertrude Stein basically ran the group chat of early twentieth-century modern art and literature except it was an actual physical Paris salon instead of a Discord server, and somehow that one room shaped the whole…
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February 8, 2026
Dorothea Bate — Dorothea
Thirty-four years on a mill floor taught me plenty about digging things out of the ground, though nothing on the scale Dorothea Bate managed, hunting fossils across the Mediterranean as one of the first women given an…
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February 8, 2026
Dorothea Dix — Dorothea
In nursing school in Cebu, and later here in America, we were taught that patients deserve dignity regardless of their diagnosis, and reading about Dorothea Dix I recognize a very early version of that same fight. She…
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February 8, 2026
Dorothea Lange — Dorothea
Dorothea Lange took one photograph, 'Migrant Mother,' and it basically became the visual shorthand an entire country uses to remember the Great Depression, which is an absurd amount of leverage for a single frame —…
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February 7, 2026
Thelma Estrin — Thelma
I never trusted automation much, watched robots and efficiency experts hollow out my hometown after the plant closed in 2009, so it surprised me how much I respected Thelma Estrin's story once I actually read it. She…
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February 7, 2026
Thelma Houston — Thelma
Thelma Houston's voice on 'Don't Leave Me This Way' has that specific disco-era power where the vocal itself becomes almost a visual thing to me, all that saturated, high-contrast emotion just filling the whole frame of…
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February 7, 2026
Thelma Schoonmaker — Thelma
Thelma Schoonmaker has three Academy Awards for film editing and decades collaborating with Martin Scorsese, and editing strikes me as exactly the kind of essential, invisible labor that keeps a whole production…
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February 6, 2026
Hilda of Whitby — Hilda
Never expected to find myself moved by a seventh-century English abbess on a truck stop podcast binge, but Hilda of Whitby's monastery became a real center of learning in her time, and she's remembered specifically for…
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February 6, 2026
Hilda Solis — Hilda
Hilda Solis being the first Latina inside a U.S. president's cabinet, then spending her career as Secretary of Labor actually fighting for labor protections and environmental justice, hits close to home for someone…
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February 6, 2026
Hilda Taba — Hilda
I'm a gym teacher and coach, but I've got a lot of respect for the folks doing the unglamorous work of building the actual playbook everybody else runs from — that's what Hilda Taba did for education, developing a…