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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August 29, 2026
Sarah McLachlan — Sarah
Sarah McLachlan isn't the kind of artist I'd normally have on in my garage, but I respect what she built with Lilith Fair — a whole touring festival for women musicians that raised over $10 million for charities, back…
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August 28, 2026
Michael J. Fox — Michael
Michael J. Fox's foundation has raised over $2 billion for Parkinson's research and become the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's science in the world, and as a former physics professor, I want to be precise about…
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August 27, 2026
Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Elizabeth
Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent a good part of her life as an invalid, largely confined indoors, which is about as far from my life on the interstate as you can get, and yet she still managed to travel further in her…
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August 26, 2026
John Legend — John
John Legend is a Grammy, Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner, which is already a rare enough combination, but what makes me want to write about him is the Show Me Campaign — fighting poverty and inequality in education, work…
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August 25, 2026
Mary Cassatt — Mary
Okay, so Mary Cassatt basically had to go full main-character-energy just to get taken seriously as a painter in 19th-century Paris, which, relatable, honestly — the art world back then was not exactly rolling out the…
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August 24, 2026
James Earl Jones — James
James Earl Jones stuttered so badly as a boy that he went years barely speaking above a whisper — and he became, of all things, one of the most recognized voices in the world. I think about that a lot in my line of…
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August 23, 2026
Grace Darling — Grace
Grace Darling was 22 years old, a lighthouse keeper's daughter, when she rowed out through a violent storm to rescue survivors of a shipwreck, and I think what strikes me most is that this wasn't her job — nobody paid…
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August 22, 2026
William Wilberforce — William
William Wilberforce spent decades of his political career — most of his adult life, really — pushing for the end of the slave trade, and there's something almost like a long, unglamorous design process in that:…
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August 21, 2026
Maria Mitchell — Maria
Maria Mitchell spent her nights on a rooftop with a telescope, sweeping the sky methodically the way a good millworker checks every gauge on a shift, and in 1847 that discipline paid off when she spotted a comet nobody…
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August 20, 2026
David Ho — David
David Ho pioneered combination antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, and what that actually meant, in plain terms, is that a diagnosis that used to be a death sentence became something millions of people…
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August 19, 2026
Sarah Josepha Hale — Sarah
Sarah Josepha Hale is a favorite of mine because she wrote 'Mary Had a Little Lamb,' which I have sung to more third graders over 38 years than I could ever count, usually to calm a classroom down on a rainy…
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August 18, 2026
Michael Jordan — Michael
Michael Jordan is, obviously, the GOAT debate starter of all time, but the thing that actually gets brought up less in casual conversation is that he's given hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, including funding…