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 17, 2026
Queen Elizabeth II — Elizabeth
Queen Elizabeth II worked the same job for 70 years, which honestly, as someone who's held down three at once just to make rent, is its own kind of impressive endurance even if the day-to-day of it looked nothing like…
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August 16, 2026
John Lennon — John
John Lennon wrote 'Imagine' and it's wild that a song from 1971 still shows up at vigils and protests today like it was written last week — that's a level of staying power most modern songs, or memes if we're honest,…
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August 15, 2026
Mary Robinson — Mary
There's something almost architectural about Mary Robinson's career — she built it in clean, deliberate layers, from the first woman elected President of Ireland to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to, now in her…
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August 14, 2026
James Baldwin — James
James Baldwin grew up poor in Harlem, one of nine kids, and he wrote his way out of it with nothing but a library card and a stubborn refusal to look away from hard truths. I respect that — I've raised three kids on…
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August 13, 2026
Grace Hopper — Grace
Grace Hopper developed one of the first compilers and helped create COBOL, and what I find most significant about that, as someone who spent 38 years in physics, is what it actually did: it made computers usable by…
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August 12, 2026
William Shakespeare — William
William Shakespeare didn't come from money or nobility — his father was a glovemaker — and he still ended up writing the plays and sonnets people are still performing and studying more than 400 years later, which is…
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August 11, 2026
Maria Montessori — Maria
Maria Montessori was a doctor before she was ever an educator — one of the first women to earn a medical degree in Italy — and it shows in how carefully she built her method, treating a child's learning almost like…
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August 10, 2026
David Attenborough — David
David Attenborough has been narrating the natural world for over seven decades now, and I have to admit that watching 'Planet Earth' or 'Blue Planet' with my mother, on her tablet, has become one of our quiet rituals…
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August 9, 2026
Sarah Breedlove (Madam C.J. Walker) — Sarah
Sarah Breedlove was born to parents who'd been enslaved, worked as a laundress for a dollar and a half a day, and built a hair care business for Black women that made her one of the first American women, of any…
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August 8, 2026
Michael Faraday — Michael
Michael Faraday is basically the original self-taught dev who out-coded everyone with formal degrees — no university training, started out as a bookbinder's apprentice, and ended up laying the groundwork for the…
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August 7, 2026
Elizabeth Blackwell — Elizabeth
Elizabeth Blackwell basically had to hack the system to become America's first woman with a medical degree — every med school rejected her except one, and legend has it they only admitted her in 1847 because the…
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August 6, 2026
John Muir — John
John Muir loved the outdoors the way some of my former students loved recess — like it was the only part of the day that made sense to them. He walked and wrote his way across this country until people started…