Yasmin Al-Rashidi
College sophomore working three jobs, Dearborn, Michigan
Profiles by Yasmin Al-Rashidi
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Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) — Alessandro
Alessandro Manzoni wrote "The Betrothed," a novel considered a masterpiece of Italian literature that also, notably, helped standardize the modern Italian language itself — which is a wild kind of influence when you think about it, a single book shaping how an entire country would eventually talk and write for generations after. I grew up bouncing between English at school and Arabic at home, being the designated translator kid for relatives my whole childhood, so language-as-identity is basically my whole personality whether I mean it to be or not. There's something powerful about a writer whose fiction ends up doing more for a national language than any official policy could — people actually read the thing and started talking a little more like it. I don't know if any book from my own generation will ever get credited with shaping a language the way Manzoni's did, but honestly, given how much slang starts on social media now, maybe it already is happening and nobody's noticed yet.
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Trevor Hoffman (b. 1967) — Trevor
Trevor Hoffman is a Baseball Hall of Fame relief pitcher who, at his retirement, held the all-time saves record and basically helped define what the modern closer role even is. I don't know baseball that well — it's not really an Iraqi-American Dearborn household thing growing up — but I looked into his career a bit and found the whole "closer" concept kind of relatable in a weird way: you're not the starter everybody watches from the beginning, you're the person who shows up at the very end and has to be perfect under maximum pressure with basically no room for error, or the whole game falls apart on your shift. That's honestly a lot like what juggling three jobs at once feels like some weeks — nobody sees the setup, they just see whether you closed it out or didn't. Hoffman apparently closed it out at an elite level for years. Respect for anybody who's good in the moments where there's genuinely no margin left.
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Freya Ridings (b. 1993) — Freya
Freya Ridings had one ballad, "Lost Without You," turn into a genuine global streaming hit, and that single song basically launched her whole recording career, which — as someone who had a video go viral for entirely the wrong reasons once and had to sit with that at eighteen — makes me think about how differently the internet can treat the exact same mechanism of sudden mass attention. One clip can end up defining you in a way you never chose, or it can open every door at once, and there's honestly not that much difference in the mechanics, just in the luck of what caught on and why. I'm glad hers went the good way. A song that resonates with that many strangers all at once has to be doing something genuinely true underneath it, not just algorithmically convenient, or it wouldn't have held up past the first few weeks the way it clearly did. Virality that actually lasts is rarer than people assume.
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Kwame Alexander (b. 1968) — Kwame
Kwame Alexander won the Newbery Medal for "The Crossover" and has basically made it his whole mission to get kids excited about poetry, which — okay, respect, because getting anyone under eighteen to willingly read verse in 2026 feels like a bigger achievement than the medal itself. I was the kid who translated for my whole extended family growing up, so I've thought a lot about how words either open a door for someone or slam it, and it sounds like Alexander built a career figuring out how to make that door swing wide for kids who might've decided books "weren't for them." I did three jobs last year just to stay in school, so I have a lot of respect for anyone spending their career on access instead of just prestige. It's a small, unglamorous kind of impact compared to going viral, and I say that as someone who's had both the viral moment and the quieter, harder-won kind, and knows exactly which one actually changes a kid's life.
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Chloé Zhao (b. 1982) — Chloe
Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color to win the Best Director Oscar, for "Nomadland," a film about people living on the actual margins of the American economy, which feels like a pointed, almost too-perfect detail once you sit with it. I watch a lot of prestige streaming and video essays, and there's a whole subgenre of commentary about which awards-season films actually earn their subject matter versus which ones are just poverty tourism with good lighting, and from what I've read Zhao's approach was the former — she reportedly spent real time with the actual nomadic communities the film is about instead of just filming them from a safe distance. That distinction matters a lot to me, coming from a community that's had its own story told badly, by people who never bothered to actually sit with us first, more times than I can count. Zhao getting that specific recognition, for that specific kind of patient, embedded filmmaking, feels like more than just a diversity milestone, though it's obviously that too.
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Elena Kagan (b. 1960) — Elena
Elena Kagan has been a U.S. Supreme Court Justice since 2010, and before that was the first woman to serve as Dean of Harvard Law School, which is two separate "first woman" milestones stacked on top of each other in one career, which is a lot even by "we're all supposedly past that now" 2020s standards. I'm pre-law right now, working three jobs to make the scholarship stretch, and honestly reading profiles like this is part of what keeps the whole plan feeling real instead of theoretical. It's easy to get cynical about institutions when you're stitching together shifts to afford being in one, but then you read about someone who ran an entire law school before the appointment that made her famous, and it's a useful reminder that the credentialed path isn't only symbolic. I try not to get too starry-eyed about any one figure, because law is complicated and no one person fixes a system by existing in it, but Kagan's specific trajectory is genuinely one I think about on hard weeks.
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Valentina Tereshkova (b. 1937) — Valentina
Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, which honestly still gives me chills a little, imagining what it took to be the actual first at something that huge with basically no template for what "female astronaut" was even supposed to look like yet. I think about firsts a lot, being the first in a lot of small rooms myself — first in my family born in the U.S., first to go the pre-law track, stuff like that, nowhere near her scale obviously, but I recognize the specific pressure of being the one everyone's watching to see if it's even possible. Tereshkova had zero cultural script to follow and just had to write the whole thing from scratch, in orbit, with the entire world watching. My mom grew up hearing about the space race secondhand and always brings up Tereshkova whenever space stuff comes up, like she's genuinely proud on her behalf across sixty years and two totally unrelated countries. There's something universal about that specific kind of pride in someone else's "first," I think.
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Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) — Sean
Sean O'Casey wrote his Dublin trilogy and put working-class Irish life on stage in a way that apparently hadn't really been done with that much honesty before, no cleaning it up for a fancier audience. I relate to that instinct more than I expected to — I grew up as "the explainer kid" for my whole extended family, translating not just language but context, constantly having to make sure people understood a life that wasn't the default one they were picturing. O'Casey putting actual working-class Dublin on a stage that usually performed something tidier feels like the same energy, just theater instead of family Thanksgiving. My family fled Baghdad in 2006, so we know something about telling a true, unglamorous version of a story instead of the simplified one that's easier for other people to digest. It's a hard thing to do well without it turning into either misery or performance, and from what I understand O'Casey mostly managed to avoid both traps, which is genuinely rare.
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Luca della Robbia (1400-1482) — Luca
Luca della Robbia figured out this technique for glazed terracotta reliefs that let sculpture hold vivid color and actually survive the centuries instead of fading or crumbling, which, when I first read it, sounded less like art history and more like someone solving a technical problem nobody else had cracked yet. I like when old stuff turns out to have a genuinely clever engineering angle hiding under the "beautiful Renaissance object" label museums put on it. There's something very of-its-time about a guy figuring out a durability hack in the 1400s, honestly — every era has its own version of "how do we make this thing actually last," whether that's glaze chemistry or, I don't know, backing up your files. My grandma still can't believe how much of my generation's stuff exists only on servers somewhere and could theoretically vanish overnight, and I think about della Robbia's reliefs, still bright after six hundred years, and feel a little called out on behalf of the cloud.
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Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) — Miguel
Okay so Miguel de Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote" and it's still considered one of the greatest works in world literature, which — I'll be honest, I read excerpts for a lit class and did not clock at nineteen how funny and how sad it is at the same time, a guy who's basically main-charactering his own delusion so hard that everyone around him just goes along with it. That's a very online-era plot if you think about it, someone convinced of their own narrative regardless of what reality is doing. I got into a whole thing last year where a joke I made got read completely wrong by strangers online, and I've thought about Quixote's whole deal more than I expected since — how much of what happens to a person is what they actually did versus the story other people decide to tell about it. Cervantes apparently wrote a lot of it while dealing with actual hardship in his own life, which somehow makes the humor land harder, not softer. Four hundred years later people are still assigning it in classes, which is objectively wild.
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Diego Forlán (b. 1979) — Diego
I know embarrassingly little about soccer given how much of my extended family treats the World Cup like a religious holiday, but even I've heard of Diego Forlan winning the Golden Ball as the best player of the 2010 tournament, and what stuck with me reading about him wasn't the trophy so much as the specific, repeated word 'sportsmanship,' a much rarer superlative in competitive anything than 'best player' is. There's a lot of noise online about athletes behaving badly, so it's kind of refreshing, in a very low-stakes way, to read about someone whose whole reputation includes 'widely respected on the field' as a real, separate accomplishment from the stats. My little cousins are obsessed with soccer highlights on my phone and I've started noticing how much of what they absorb from those clips is attitude, not just skill -- who celebrates how, who helps an opponent up, that kind of thing. Forlan apparently modeled the version of competitiveness I'd actually want my cousins copying, which honestly might be a bigger legacy than one Golden Ball, even if it gets a lot fewer headlines.
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Omar Epps (b. 1973) — Omar
Omar Epps built a whole career out of 'House' and 'Love & Basketball,' both of which I've watched more times than I'd admit in a job interview, and then spent years advocating for arts education programs that get young people actual access to the performing arts, which matters more than it sounds like it does when you grew up, like I did, in a community where extracurriculars were the first thing to get cut for cost. Nobody in my family had spare money for acting classes or instruments growing up -- you either had a scholarship, a generous teacher, or you didn't get the exposure at all -- so I take arts-access advocacy seriously in a way that isn't purely aesthetic for me. Epps clearly remembers something about how he got his own start, because that kind of advocacy usually comes from people who know exactly how easily the door could have stayed shut. I over-explain things sometimes because I spent my whole childhood being the designated translator kid for relatives, but I don't think I need to over-explain why access to art shouldn't depend on your parents' income. It just shouldn't.
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Alice Waters (b. 1944) — Alice
I did not expect to get emotional about a chef, but Alice Waters pioneering farm-to-table at Chez Panisse and then turning that into the Edible Schoolyard Project -- actually teaching kids to grow and cook their own food in schools -- hit closer to home than I expected, because food access and food knowledge are not equally distributed things, and I grew up very aware of which of my friends had time and money for 'nice' food versus which of us were eating whatever was fastest and cheapest between jobs and classes. Waters basically built an institution around the idea that knowing how to grow and cook food is a kind of literacy kids deserve regardless of their zip code, a much more concrete form of equity work than most 'awareness' campaigns manage. I catch myself being cynical about wellness-and-food culture sometimes because so much of it is marketed at people who already have plenty, so it's genuinely refreshing to read about someone who took that same energy and pointed it at public school kids instead of another cookbook for people who don't need it.
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Alice Walker (b. 1944) — Alice
'The Color Purple' is one of those books that gets assigned so often it risks becoming furniture instead of literature, but reading about Alice Walker becoming the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction reminded me how recent and hard-won that 'first' actually was, not some ancient historical footnote. I get impatient with how casually people my age sometimes treat representation like it was always a given, when it very clearly wasn't, and still isn't fully, depending on which industry you're looking at. Walker's writing shaped real, ongoing conversations about race, gender, and resilience, a heavier lift than 'wrote a good book,' though it's also that. I think about my own viral moment from last year sometimes, how a joke I made got read completely differently than I meant it, and how much harder that must be when what's on the line isn't a bad week online but decades of a whole category of stories getting dismissed before they're even read. Walker forced the door, basically, and a lot of writers who came after her walked through it without necessarily knowing her name.
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Joyce Banda (b. 1950) — Joyce
My family fled Baghdad in 2006, so I have a personal, not-abstract relationship with the phrase 'first woman to' in a country's political history, because I know exactly how much resistance usually sits behind that phrase even when the headline makes it sound clean and inevitable. Joyce Banda became the first female president of Malawi and then spent her career on women's economic empowerment and rural development, the unsexy, structural version of that fight -- not just occupying the office, but using it to change who gets access to money and school and land afterward. I get impatient sometimes with how my own generation talks about progress like it's automatic once one person breaks through, when really someone has to keep doing the actual work for years afterward or the door just quietly swings shut again. Banda's foundation work reads like someone who understood that part of the assignment. I don't know enough about Malawian politics to grade her presidency, honestly, and I try to catch myself before pretending I do -- but the follow-through after the historic 'first' is the part that actually impresses me.
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Ann Patchett (b. 1963) — Ann
Ann Patchett is already an award-winning novelist, which would be plenty, but then she went and opened an actual bookstore in Nashville because she was worried about literary culture surviving without one, which is such a specific, unglamorous kind of activism -- showing up as a landlord and inventory manager for a cause you believe in, not just writing an op-ed about it. I think about scheduling apps and gig-work algorithms a lot, given how much of my own life gets decided by them, and there's something almost defiant about Patchett choosing to build a small, physical, human-scale business in an industry everyone insists is dying because of exactly those kinds of apps and algorithms. My family didn't have books lying around the house growing up in the way some of my classmates did, so independent bookstores always felt a little bit like a clubhouse I had to earn my way into later. Patchett apparently decided that clubhouse was worth keeping open for the next kid like that, and honestly, as someone who was that kid, I appreciate it more than the average book review probably will.
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Frances McDormand (b. 1957) — Frances
There's a very specific kind of Hollywood person who gets three Academy Awards and somehow stays completely unbothered about being famous, and Frances McDormand is apparently the patron saint of that energy -- picking weird, deeply human roles instead of the obvious prestige ones, and treating fame itself like something mildly inconvenient rather than the whole point. I spend a lot of time online, professionally and otherwise, in a world where visibility is basically the currency, so someone actively choosing to be less visible than her achievements technically allow is almost a radical act from where I sit. It reminds me a little of watching my own viral moment last year -- a joke that landed wrong and got read as mean instead of funny -- and realizing afterward how much I didn't actually want the attention I got, good or bad. McDormand's whole career seems built on wanting the work and not particularly wanting the spotlight that comes attached to it, which, having tasted an unwanted spotlight for about two weeks, I now respect on a completely different, much more personal level.
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Helen Sharman (b. 1963) — Helen
Helen Sharman was a chemist before she became the first British astronaut, which is such a specific 'started in one lane, ended up somewhere completely unbelievable' story that it makes my own resume -- cashier, hostess, retail, barista, social media, freelance editing, occasionally all in the same month -- feel slightly less chaotic by comparison, even though obviously nothing about my jobs involves the Mir space station. What actually got me was that after she'd literally been to space, she spent years afterward working on science education for younger people, going back to open doors instead of just keeping the view to herself. I use AI tools constantly for school and I'm generally optimistic about where science and tech are headed, but I have real anxiety about how much disinformation targets communities like mine, so I notice, and appreciate, anyone with real scientific credibility spending it on making science actually accessible instead of intimidating. Sharman didn't have to keep showing up for that after her one incredible trip; she did anyway, and that's the part of her story that actually stuck with me.
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Kathleen Battle (b. 1948) — Kathleen
I'll be honest, opera is not really my scene -- I grew up on K-pop and video essays, not the world's leading opera houses -- but reading about Kathleen Battle's voice, the way people describe it as pure and lyric like it's a specific, rare frequency only a handful of humans can hit, made me actually go find a clip, which almost never happens with 'important classical artist' profiles. There's something in the specificity of a gift like that -- not 'good at singing' but a particular, trained, decades-honed instrument -- that reminds me of how my grandmother talks about certain old Iraqi singers, voices she says you don't hear made that way anymore. Battle performed with orchestras and opera houses across the world, which is its own kind of universal language, the way music travels past whatever language the audience actually speaks. I don't have the vocabulary of a real opera critic and I'm not going to pretend I do, but I know rarity when a whole field agrees on it, and apparently the whole field agreed on her.
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Cynthia Nixon (b. 1966) — Cynthia
Okay so I did not expect to be writing about 'Sex and the City' between a barista shift and a shift editing videos for a nonprofit that pays me in 'exposure' half the time, but here we are -- Cynthia Nixon has had a genuinely wild career, Tony and Emmy wins, over four decades bouncing between Broadway and television, which honestly sounds like the opposite of my life where nothing lasts longer than a semester or a gig-app notification. There's something kind of soothing about reading about a career with that much continuity in it, like watching someone build one really solid thing instead of six unstable half-things at once, which is basically my personal economy right now. I don't actually know her politics or her opinions on anything, I just know the resume, and the resume alone is the kind of long, steady arc that feels almost fictional to someone my age juggling three part-time jobs. Anyway -- respect, genuinely, for four decades of doing one thing, well two things, stage and screen, really well. Wait, that's not really casual online commentary anymore, is it. Moving on.
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Amanda Gorman (b. 1998) — Amanda
The youngest inaugural poet in United States history, Amanda Gorman read 'The Hill We Climb' at the 2021 presidential inauguration, delivering a message of unity and hope that reached audiences well beyond anyone who usually pays attention to poetry. I got accepted into a fellowship this summer that had me living outside Michigan for the first time in my life, and there's something about watching someone my own generation stand in front of the entire country and deliver something that precise and that composed that still gives me chills thinking about it. Gorman wasn't much older than I am now when she did that, which recalibrates what I think is possible on a timeline I usually assume takes decades. I'm the designated explainer kid in my family, the one who translates for relatives, and I recognize something of that instinct in her poem too — taking a complicated, tense moment and finding language ordinary people could actually hold onto. That's a specific and difficult skill, and she had it astonishingly young.
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Carol Burnett (b. 1933) — Carol
Carol Burnett hosted one of the most beloved and longest-running variety shows in television history, and in doing so opened real doors for the generations of women in comedy who came after her. I'm extremely online, I'll be the first to admit it, and I think a lot about how much easier it is now for a woman to be visibly, unapologetically funny on camera than it clearly was in Burnett's era — and that ease didn't happen by accident, it happened because people like her spent years proving, week after week, that a woman could carry an entire show on her own comic instincts. It's easy from where I sit, scrolling clips of women doing brilliant sketch comedy today, to forget how recently that wasn't assumed to be possible at all. Burnett ran that show for over a decade, which in television terms is basically an institution. Every woman doing physical comedy on a screen right now owes a little bit of runway to her having gone first.
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Emily Blunt (b. 1983) — Emily
Emily Blunt, an acclaimed actress known for 'The Devil Wears Prada' and 'Oppenheimer,' has spoken openly about overcoming a childhood stutter, using her own experience to help other children facing the same challenge. I had a video go viral for the wrong reasons a while back, a joke that read as mean instead of funny, and had to sit with a wave of public criticism at eighteen that I'm honestly still processing pieces of — so I have a specific soft spot for people who talk openly about something that made them feel exposed or judged as kids, especially something as visible as a stutter would have been for a young actress. It would be so easy for someone at her level of fame to just let the stutter stay a footnote nobody brings up. Instead she's used exactly that story to reach kids going through the same thing right now, which strikes me as the harder, more generous version of fame — using the platform for the vulnerable part of your story, not just the polished highlight reel.
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Margaret Hamilton (b. 1936) — Margaret
Margaret Hamilton led the team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions, work rigorous enough that it helped land astronauts safely on the Moon, and she's the one credited with actually coining the term 'software engineering' in the first place. I use AI tools constantly for school and content, and it's a little humbling to remember that the whole field I take for granted didn't even have a name until a woman had to invent one for the work she was already doing, because nobody had bothered to name it before her. That's very on-brand for a lot of the history I've come across since I started paying attention to this stuff — women doing foundational work that gets folded quietly into a field's origin story instead of credited directly to them. Hamilton at least got her due eventually, which isn't always how these stories go. Her code helped land actual humans on the actual Moon. That's not a small thing to be first at naming.
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Karen Uhlenbeck (b. 1942) — Karen
Karen Uhlenbeck, a mathematician, became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, one of the highest honors in mathematics, for foundational work in geometric analysis that most of us will never fully understand and that still shaped the whole field. I'm not a math person at all, I'll admit that upfront, but I notice patterns in whose achievements get called 'foundational' right away versus whose take decades to get properly recognized, and Uhlenbeck's story reads like the second kind. Being the literal first woman to win a prize that's been around that long tells you something uncomfortable about how long the field kept the door mostly shut. I've had my own dose of public criticism land on me at eighteen for something way smaller than a career's worth of unrecognized math work, and it's made me think differently about how long some people have to wait for the credit that was already theirs. Uhlenbeck waited a career's worth of time and still got there.
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Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) — Susan
Susan B. Anthony dedicated her entire life to the fight for women's right to vote, work that eventually culminated, decades after her own death, in the 19th Amendment finally becoming law. I think about this a lot actually — putting in work you know you might not live to see the payoff of, because I grew up hearing my parents' stories about fleeing Baghdad for a future they couldn't guarantee would actually happen for their kids. Anthony spent her whole life on a cause she never got to see fully win, which is a different kind of sacrifice than the instant-gratification stuff my generation gets accused of chasing online all the time. I'll be honest, when I first learned she didn't live to vote herself, it kind of wrecked me a little, in the way things about displacement and long odds always do. It's a good reminder that some of the biggest wins in history were built by people who had to trust the work would matter after they were gone.
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Frank Capra (1897-1991) — Frank
Frank Capra made movies, especially 'It's a Wonderful Life,' built almost entirely around the idea that ordinary people matter and that small, decent choices add up to something real, which is a message that could easily read as corny except it keeps working on new audiences every single holiday season, generation after generation. I'm pretty deep in extremely online, ironic internet culture most of the time, so genuine, unguarded optimism like that usually makes me a little suspicious on instinct -- until I actually watch the movie, at which point it gets me every single time anyway, no irony surviving contact. There's something almost brave about making something that sincere in an industry that mostly rewards cynicism or spectacle. Capra bet that people would still respond to earnestness decades later, long after the specific cultural moment that produced the film had passed, and he was right. I think about that a lot when I catch myself being too casual or jokey about things that actually matter to me. Sometimes sincerity just ages better than the alternative.
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Brandon Sanderson (b. 1975) — Brandon
Brandon Sanderson made an actual crowdfunding record, which is about as internet-era an achievement as it gets, and what's stuck with readers even more than the number itself is how transparent he was about where all that money was actually going, at a time when a lot of big crowdfunding campaigns online have made people justifiably suspicious of exactly that. Fantasy readers online talk about him constantly, not just for the books, though there are a lot of those, but for how generous he is toward newer, aspiring writers trying to break in behind him. That combination -- massive commercial success plus genuine transparency plus actively helping the next generation instead of guarding the gate -- is honestly rarer online than it should be, especially from somebody who's already made it. I've watched plenty of creators build a following and then get cagey the second money enters the picture. Sanderson apparently didn't. That's the kind of internet reputation that actually holds up under scrutiny, which, trust me, internet reputations rarely do.
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Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) — Scott
Sir Walter Scott is basically credited with inventing an entire genre -- the historical novel -- which is the kind of foundational cultural contribution that's easy to take for granted now because it's just, like, a whole shelf at every bookstore and library today. 'Ivanhoe' took Scottish history and culture and made it legible and interesting to readers who had zero personal connection to it, which is a specific kind of translation work I think about constantly, being the designated 'explainer kid' in my own family my whole childhood, always finding the bridge between what my community understood instinctively and what everyone else needed spelled out. Scott did that for an entire country's history, on a much bigger scale, obviously, but the instinct is recognizable to me. Representation in fiction isn't a new conversation invented by my generation online -- writers have been doing the work of making a specific culture's story feel real and worth caring about to outsiders for centuries. Scott just happened to more or less start the whole genre doing it.
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Scott Joplin (1868-1917) — Scott
Scott Joplin composed 'Maple Leaf Rag' and basically willed an entire genre into mainstream respectability through sheer craft, at a time when ragtime wasn't exactly being taken seriously by the people who got to decide what counted as 'real' music. It ended up influencing jazz, which is arguably one of the most important cultural exports this country has ever produced, and none of that trajectory was guaranteed at the time he was writing it. I think about this a lot when I see new genres coming out of internet culture right now getting written off the exact same way -- something dismissed as a novelty in the moment that ends up quietly reshaping everything that comes after it once enough people take it seriously. Joplin didn't live to see how far his influence would travel; he just kept writing music that was rigorous and joyful and undeniable on its own terms. I like being reminded that the stuff people are currently sniffing at might just be next century's foundational genre. It's happened before.
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Stephen King (b. 1947) — Stephen
Stephen King is basically the original algorithm nobody could replicate -- decades before anyone was optimizing content for engagement, the man had already figured out exactly how to make a reader unable to put a book down, and he did it dozens of times over instead of just once. What gets less attention than the horror-novel fame is that he and his wife have put real money into libraries, schools, and the arts specifically in Maine, which tells me something about where he actually thinks culture gets built -- not in some abstract national conversation, but in the very specific, unglamorous local institutions that raised him. I think about this a lot in my own community, how the internet makes everything feel national and abstract when the actual work of keeping a place alive culturally happens in a library branch or a school program that never trends anywhere. King clearly gets that distinction. He became one of the best-selling authors ever and still put resources back into the exact kind of small institutions that don't get any attention online at all.
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Ryan Reynolds (b. 1976) — Ryan
Ryan Reynolds basically figured out how to turn 'extremely online and very funny' into an actual charitable engine, which, as someone who has had her own complicated relationship with the internet reading her intentions correctly, I find genuinely impressive. He's an actor and entrepreneur who's donated proceeds from his businesses to children's hospitals and given generously to cancer research, all while keeping this reputation for good humor and marketing creativity that could easily have stayed just a personal brand thing and nothing more. It didn't. The jokes are real, but so is where the money goes, and that's not always true of famous people who are funny online. I had a video go viral for the wrong reasons once and spent a year learning how fast a joke can get read completely differently than you meant it -- so I notice, more than I used to, when somebody manages to stay funny in public for this long without it curdling into something meaner. Reynolds seems to have threaded that needle pretty well.
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Paul Newman (1925-2008) — Paul
Paul Newman founded Newman's Own on the literal principle of donating all the profits to charity, which even now, in an era where every brand claims to be 'giving back' in its marketing copy, is a genuinely rare and pretty wild business model to actually commit to. He ended up giving away hundreds of millions of dollars, including funding camps for seriously ill children, which is way more concrete and useful than a lot of celebrity philanthropy that stays mostly symbolic. I think about how much modern 'charity marketing' feels performative sometimes, a percentage here, a limited campaign there, and Newman's approach was basically the opposite — build the whole company around it and just keep doing it, quietly, for decades, without needing a viral moment to justify it. He was already an acclaimed actor, he didn't need the food company for money or fame. He built it anyway, on purpose, for the giving. That's a legacy that ages really well.
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Mary Lou Retton (b. 1968) — Mary
Mary Lou Retton's 1984 all-around gold is one of those sports moments that's basically internet-famous even though it happened decades before the internet — my mom has told me about watching it live more times than I can count. She was the first American woman to win that title, and she did it with this scrappy, joyful energy that made an entire country suddenly care about gymnastics, not just for two weeks every four years but for good. I think what gets me about her story is the timing — she was a teenager carrying an entire sport's popularity in the US on her shoulders at the Olympics, which is a wild amount of pressure to hold at that age. I was juggling three part-time jobs at nineteen and that felt like a lot; I cannot imagine doing it on a balance beam in front of the whole world. Her gold medal performance genuinely changed how many young athletes, especially girls, saw what was possible for themselves.
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William Kamkwamba (b. 1987) — William
Okay, the William Kamkwamba story genuinely gets me every time — a teenager in Malawi, during a famine, taught himself how to build a windmill out of scrap materials using library books, and ended up bringing electricity and water pumping to his family's farm. No YouTube tutorials, no online course, just actual library books and pure stubborn ingenuity. As someone who leans on the internet constantly for basically everything I learn, it's humbling to think about how much he figured out with way fewer resources than I've ever had to work with. 'The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind' turned his story into something that's inspired readers everywhere, and honestly it should — it's proof that curiosity and persistence can outperform access sometimes, even though access obviously matters too and I don't want to romanticize scarcity. I just think about him whenever I complain about slow wifi. Dude built a windmill from junk parts and a library card. Respect.
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Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) — 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 welcome mat for women. She was American, working abroad, and somehow became one of the actual leaders of Impressionism, known for these incredibly tender paintings of mothers and kids that feel more real than a lot of what her male peers were doing. I think about her whenever people act like women 'breaking into' male-dominated spaces is some brand-new internet-era struggle — no, Cassatt was doing it with a paintbrush and zero social media before women could even vote. Her paintings are still in major museums, still taught, still genuinely moving to look at, not just historically important. Sorry, I get worked up about women who had to fight for a seat at a table that should've just had a seat for them already. She earned every square inch of that canvas.
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Michael Jordan (b. 1963) — 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 two medical clinics back in his hometown of Charlotte that provide free and low-cost healthcare. That's the kind of legacy that doesn't trend the way a highlight reel does, but honestly means more. I grew up watching clips of his career on YouTube way after the fact, this whole mythologized figure, and it's kind of grounding to realize the actual adult version of that story includes just quietly funding healthcare access for people who need it. We talk so much online about legacy and 'staying humble' as buzzwords, but Jordan's version of it is just a clinic that exists because he built it. I respect that more than another highlight. Some GOATs just win games. This one also built something that outlasts the scoreboard.
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John Lennon (1940-1980) — 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, never get close to. As a member of The Beatles he already reshaped what pop music could even be, but it's the peace-anthem era of his solo career that keeps circling back into my life specifically, because I've watched that exact song get sung at rallies for refugees, including ones connected to my own family's story out of Iraq. There's something about a really simple, sincere idea — just imagine people not fighting — that cuts through decades of noise in a way a lot of more 'clever' art doesn't. I get self-conscious sometimes about liking something so earnest, but honestly, earnest and simple traveled further than ironic ever will. Lennon knew that. The crowds still singing it, hopeful, decades later, are the proof.
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Judy Garland (1922-1969) — Judy
There's genuinely no escaping Judy Garland if you were a kid anywhere near a television during the holidays — 'The Wizard of Oz' is one of those movies that just gets replayed into every generation whether you seek it out or not, and she's the reason it works at all as Dorothy. It's kind of funny to think about now, in a world of algorithm-fed content where nothing sticks around long enough to become a shared thing anymore, that this one film has somehow stayed a cultural touchstone across, what, several generations at this point. I say 'funny' but I actually mean something closer to comforting — proof that some things really do just last because they're genuinely good, not because a platform is pushing them at you. Garland built a celebrated career in both film and music beyond just that one role, obviously, but Dorothy is the one that made her permanent in a way most performers, even very good ones, never quite achieve. That's a strange kind of immortality to hand someone at a young age.
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Jane Austen (1775-1817) — Jane
I feel like people forget Jane Austen basically invented an entire genre that BookTok is still running on two hundred years later — like, 'Pride and Prejudice' is essentially the original enemies-to-lovers plot, and every romance recommendation algorithm on the planet is quietly indebted to her. It's genuinely wild that something written that long ago is still one of the most beloved, widely read books in the English language, not as some dusty assignment but as something people actually reread for fun. I remember being assigned it in high school and rolling my eyes before I'd read a single page, and then getting weirdly attached to the characters within like two chapters, which honestly annoyed me at the time. There's something kind of comforting about a story lasting that long — proof that whatever's actually good doesn't really expire, it just gets rediscovered by a new generation who thinks they found it first. I definitely thought I found it first. I did not. Neither did you, probably.
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Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) — Kathryn
Kathryn Bigelow being the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar hits different when you actually sit with how long 'first' took to happen — like, the Oscars had been around for decades before a woman won for directing, and it was 'The Hurt Locker,' a war movie, that finally did it. I think about that a lot in a very specific, personal way, because war isn't an abstract movie genre to my family, it's the reason my parents left Baghdad in 2006 and the reason I exist in Dearborn instead of somewhere else. I'm not saying Bigelow's film experience maps onto that, obviously, that would be reaching — I'm saying that watching someone tell a hard, unglamorous story about conflict and get real recognition for the craft of it, not despite the subject but because she handled it seriously, means something to me. Okay, wait, I'm getting a little too in-my-feelings for what's supposed to be a quick profile. Bottom line: 'first woman to win Best Director' should not have taken that long, and she earned every bit of it regardless.
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Diana, Princess of Wales (1961-1997) — Diana
Diana, Princess of Wales, is remembered above all for humanitarian work that included campaigning to ban landmines and pushing hard to reduce the stigma around HIV/AIDS at a time when a huge amount of the public still treated that stigma as acceptable, even normal. What gets me about her story is that she had every incentive to just enjoy the platform quietly and safely, and instead she used it on causes that were genuinely unpopular and uncomfortable to touch publicly at the time, not the easy, universally-beloved kind of charity work. I think a lot about platform and risk, having had a video go viral for the wrong reasons myself and learned firsthand how fast public opinion turns on anyone visible. Diana chose to be visible on purpose, on the hardest topics, not the safest ones. That's a much braver use of fame than most public figures, then or now, ever actually attempt, and it clearly mattered to the actual people those campaigns were meant to help.
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Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) — Steven
Steven Spielberg directed "Jaws," "E.T.," and "Schindler's List," among a dozen other films most people can quote from memory, and on top of an insane filmmaking career he also founded the USC Shoah Foundation specifically to record and preserve Holocaust survivor testimonies before those firsthand voices were gone forever. I think about testimony and memory a lot, being from a family that fled Baghdad in 2006 with stories my parents don't always want to repeat out loud, even to me, even now. There's something huge about using your biggest possible platform not to make another blockbuster but to build a permanent archive so that other people's worst history doesn't get flattened or forgotten once the generation who lived it is gone. I don't think enough people my age realize how deliberate and how expensive that kind of preservation work actually is to build and maintain. Spielberg clearly understood that some stories need infrastructure, not just attention, to actually survive.
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Roberto Baggio (b. 1967) — Roberto
Roberto Baggio winning the Ballon d'Or in 1993 and getting called one of the greatest players of his generation is one of those facts that just sits there being impressive without needing much extra commentary from me, honestly. What I find more interesting is thinking about what it takes to be the best in the world at something for one specific, recognized moment, when there are literally thousands of people worldwide trying to be exactly that at the exact same time. I catch myself comparing everything to my own chaotic three-jobs-at-once college life, which is unfair to a professional athlete operating at a completely different level of focus, and I'll actually correct that instinct here instead of forcing the comparison. Being remembered as one of the greatest of his generation, decades later, means the recognition wasn't just a good season that happened to line up with an award — it held up under everyone looking back at it since. That kind of staying power in how people remember an athlete is genuinely rare.
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Marcelo Bielsa (b. 1955) — Marcelo
Okay so Marcelo Bielsa is basically the football equivalent of that one professor whose class destroys you but somehow makes you better at the subject forever — his whole reputation is built on an intense, obsessive, attacking coaching philosophy that apparently influenced a whole generation of other coaches, which is wild when you think about how specific and demanding that kind of influence has to be to actually spread. I don't follow soccer super closely, ok wait, let me actually be accurate here — I follow it in bursts, mostly when something's trending, which is a very Gen Z way to half-know a sport. But the idea of someone being famous specifically for how hard they work and how much they demand from everyone around them tracks with basically every "work culture" discourse happening online right now, just applied to football decades before hashtags existed. Influencing that many other coaches means he wasn't just intense for the sake of it, there was something in the actual method that people kept stealing because it worked.
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Keith Richards (b. 1943) — Keith
Keith Richards co-founded The Rolling Stones and is still regarded as one of the most influential guitarists rock music has ever produced, which is wild considering how long that band has actually been together at this point, decades longer than most bands even attempt to stay functional as a unit. I'm more of a K-pop and streaming-playlist person myself, rock history isn't exactly my specialty, but even I know his riffs, the kind of guitar parts that get sampled and referenced by artists who weren't born when the originals came out. There's something impressive about a body of work staying that influential for that long, especially in an industry that usually moves on from anybody pretty quickly once the next new thing shows up. Richards clearly built something with real staying power, technically and culturally, the kind of influence that keeps showing up in music made by people two or three generations removed from when he actually recorded it. That's a rare kind of longevity, no matter what genre you're talking about.
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Craig David (b. 1981) — Craig
Craig David had massive hits like "7 Days" and "Walking Away" that basically defined a whole British R&B and garage sound in a very specific era, the kind of songs that show up unexpectedly on a throwback playlist and immediately transport you somewhere even if you weren't even alive for the original run of it, which, in my case, I mostly wasn't. I got into his stuff backward, through remixes and internet playlists years after the fact, which I think is actually pretty common for how a lot of my generation discovers older music now, not through the original release at all but through whatever algorithm happens to surface it years later. There's something a little funny about an artist building a whole career in one moment and then getting rediscovered decades later by people who found them through a completely different door than the one he originally walked through. I don't actually know that much else about his career beyond the hits, I'll be honest, but the songs themselves have held up better than I expected.
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Alan Turing (1912-1954) — Alan
Alan Turing's codebreaking work at Bletchley Park is credited with actually shortening World War II, which is an enormous, almost hard-to-process kind of impact for one person's mathematical work to have had, and he's remembered now as one of the actual founders of computer science on top of that. What gets me thinking every time I read about him is how long it took the wider world to properly credit what he did, versus how quickly the impact itself was real the moment it happened. I had my own experience with public opinion moving a lot slower than the actual truth of a situation, after a joke of mine got read completely wrong online last year and I spent months being defined by that instead of by anything else I'd actually done. Turing's story is a much heavier version of that same basic unfairness, being defined by something other than the actual substance of his work for far too long. Recognition catching up to reality shouldn't take that long, for anybody, but I'm glad his eventually did.
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Jordan Peele (b. 1979) — Jordan
Jordan Peele went from being one half of a well-known sketch comedy duo to basically reinventing socially conscious horror as a genre with Get Out and Us, which is such a wild pivot that it still surprises me a little every time I think about it. Comedy and horror actually share more structural DNA than people assume, both depend entirely on precise timing, on knowing exactly when to make an audience uncomfortable and exactly how long to hold it there, so maybe the jump wasn't as strange as it first looks from the outside. What actually gets me about his films specifically is that they use genre conventions everybody already knows to sneak in commentary that a straight drama might get too preachy delivering directly. I've watched a lot of horror that's just trying to make you jump, and it's a completely different experience watching something built that carefully, where every unsettling choice is actually doing work instead of just being loud. Peele basically proved an entire audience was hungry for that and nobody else had bothered making it yet.
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Nathaniel Rateliff (b. 1978) — Nathaniel
Nathaniel Rateliff fronts Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, and "S.O.B." is one of those songs that somehow became a genuine crossover hit despite sounding like it came straight out of an old soul revival rather than anything designed for a modern playlist algorithm. Not really my usual lane, I lean K-pop and whatever's trending on my For You page most days, but a song with that much raw, horn-driven energy cuts through no matter what genre you normally listen to, which might be the whole reason it caught on the way it did outside its expected audience. There's something to be said for music that sounds handmade in an era where a lot of what gets pushed to us is engineered to be catchy in a much more calculated way. I don't know the rest of his catalog well, but that one song has outlasted a lot of stuff that was actually designed to be more viral than it was, which feels like it should tell us something about what people are actually hungry for.
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Isaiah (8th century BC) — Isaiah
Isaiah is one of the major prophets from the Hebrew Bible, and his writings are still considered some of the most influential religious texts that exist, quoted across multiple faiths centuries and centuries after they were first written down. I didn't grow up with a ton of direct exposure to that specific tradition, my own family's background is Muslim, but there's something about prophetic writing in general, this insistence on speaking hard truths to people who'd rather not hear them, that crosses over pretty cleanly no matter which religious tradition you're coming from. My grandmother has quoted plenty of scripture at me over the years, different book entirely, same basic instinct: don't just accept things as they are if they're wrong, say something, even when it's not popular. Isaiah's writings apparently did exactly that, unpopular truths delivered anyway, and getting remembered as one of history's most significant texts for it says something about how much staying power that kind of honesty actually has.
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Caleb Landry Jones (b. 1989) — Caleb
Caleb Landry Jones has built a career on intense, unsettling performances, Get Out and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri both being movies that stuck with me way longer than I expected them to when I first watched them. Get Out especially hit different for me, honestly, not because of his specific role but because it's one of those rare horror movies that's actually about something real, using genre to say something true about race that a straight drama probably couldn't have landed as hard. I care a lot about how movies use uncomfortable subject matter responsibly instead of just for shock value, given how much media I watched growing up that got my own community's story completely wrong, and a film that uses an unsettling performance in service of something that actually means something is a totally different animal than one that's just trying to disturb you for its own sake. Jones being memorable enough in a small supporting role to stick in people's memory for years says something real about the performance itself.
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Aidan Gillen (b. 1968) — Aidan
Aidan Gillen played in two of the shows that basically defined prestige television for an entire generation of people my age, Game of Thrones and The Wire, which is a pretty wild resume to have if you think about how different those two shows actually are in tone and subject matter. I grew up on exactly that era of television, watching shows my parents didn't always fully understand the appeal of, and there's something satisfying about an actor who managed to be genuinely memorable in two completely different, equally acclaimed worlds instead of getting typecast into one. Versatility like that doesn't always get talked about as much as it should, honestly, because it's less flashy than one iconic role, but staying convincing across that much range takes real range as an actor, not just luck landing two good scripts back to back. I haven't rewatched either show recently, mostly because I don't have time between school and three jobs, but I remember exactly which scenes of his stuck with me.
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Julian Bream (1933-2020) — Julian
Julian Bream spent his career reviving interest in early music for the guitar, basically doing centuries ago what my generation does now every time we discover vinyl records or bring back some fashion trend our parents wore unironically the first time around. He's credited with getting whole audiences interested again in music that had mostly been forgotten, which takes a specific kind of patient, unglamorous work, playing something old and undervalued convincingly enough that people start caring about it again instead of dismissing it as outdated. I'll admit classical guitar isn't exactly what's playing on my phone between shifts, mostly K-pop and whatever prestige show I'm three episodes behind on, but I respect the instinct behind what Bream did, taking something people had written off as irrelevant and proving it still had something real to offer. Culture doesn't actually move in one straight line forward, no matter how much it feels that way when you're twenty. Sometimes the most interesting move is backward, done well.
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Julian of Norwich (1343-c. 1416) — Julian
Julian of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love, considered one of the first books written in English by a woman, back in the 1300s when that alone would have been an enormously unusual thing for anyone to have accomplished. I think about "firsts" a lot, honestly, being one of the first in my own family to go straight from high school into a four-year university on a scholarship I almost talked myself out of applying for, and there's a specific kind of loneliness in being first at something, doing it without a clear map of how it's supposed to go. She was an anchoress, which meant living a genuinely isolated, devoted life, and still managed to produce something that outlasted her by seven hundred years and counting. I don't know much about medieval English mysticism, I'll be honest, that's pretty far outside my usual scroll, but the basic shape of her story, quiet person, isolated circumstances, producing something that turns out to matter enormously later, is one I recognize even across seven centuries.
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Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) — Oliver
Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who wrote books, Awakenings among the most famous, that somehow made the science of the human brain read less like a textbook and more like actual stories about actual people, which sounds simple until you realize how rare that combination actually is. I've been the designated explainer in my family my whole life, translating for relatives, explaining forms, explaining America basically, and I have a real appreciation for anyone who can take something genuinely complicated and make it land for someone who has no background in it at all, without dumbing it down or losing what made it complicated in the first place. Sacks apparently did that for entire conditions most people had never heard of, treating his patients as full people with actual stories instead of case studies to be summarized in five bullet points. That's a harder skill than it sounds, and it's the whole reason I ended up leaning communications instead of something more technical myself. Making things understandable to people is its own real discipline.
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Marcus Aurelius (121-180) — Marcus
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor who apparently spent his downtime writing private notes to himself about how to be a better, calmer, more disciplined person, which is very funny to me because that's basically what half of self-help TikTok is doing now, just with worse lighting and no empire attached. His notes got collected later as Meditations and somehow became one of the most quoted philosophy books two thousand years later, still getting recycled into inspirational quote graphics by people who've never read a page of it, myself occasionally included before I actually looked into him for this. Underneath the meme-ification though, there's something genuinely steadying in there about not needing the world to go your way in order to hold yourself together, which, as someone stitching together school and three different jobs at once, I actually needed to sit with for a second instead of scrolling past. It's strange that advice from a Roman emperor two millennia ago about staying calm under pressure still basically works. I guess some problems just don't go out of style.
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Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) — Beatrice
Beatrice Webb co-founded the London School of Economics and helped shape the modern welfare state as a social reformer and economist, which is honestly the kind of institution-building most activists, myself included on a way smaller scale, only dream about actually pulling off instead of just posting about it. Building something that structurally outlasts you — an actual school, an actual policy framework — is a different and much harder achievement than just having correct opinions about what's wrong with a system. I get loud about gig-economy instability and scheduling apps that cut hours without warning because I've genuinely lived it, three jobs deep, but Webb's story is a reminder that the real work is turning that anger into something that changes the actual structure for people after you, not just naming the problem clearly. That's honestly the harder, less immediately satisfying part, and it's the part I'm still figuring out how to do at nineteen instead of just being right online about it, which frankly comes a lot easier.
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Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) — Marguerite
Marguerite Duras wrote "The Lover," an autobiographical novel that won the Prix Goncourt, and from what I understand she was also a filmmaker on top of being one of France's most significant authors, which is a genuinely intimidating amount of range for one person. Writing autobiographically about your own most difficult, formative experiences and having it become recognized as literature instead of just, like, oversharing, takes a specific kind of nerve I actually think about a lot as someone who writes pretty openly online myself, sometimes to a fault. There's a version of "The Lover" energy in a lot of what my generation does now, honestly, just compressed into shorter, more disposable formats — the impulse to turn your own hardest, most personal material into something other people can actually learn from is the same impulse, whether it's a Prix Goncourt novel or a video. Duras clearly figured out how to do that with real craft and staying power, not just raw exposure. That's the part that's actually hard.
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Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) — Simone
Simone de Beauvoir wrote "The Second Sex," which is basically foundational for modern feminist thought — like, an actual root text a huge amount of later thinking grows directly out of, the kind of book you cite even now without fully realizing how much of the vocabulary you're using came from her first. I'm taking communications and pre-law right now and keep running into her ideas secondhand in readings that never even bother crediting the original source anymore, which says something about how deeply absorbed her framework has become. There's something both cool and a little unsettling about a thinker becoming so foundational that people forget she's the reason they're even asking these questions in this particular way. I get genuinely fired up about structural stuff — gig work, scheduling algorithms, whose labor counts and whose doesn't — and de Beauvoir was doing that same kind of structural thinking about gender back when almost nobody with real academic standing was taking it seriously at all.
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Serena Ryder (b. 1981) — Serena
Serena Ryder is a Canadian singer-songwriter with that soulful, kind of raw voice, Juno-Award-winning albums to back it up, and she's also been really open publicly about mental health struggles alongside the music career, which honestly matters to me more than the awards do. I deal with anxiety and the occasional panic attack myself, out loud, online, because I think staying quiet about it just makes other people feel more alone with it, and it seems like Ryder's been doing a version of that same thing through her music for years. There's something about a soulful voice specifically, not a polished, over-produced one, that lands different when you know the person behind it has actually been through something real and isn't performing a persona. I think my generation talks about mental health way more openly than the ones before us did, sometimes almost too casually, not gonna lie, but artists like Ryder who were doing it honestly before it was a whole trend deserve real credit for that. Juno Awards are nice. Being that honest publicly, for years, is harder.
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Bianca Balti (b. 1984) — Bianca
Bianca Balti has had a genuinely decades-long career as an Italian supermodel, appearing in campaigns for major fashion houses well past the point where the industry usually discards people, especially women, for being "too experienced." I think about longevity a lot given how unstable and short-cycle basically every job I've ever had has been — three jobs at once, none of them permanent, all of them one bad scheduling week from falling apart. A career that actually sustains across decades in an industry famous for chewing people up fast is honestly kind of remarkable and doesn't get talked about as its own achievement, separate from the glamorous surface stuff. Fashion specifically has a brutal churn rate, and staying relevant and employed in it long-term requires a kind of resilience that isn't captured in a single magazine cover. I don't know the specifics of how she's managed it, but "still working, still respected, decades in" is honestly its own quiet form of success that deserves more credit than the campaigns themselves.
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Greta Garbo (1905-1990) — Greta
Greta Garbo was this legendary, almost mythically luminous screen presence during Hollywood's golden age, the kind of old-school movie star whose whole aura I only really know through clips my mom shows me, not through actually growing up with her the way older generations did. There's something about that era of stardom — mysterious, controlled, way less "extremely online" than literally everything now, myself very much included — that feels almost impossible to imagine existing today. I catch myself getting nostalgic for a version of fame I never actually lived through, which is a very internet-generation thing to do, romanticizing an era specifically because it had none of the exposure ours has. Garbo reportedly craved privacy in a way that would be basically unachievable now, and I think about that a lot given how much of my own life, including a viral moment I really did not enjoy, ended up publicly dissected against my will. Sometimes the old mystery sounds genuinely restful.
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Empress Matilda (1102-1167) — Matilda
Empress Matilda spent years fighting for her right to the English throne back in the 1100s, and her claim actually set important precedents in English constitutional history even though she never fully secured the crown herself in her own lifetime. That's such a specific kind of frustrating I relate to way more than I expected to — doing the actual work, laying the actual groundwork, and having someone else technically inherit the "win" later. It's basically medieval scheduling-app energy: you put in the hours, the system reroutes the credit somewhere else. My own family's story is about my parents fleeing Baghdad in 2006 and rebuilding from nothing here in Dearborn, so I have a lot of respect, generationally, for people whose fight matters even when they personally don't get to see the full payoff. Matilda's persistence mattered structurally even without a personal victory lap, which is honestly a more mature kind of legacy than most people, myself included at nineteen, are built to accept gracefully.
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Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) — Florence
Okay so Florence Nightingale basically invented modern nursing AND was one of the first people to use actual statistics to prove her sanitary reforms were saving lives during the Crimean War, which honestly reads like the origin story of someone who'd have an insane LinkedIn today — "founder, healthcare + data viz, 1850s." I say that a little jokingly but I mean it as a real compliment; using cold, hard numbers to force people in power to take hygiene seriously, when the existing system genuinely did not want to hear it, takes a specific kind of stubbornness I recognize from watching my own community try to get institutions to actually listen. Countless lives were saved because she refused to let "that's just how it's always been done" win the argument. I think about that a lot with how slow institutions still are to change even when the data's staring them in the face. Nightingale basically had to fight bureaucracy itself as much as disease, and honestly, bureaucracy might have been the harder opponent.
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Florence Welch (b. 1986) — Florence
Florence Welch fronts Florence and the Machine and has this genuinely theatrical, almost otherworldly stage presence that I don't think translates fully even through a phone screen, though god knows I've tried to capture it in a video for my followers more than once. That powerful voice paired with the whole dramatic performance style feels like someone who fully committed to a specific artistic vision instead of chasing whatever was algorithmically trending that year, which honestly takes guts in a music industry that rewards the opposite. I catch myself, writing this, being a little too casual about someone whose musicianship is genuinely serious — let me actually sit with that for a second, because reducing "powerful voice and theatrical presence" to just vibes undersells real vocal control and stagecraft built over years. There's something in her fully-committed, unapologetically dramatic persona that I find kind of inspiring as someone still figuring out my own voice, literally and otherwise, across three different part-time jobs and a communications degree.
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Princess Eugenie (b. 1990) — Eugenie
Princess Eugenie's known for her charity work, including scoliosis awareness and anti-human-trafficking efforts, and honestly the second one is the part that actually stops me, because trafficking and exploitation are things I've read enough about, especially how misinformation and predatory targeting work against vulnerable people, that I can't just skim past the phrase 'anti-human-trafficking efforts' the way I might have a few years ago. My own community got hit hard by disinformation after 2001 and again after 2006, different context obviously, but it taught me young how easily bad information and bad actors can specifically target people who are already vulnerable and least equipped to fight back. I don't know the specifics of her advocacy work day to day, I'll be honest, that's outside what I actually know here. But choosing that cause, out of all the causes available to someone with her platform, at least suggests somebody's paying attention to a genuinely serious problem instead of picking the easiest, most photogenic one available. That's worth something, even from a distance.
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Lorraine Kelly (b. 1959) — Lorraine
Lorraine Kelly has hosted British morning television for decades, which is honestly kind of wild to think about in an era where most on-camera personalities burn out or get replaced within a couple of years — like, imagine being the consistent, familiar face people wake up to for that long, before livestreaming and influencer culture turned 'being on camera constantly' into something anyone can technically attempt from their bedroom. There's something almost old-school reliable about a career like that, a Scottish television presenter and journalist just showing up, morning after morning, decade after decade, building actual trust with an audience the slow way instead of chasing a viral clip. I catch myself being kind of dismissive of 'traditional media' sometimes, like it's obviously being replaced by whatever's on my phone, and then I read a career like Kelly's and have to admit that consistency and trust built over decades is a genuinely different, and maybe more durable, kind of success than a single viral moment ever produces. Okay, fine, the old formats got some things right.
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Claire Tomalin (b. 1933) — Claire
Claire Tomalin is a biographer, which honestly might be one of the more thankless jobs in publishing if you think about it — you're not the famous one, you're the person who spends years in someone else's letters and archives trying to get their whole life right, on their behalf, long after they can weigh in on whether you nailed it. She's written prize-winning books on Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and is considered one of the most respected literary biographers of her generation, which is a very specific kind of expertise, distinct from just being a great writer generally. I have a habit of over-explaining context for people, it's basically an occupational hazard of being the designated translator kid in my family my whole childhood, so I have a weird amount of respect for someone whose entire career is built on getting context exactly right on someone else's behalf. That's patience I genuinely don't have yet. Maybe by the time I'm through law school I'll understand the appeal of sitting with one subject's whole life that long and that carefully.
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Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) — Audrey
Everyone knows Audrey Hepburn from 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and 'Roman Holiday,' the iconic old-Hollywood stuff, but what actually gets me is that she spent a big chunk of her life after that as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador doing humanitarian work. Like, she had the fame locked in already, she didn't need to do anything else, and she chose to spend real years of her life on that instead. I don't know her personal reasons, obviously, I'm not going to pretend I do, but there's something about someone using an already-secure platform to actually show up for people in crisis, rather than just attaching their name to a cause for a photo, that hits differently when your own family has been on the other side of that kind of aid at some point. My parents fled Baghdad in 2006; I grew up hearing about which organizations actually helped and which just showed up for the cameras. I have no idea which category her work fell into specifically, but the years-long commitment part, at least, says something real.
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Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) — Charlotte
Everyone treats 'Jane Eyre' like a stuffy old classic you're forced to read, but honestly it's kind of unhinged in the best way if you actually pay attention — like, the emotional intensity in that book would absolutely go viral in fic form today, no notes. Charlotte Brontë wrote one of the most influential and beloved novels in the English language, and it's wild to me that something written under those constraints, in that era, still hits as hard as it does for readers who weren't born anywhere near that world. I think what actually gets me is imagining how much had to be channeled into just the writing, because there wasn't exactly a version of Brontë posting her thoughts online or venting to a group chat the way I would've. All that intensity had one outlet, and she made it count in a way that's still being read two centuries later. That's kind of the whole appeal of writing something real, honestly — it doesn't need an algorithm to survive, it just needs to actually mean something to somebody.
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Olivia Colman (b. 1974) — Olivia
I feel like every prestige streaming show I've gotten into over the last few years has had Olivia Colman quietly stealing scenes in it somewhere — 'The Crown,' 'The Favourite,' that whole run — and honestly her whole appeal is that she never seems to be performing 'award-winning actress,' she just seems like a real person who happens to be devastatingly good at this. That's the Academy Award-winning, British-actress-known-for-warmth-and-versatility résumé for you, and I think the warmth part is actually the underrated skill, not just a personality bonus. Anyone can play cold and calculating and get called intense; it's harder to be genuinely warm on screen and still be taken seriously across comedy and drama both. I catch myself doing this thing where I compare every actress to whatever meme format she'd fit into, and honestly Colman resists that a little, which I actually respect — she doesn't read as a 'type,' she just reads as good. Sometimes the highest compliment is that someone doesn't fit neatly into the box you were about to put them in.
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Bonnie Blair (b. 1964) — Bonnie
Bonnie Blair won five Olympic gold medals in speed skating, which puts her among the most decorated athletes in Winter Olympics history, and also makes me think about how insane it is that we expect people to peak, medal, and retire gracefully all before 30. Five golds is not luck, that's years of 5 a.m. practices nobody posted about. I don't skate — my only 'training regimen' is whatever fitness trend TikTok convinces me to try for exactly one month — but I respect discipline that specific and that repeated. It's the kind of achievement that looks effortless from the outside and is actually just relentless, unglamorous repetition, which, relatable, minus the gold medals. There's a version of my own life in that too: nobody sees the three jobs, they just see whichever five minutes I posted. Blair's medals are proof the boring, invisible part of the work is the actual work. I find that oddly comforting when my own invisible parts feel like they're taking forever to add up to anything.
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Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949) — Bonnie
Bonnie Raitt has one of those decades-spanning careers that makes you realize 'blowing up' and 'having a real career' are actually two different things. She's been doing soulful blues-rock and winning Grammys for so long that she basically outlasted every trend that tried to make her irrelevant. I grew up on whatever was algorithmically fed to me, so an artist whose whole thing is patience and craft over virality is kind of a foreign concept, and also kind of aspirational. It's very different from my own work life, which is three jobs stitched together with zero guarantee any of them last past the next scheduling app update. But I like that Raitt's story isn't about one big moment — it's about staying good at something for a really long time, through changing tastes, changing decades, changing everything. That's the kind of longevity that doesn't trend, it just quietly becomes legendary. I'll take that lesson into whatever unstable career I end up cobbling together myself.
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Saint Monica (331-387) — Monica
Saint Monica gets remembered, centuries later, mostly for one thing: she didn't give up on her son, even when it took years and years for that devotion to look like it was going anywhere. There's something almost internet-unfriendly about that kind of patience — no updates, no visible progress, just showing up for someone for decades until it finally mattered. My own family is big on faith and even bigger on not giving up on people, especially the ones who take the long way around, so this tracks for me. I think a lot about my grandparents' generation, how much quiet, undocumented persistence went into just getting us here, into being the reason any of us get to have a normal Tuesday in Dearborn. Monica didn't have social media to prove any of it happened. She just kept at it, and it became enough of a story that people are still telling it, what, over a thousand years later. I'd like to be remembered for something that patient someday.
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Marina Abramovic (b. 1946) — Marina
Marina Abramovic has spent decades doing performance art that is, frankly, built entirely on endurance — sitting still for hours, letting a room full of strangers just look at her, turning discomfort into the whole point. As someone who once had a video go viral for the wrong reasons and had to sit, publicly, with people's opinions of me at eighteen, I have a weird amount of respect for someone who does that on purpose, as art, for a living. She's one of the most influential figures in contemporary art now, which took a long time and a lot of pieces most people never saw. It makes me think about how much of anyone's 'iconic moment' is actually the tip of years of unglamorous, unwatched practice. I didn't choose my internet moment, she chose hers, over and over, which honestly sounds harder. Anyway, I respect anyone whose whole career is basically staring down an audience and refusing to flinch. That's a skill I'm still working on, mostly off-camera.
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Rita Moreno (b. 1931) — Rita
Rita Moreno did the EGOT — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, one of the very few actual humans to pull off all four — and she didn't do it in some tidy five-year sprint, she did it over the course of an entire long career. That patience is honestly wild to me at 19, when everything I do feels like it needs to pay off by next semester or it doesn't count. My family didn't hand me any four-award-collection blueprint either; we've mostly been figuring things out one unstable paycheck at a time since my parents got here from Baghdad. But there's something reassuring about a career built in decades instead of a viral week — no cap, most of what actually lasts wasn't built to trend. Moreno's been part of American entertainment for so long she basically watched the industry's whole personality change around her and still kept working, kept being good. I like people who play the long game and still turn out to be the most interesting person in the room. That's the energy I'm chasing, eventually, hopefully, after law school.
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Bernard Hopkins (b. 1965) — Bernard
Okay, I need everyone to sit with this for a second: Bernard Hopkins was already collecting Social Security age-adjacent respect by the time he became the oldest fighter ever to hold a widely recognized world title, well into his late forties. In an era where the internet declares you washed at 25, that's almost an act of defiance. I think about this a lot when I'm scrolling past 'it's too late for you' content between shifts — still winning, still showing up, decades in. There's something very grounding about a guy who apparently didn't get the memo that your best years have an expiration date. I don't box, obviously, my cardio is TikTok fitness challenges and running for the bus between two jobs, but I get the stubbornness. Longevity like that isn't a highlight reel, it's a thousand unglamorous Tuesdays nobody filmed. Anyway. Respect to a man old enough to be somebody's cool uncle, still in the ring, still winning titles history didn't expect him to win.
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Warren Buffett (b. 1930) — Warren
Warren Buffett pledging the vast majority of his fortune to philanthropy is the detail that actually gets my attention here, way more than the investing genius everyone already talks about constantly. I've watched enough personal-finance content thanks to a friend who's genuinely evangelical about index funds to know that "the Oracle of Omaha" gets treated almost like a meme in that world, half-joking, half-worshipped, but the philanthropic pledge is the part that doesn't get memed nearly as much, probably because giving away most of an enormous fortune is a lot less fun to quote-tweet than a clever investing rule. I'm someone who thinks about money anxiously, because I've had to be, working three jobs through college with basically no safety net, so it's genuinely hard for me to imagine having so much that giving most of it away is even a real decision on the table. That gap in experience is exactly why I try not to be too glib about wealth I've never had, but the choice to redirect that much of it deliberately still seems worth real respect.
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Warren Moon (b. 1956) — Warren
Warren Moon being the first Black quarterback inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame is one of those facts that should not still feel as recent as it does, and it says a lot about structural barriers in football specifically that his whole career had to route through the CFL first before the NFL fully made room for him. I think about scheduling apps that cut my hours without warning and I get genuinely angry about instability I can at least eventually escape; Moon had to build an entire alternate path in a different country's league just to eventually get the recognition he'd clearly already earned. That's not the same category of unfairness as gig work, obviously, and I don't want to flatten the two things into being equivalent just because they both involve barriers, but the underlying pattern of someone having to work twice as hard for the same recognition feels familiar to me regardless of the specific field. Setting records across two leagues on top of all that makes the achievement even harder to argue with.
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Howard Hughes (1905-1976) — Howard
Howard Hughes setting multiple flight speed records while also working as an engineer and a filmmaker is genuinely the most "main character energy" resume I've come across doing this project, and I mean that as a real compliment, not just an internet joke, because succeeding at that level in aviation and film simultaneously requires being obsessively good at two completely unrelated fields at once. I don't know enough about early aviation history to speak to the technical side with any real authority, so I'll be honest about that limit instead of pretending otherwise. What I find interesting is how rare that specific combination is even now — most people who are extremely online and extremely talented pick one lane and stay in it, and Hughes apparently just refused to. Advancing American aviation technology while also being a notable figure in filmmaking during the same era is the kind of range that would absolutely break the algorithm if it happened today, in a good way.
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Albert Pujols (b. 1980) — Albert
Albert Pujols being a likely future Hall of Famer is honestly the less interesting half of his story to me — his foundation supporting people with Down syndrome and communities back in the Dominican Republic is the part that actually sticks with me, probably because I grew up watching my own family send whatever they could spare back to people who needed it more, just at a much, much smaller scale than a professional athlete's foundation obviously operates at. There's something about immigrant and first-generation success stories where the money starts flowing backward toward home the second there's any to spare, and it happens so consistently across totally different countries and totally different fields that I don't think it's a coincidence, I think it's just what gratitude looks like when it has actual resources behind it. Building that kind of sustained charitable structure, on top of maintaining an elite baseball career for that many years, means the commitment was real and ongoing, not just a nice line in a press release somewhere.
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Arthur Ashe (1943-1993) — Arthur
Arthur Ashe is one of those names where the sports achievement — first Black man to win both Wimbledon and the US Open — is honestly already a huge deal on its own, but then he used the platform afterward to become a genuine global voice for civil rights, education, and AIDS awareness, which turns the whole story into something bigger than tennis entirely. I think about that a lot with people from marginalized backgrounds who break through somewhere first — there's this unfair extra weight where you're expected to then speak for everybody after you, and Ashe apparently didn't just accept that weight, he actively built a second, meaningful career out of it. That's not a small thing to take on voluntarily. My own family's story is about displacement and rebuilding somewhere new, so I have a real soft spot for anyone who takes a hard-won personal breakthrough and turns it outward toward other people instead of just keeping it for themselves. Ashe clearly did both, the winning and the giving back, at a genuinely serious level.
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June Carter Cash (1929-2003) — June
June Carter Cash being a pillar of the actual Carter Family musical dynasty is one of those facts that recontextualizes basically all of American country music once you actually sit with it — like, there's a direct lineage running through her into a huge chunk of what we consider 'classic' American music today. I'm not deep into country generally, that's more my grandfather's lane, but the idea of carrying a family's entire musical legacy forward while also being genuinely, distinctly funny and warm in your own right is a specific kind of pressure I can respect. My family carries its own weight of expectation, being 'the translator kid' for relatives my whole childhood taught me plenty about representing something bigger than just yourself. She apparently did that with grace and actual wit intact, instead of getting flattened by the dynasty part of it. Anyway, I have a newfound appreciation for anyone who inherits a legacy that heavy and still manages to make it feel like their own thing too.
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Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) — Pearl
Pearl S. Buck won both a Nobel and a Pulitzer, mostly known for The Good Earth, but the part that actually got me was that she spent her life advocating for children's welfare beyond just the writing — like, she used the platform for something real instead of just collecting the accolades and moving on, which happens with a lot of famous authors honestly. I think a lot about how people with a big platform choose to spend it, probably because I watched one bad joke of mine get taken out of context and blow up for the wrong reasons last year, and had to sit with what it actually means to have any kind of public voice at all, even a small, temporary one. She had a real one and used it to actually help kids, across a career and a life that spanned a lot of upheaval. Anyway, I clearly need to actually read The Good Earth at some point instead of just knowing the vibes of it secondhand — adding it to the list, for real this time.
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Edith Head (1897-1981) — Edith
Okay, eight Academy Awards for costume design is an absolutely unhinged number and I feel like Edith Head does not get talked about enough compared to directors and actors from the same era, even though half of what makes those old movies so iconic visually is literally her work. Like, you know an outfit is from a specific golden-age Hollywood movie because of the silhouette alone, and that's her doing, quietly, film after film, for decades. It's kind of the classic thing where the person actually building the aesthetic that everyone remembers gets way less credit than the people standing in front of the camera wearing it. I do a lot of freelance video editing between my other jobs and I think about this constantly — how much invisible craft goes into anything that looks effortless on screen. Anyway if you've ever described an old movie as 'so elegant' without knowing why, there's a solid chance the actual answer is Edith Head, and more people should just know her name honestly.
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Constance Wu (b. 1982) — Constance
Constance Wu her lead roles in Crazy Rich Asians and on Fresh Off the Boat hit different for people like me who grew up basically never seeing anyone who looked like our families on screen — like, I remember exactly where I was when Fresh Off the Boat premiered because it felt genuinely rare, not just nice-to-have rare. She's been vocal about wanting more Asian American representation in Hollywood, and I get why that matters so much beyond just 'seeing yourself,' it's about who gets to tell which stories and who's stuck being the sidekick forever. My family's whole experience is filtered through being the ones explaining ourselves to everyone else, so I have a lot of feelings about representation as a concept generally, maybe too many feelings honestly. Anyway I'm not going to pretend I know every detail of her career, but the impact of those two shows on an entire generation of kids who finally saw something familiar is real and I don't think people give that enough credit.
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Franklin Thomas (1934-2021) — Franklin
Okay so Franklin Thomas became the Ford Foundation's first Black president and spent decades doing actual, structural work on urban renewal and philanthropy, which is basically the opposite of the internet-clout version of 'giving back' we see now where somebody posts a check for five seconds. This guy was doing generational infrastructure work, the kind that doesn't trend but actually changes whether a neighborhood has a future. I grew up hearing my parents talk about what it took just to get a fair shot after leaving Baghdad, and there's something about people who use real institutional power to widen the door for others that gets me every time, no matter what era they're from. It's easy to be cynical about big foundations doing PR-flavored charity, but reading about the actual scope of what he did, this feels like the real thing, not the performance of it. Anyway — going to go feel inadequate about my three-jobs schedule compared to a guy who restructured entire foundations. Respect, though. Genuinely.
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Milton Berle (1908-2002) — 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 first people to be famous for being good at a brand-new medium nobody had figured out the rules for yet. That's such an early-internet-influencer energy when you think about it: figuring out a platform in real time, with no playbook, while everyone's watching you make it up as you go. I spend a lot of my own time thinking about how content and platforms shape who gets to be a household name, so a guy who did that with literal television feels like an ancestor of the whole mess I've grown up inside. He didn't have analytics or comment sections roasting him nightly, though — just live TV and millions of people deciding, together, in real time, that he was funny. That's a pressure I genuinely don't think I could survive.
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Clarence Clemons (1942-2011) — 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 sound everyone recognizes even if they can't always place the name. I didn't grow up on classic rock, my playlists skew K-pop and whatever video essay algorithm currently has me in its grip, but there's something universal about a guy whose instrument became inseparable from an entire band's identity. That's not luck, that's someone showing up and being exactly, unmistakably himself inside somebody else's spotlight, for years, and getting remembered for it anyway. I think about that a lot in my own patchwork of jobs — how you can be essential to something without ever being the headline. Clemons apparently made peace with being the unforgettable supporting sound instead of the frontman, and honestly, that takes its own kind of confidence I'm still working on.
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Earl Warren (1891-1974) — 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 changed what fairness looked like on paper. I think about this stuff a lot, probably more than the average sophomore, because I'm pre-law specifically so I can end up somewhere useful for people who get steamrolled by systems that were never built with them in mind. My own community has seen what it looks like when the law and public opinion don't protect you, so a guy who used real institutional power to expand who counted as protected means something concrete to me, not abstract. It's easy to be cynical about institutions right now; it's harder, and more useful, to remember that they've occasionally been bent toward something better by people willing to actually do the unglamorous work inside them. That's the version of 'making it' I'm quietly aiming for, eventually, once I'm done juggling three jobs and a syllabus.
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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) — 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 direction of modern literature and art for decades after. I think about this every time I see people dunk on 'extremely online' culture as somehow less legitimate than older forms of intellectual community — turns out people have always needed a central hub where the interesting people gather and argue and influence each other, it's just the format that changes. My whole generation is extremely online and gets mocked for it constantly, but apparently a room full of writers and painters talking too much and influencing each other's work is just... how culture has always actually moved. Anyway, I have a newfound respect for salons as the original group chat, and for Stein specifically as apparently one of history's great chaotic-good conveners of talented, difficult people.
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Hilda Solis (b. 1957) — 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 who's currently stitching together school and three different part-time jobs with scheduling apps that cut my hours with zero warning. It's genuinely rare to see someone reach that level of institutional power and then spend it on the actual unglamorous stuff — labor protections, environmental justice — instead of just symbolic representation and a nice photo. I think about this a lot given my own summer fellowship being the first time I've had the luxury of just one job at a time in years; the instability itself shapes how you read everybody else's story, honestly. Solis clearly understood the instability from real angles and then used real power to try to fix pieces of it structurally. That's the version of representation that actually changes conditions for people instead of just looking good, and I don't think that gets said about her enough.
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Bertha Benz (1849-1944) — Bertha
Bertha Benz basically drove off in 1888 to prove her husband's invention actually worked, without permission, essentially inventing the first road trip and single-handedly saving the automobile's reputation while everyone else was skeptical it would ever be practical. That is such a specific kind of main-character energy — nobody believed the product, so she just went and became the proof of concept herself, on unpaved roads, in a dress, in the 1800s. I use AI tools constantly for school and content stuff and I'm mostly optimistic about new technology in general, but I always think about the people who had to do the actual, physically risky work of proving something new could be trusted before everyone else was allowed to be casually impressed by it later. Bertha Benz did that literally, on wheels, over actual mountains, with zero roadside assistance obviously. History mostly remembers her husband's name on the car, but she's the one who put the whole invention's credibility on the line first.
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Norma Kamali (b. 1945) — Norma
Norma Kamali basically shaped American sportswear for decades with designs that were actually body-positive before that was even a phrase people used casually, which feels like being ahead of a conversation the rest of the culture took like forty extra years to catch up to. I'm very online, obviously, so I see a lot of brands now performing body positivity as a marketing angle, and it's kind of refreshing to read about someone who was apparently doing the real, substantive version of it decades before it became a hashtag. Fashion history isn't usually my thing, I'm more of a K-pop-and-prestige-TV person if I'm being honest, but there's something satisfying about learning that a trend everyone treats as recent actually has real roots going way back, built by someone who just quietly kept doing the work while the culture eventually caught up to her. Anyway, respect to somebody who was doing the substance of a thing decades before everyone else discovered the hashtag for it.
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A. C. Gilbert (1884-1961) — Gilbert
A pole vaulter who won Olympic gold before then goes and invents the Erector Set is such a wild career pivot that I had to read it twice — like, imagine peaking athletically and then deciding your actual legacy is going to be a toy that gets kids into engineering for generations. That's such a specific kind of confidence, believing your second act could matter more than your first, gold medal and all. I think about pivots a lot given how my own resume is basically a patchwork of whatever job didn't fall through that month, though obviously my pivots are less 'invent a beloved children's toy' and more 'the mall cut my hours again.' Still, there's something genuinely inspiring about someone refusing to be defined by the thing they were already famous for. A.C. Gilbert apparently decided that getting other kids excited about how things work was worth more to him long-term than resting on an Olympic medal, and generations of future engineers are somehow downstream of that decision. Wild legacy, honestly.