Good Names, Good People
A running, dated feed of short, positive profiles of real people — historic and present-day — who share popular names. New posts appear here on a regular schedule; every name's own detail page always shows the full set of profiles researched for it.
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June 9, 2026
Jackson Pollock — Jackson
I'll be honest, the first time I saw a photo of a Jackson Pollock painting I thought the same thing half the internet still says: my kid could do that. But then I read a little more and changed my mind, the way I…
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June 9, 2026
Jackson Wang — Jackson
Jackson Wang went from being in GOT7, one of the biggest K-pop groups of the last decade, to building a genuinely successful solo international career, which in tech terms is basically like leaving a successful startup…
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June 8, 2026
Dominic Thiem — Dominic
Dominic Thiem spent years as one of the best tennis players in the world without quite breaking through at the very top of a major, losing finals to guys built like immovable objects, before he finally won the US Open…
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June 8, 2026
Dominic West — Dominic
Dominic West played a lead role in The Wire, which more than one person's told me is the best show ever made about what actually happens to a city when the institutions that are supposed to hold it together start…
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June 8, 2026
Saint Dominic — Dominic
Saint Dominic founded the Dominican Order in the early thirteenth century, and I find institutional lineages nearly as fascinating to trace as family ones — an idea, planted by one determined priest eight hundred…
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June 7, 2026
Francis Xavier — Xavier
Francis Xavier helped found the Society of Jesus and then spent the rest of his life carrying his faith clear across the world to places that had never heard of it before, at a time when traveling that far meant real…
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June 7, 2026
Xavier Dolan — Xavier
Xavier Dolan became one of the youngest directors ever to win a major award at Cannes, which is the kind of thing that makes my stomach flip a little in sympathy, honestly, because I remember what it felt like starting…
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June 7, 2026
Xavier Woods — Xavier
I will confess that professional wrestling is not a world I have any natural fluency in, and my first instinct on reading about Xavier Woods was the sort of mild, reflexive condescension I am trying, with limited…
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June 6, 2026
Julian Bream — 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…
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June 6, 2026
Julian Lennon — Julian
Julian Lennon built his own recording career and also grew up carrying one of the most famous surnames in music history, which strikes me as a uniquely specific kind of pressure — imagine every single review of your…
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June 6, 2026
Julian of Norwich — 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…
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June 5, 2026
Owen Chamberlain — Owen
Owen Chamberlain won a Nobel Prize in physics for co-discovering the antiproton, which is about as far outside my wheelhouse as you can get — I spent thirty-four years reading gauges and pressure levels on a mill…