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 5, 2026
Owen Hargreaves — Owen
Owen Hargreaves never got to be the one position, the one specialty everybody built a highlight reel around — he was the guy who could slot into wherever the team needed him, tactically disciplined in midfield, doing…
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June 5, 2026
Owen Wilson — Owen
Owen Wilson made a whole career out of looking like he wasn't trying very hard, which, coming from a coach, I recognize immediately as one of the harder disguises to actually pull off. That loose, easygoing comic…
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June 4, 2026
Gabriel Byrne — Gabriel
Gabriel Byrne built a career that's lasted across genres most actors never manage to survive both of — the tense ensemble crime of The Usual Suspects and the quiet, almost unbearably intimate therapy-office drama of…
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June 4, 2026
Gabriel García Márquez — Gabriel
Gabriel García Márquez wrote about a family that stretched across a hundred years in one town, all those generations tangled up together, and I think that's why the book stuck with people the way it did — most…
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June 4, 2026
Gabriel Iglesias — Gabriel
Gabriel Iglesias has Netflix specials and arena tours, and I have a handful of open mics where the bartender was my biggest fan for exactly one Tuesday in 2022, so let's just say we're at different stages of the same…
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June 3, 2026
Oliver Hardy — Oliver
Oliver Hardy, half of Laurel and Hardy, made his living doing physical comedy that didn't need a single dirty joke or a big special-effects budget to get a whole theater full of mill workers and their families laughing…
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June 3, 2026
Oliver Sacks — 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…
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June 3, 2026
Oliver Stone — Oliver
Oliver Stone built a career on movies that don't look away from hard, complicated history, Platoon and JFK among the ones people still argue about decades later, and there's something in that instinct I recognize from…
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June 2, 2026
Marcus Aurelius — 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…
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June 2, 2026
Marcus Rashford — Marcus
Marcus Rashford is a genuinely excellent footballer for Manchester United and England, but the thing that actually made me tear up reading about him — postpartum hormones or not, I'll own it — was the campaign he…
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June 2, 2026
Marcus Samuelsson — Marcus
Marcus Samuelsson's whole story reads like a scouting report you'd want to believe but almost don't: Ethiopian-born, raised in Sweden, and now running one of Harlem's most respected restaurants while actively pulling up…
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June 1, 2026
Vincent Cassel — Vincent
Vincent Cassel has spent his career moving between raw, socially charged French films like La Haine and glossier international projects like Black Swan, and visually those two worlds couldn't look more different — one…