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 1, 2026
Vincent Price — Vincent
Vincent Price built his fame on horror films, that unmistakable voice draped over decades of gleeful menace, but the detail that actually delighted me was learning he was also a serious, knowledgeable art collector,…
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June 1, 2026
Vincent van Gogh — Vincent
Vincent van Gogh is, of course, one of the towering names in art history now, The Starry Night and the sunflowers reproduced on everything from museum totes to dormitory walls, and it would be easy, in my usual…
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May 31, 2026
Theo James — Theodore
Theo James built his early career on Divergent, the kind of big, glossy franchise built for teenagers, and then quietly reshaped his image years later with The White Lotus, a show with a totally different color and tone…
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May 31, 2026
Theodor Seuss Geisel — Theodore
Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss to about every kid who's ever grown up in this country, built a career on rhymes simple enough for a five-year-old and truths sneaky enough that grown adults are still finding new meaning…
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May 31, 2026
Theodore Roosevelt — Theodore
Theodore Roosevelt is the reason so many of our national parks exist today, and I've always thought that was one of the finest things a president ever did with his power — not spending it all on himself, but setting…
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May 30, 2026
Hugo Grotius — Hugo
Hugo Grotius gets called the father of international law, which sounds like a fancy title for a guy from the 1600s, but when you actually think about what that means, he was one of the first people trying to write down…
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May 30, 2026
Hugo Lloris — Hugo
Being the captain of a team isn't the flashiest job on the field — the strikers get the highlight reels, the goalkeeper mostly gets remembered for what goes wrong — but Hugo Lloris built his whole career on being…
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May 30, 2026
Hugo Weaving — Hugo
Hugo Weaving has one of those voices that could probably sell you anything, and he's used it across two of the most iconic franchises there are — The Matrix and Lord of the Rings — playing characters that couldn't…
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May 29, 2026
Louis Armstrong — Louis
Louis Armstrong didn't just play the trumpet well, he changed what trumpet playing and singing were even allowed to sound like, and that's the kind of innovation I try to get my players to understand: greatness usually…
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May 29, 2026
Louis Braille — Louis
Louis Braille lost his sight as a young boy, and instead of that being the end of what anybody expected from him, he grew up and invented an entire system of raised dots that let blind folks read and write for…
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May 29, 2026
Louis Pasteur — Louis
You don't get a highlight reel for the disease that never happened, and that's basically Louis Pasteur's whole legacy — germ theory, vaccination, pasteurization, all of it prevention, all of it invisible once it works…
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May 28, 2026
Leonardo da Vinci — Leonardo
I first heard about Leonardo da Vinci on a podcast playing through my headphones on a delivery run, and something about him stuck with me: the man never had just one job either. Painter, inventor, engineer, note-taker…