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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March 5, 2026
Gladys Aylward — Gladys
I don't scare easy, thirty-four years in a steel mill will do that to a man, but reading about Gladys Aylward leading dozens of orphaned children across mountains to safety during wartime China puts my nerve to shame.…
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March 5, 2026
Gladys Cooper — Gladys
A six-decade career with three Academy Award nominations is basically the sports equivalent of playing at a high level into your forties — Gladys Cooper just kept showing up and delivering, generation after generation…
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March 5, 2026
Gladys Knight — Gladys
Gladys Knight has earned, quite fairly, the title 'the Empress of Soul' across a Grammy-winning career including 'Midnight Train to Georgia,' a song whose emotional precision I admire in much the way I admire an…
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March 4, 2026
Edith Head — 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…
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March 4, 2026
Edith Piaf — Edith
I'm usually talking sports metaphors with my players, but Edith Piaf's story has that same underdog shape I look for in any comeback tale — a voice that powerful coming out of a hard early life and turning into…
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March 4, 2026
Edith Wharton — Edith
I never did finish my bachelor's degree, raising four kids and teaching third grade the whole time, so I have a particular fondness for anybody who broke new ground doing hard, careful work most folks weren't expecting…
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March 3, 2026
Agnes de Mille — Agnes
Agnes de Mille reshaped the American musical by folding genuine, narrative-driven choreography into productions like Oklahoma!, which strikes me, as someone who spent thirty-eight years teaching physics, as a lovely…
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March 3, 2026
Agnes Martin — Agnes
Agnes Martin's serene, minimalist grid canvases helped define postwar American abstraction, and there is something in her disciplined, almost mathematical restraint that speaks directly to a physicist's sensibilities…
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March 3, 2026
Agnes Moorehead — Agnes
Agnes Moorehead had a distinguished career across stage, radio, and screen for decades before most people just remember her as Endora on Bewitched, which is honestly how it goes for a lot of people who put in the real,…
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March 2, 2026
Doris Day — Doris
I've listened to a lot of history and music on long hauls across this country, and Doris Day's cheerful on-screen persona and a long run of hit records carried a whole generation through some genuinely hard decades,…
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March 2, 2026
Doris Lessing — Doris
I do adore a good genealogical detective story, though Doris Lessing's own path to a Nobel Prize is less a matter of lineage than of sheer, sustained literary force — her sweeping, insightful novels earned her that…
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March 2, 2026
Doris Roberts — Doris
Doris Roberts spent a long career earning her craft before Everybody Loves Raymond made her broadly, belatedly beloved, which is a pattern I notice often and appreciate: recognition arriving well after the actual work…