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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February 5, 2026
Estelle — Estelle
Estelle's 'American Boy' mixing soul, hip-hop, and pop together is exactly the kind of genre composition I appreciate as someone who thinks visually about layering and contrast for a living — good blending, whether…
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February 5, 2026
Estelle Getty — Estelle
Estelle Getty playing Sophia on The Golden Girls is one of those performances where the visual comedy and the writing worked together so perfectly that the character feels almost like a completed composition — the…
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February 5, 2026
Estelle Parsons — Estelle
I don't get to the theater much, Braddock isn't exactly Broadway, but a career spanning decades in both film and theater the way Estelle Parsons managed says something about sticking with a trade long after the flashy…
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February 4, 2026
Bertha Benz — 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…
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February 4, 2026
Bertha Lutz — Bertha
Bertha Lutz was among a small handful of women actually in the room when the United Nations was founded, and she used that rare seat to help get gender equality written directly into its charter, which strikes me as…
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February 4, 2026
Bertha von Suttner — Bertha
Here's a fun one to bring up at a party where everyone's arguing about something dumb: the first woman ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize spent her whole life campaigning against war and militarism in an era when that…
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February 3, 2026
Mabel — Mabel
Mabel, the British singer-songwriter behind 'Don't Call Me Up,' represents a genre and generation considerably outside my usual listening habits of classical music and opera, though I try, in these profiles, to extend…
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February 3, 2026
Mabel Normand — Mabel
Mabel Normand wrote, directed, and starred in her own silent films at a time when almost no woman in Hollywood was allowed to do any one of those jobs, let alone all three, and she helped shape early screen comedy in…
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February 3, 2026
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee — Mabel
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was out there championing women's voting rights as a literal teenager, and then spent the rest of her life doing quieter, deeply necessary community and social service work in New York's Chinatown…
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February 2, 2026
Norma Kamali — 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…
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February 2, 2026
Norma Merrick Sklarek — Norma
Norma Merrick Sklarek became the first Black woman in the country to earn an architecture license, and I read her story with the particular recognition of someone who was one of very few Black women in her own doctoral…
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February 2, 2026
Norma Shearer — Norma
Norma Shearer basically ran a chunk of the biggest studio in golden-age Hollywood from the inside, which if you translate it into modern terms is like being the most versatile engineer on the team AND quietly shaping…