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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July 31, 2026
Andrea Jaeger — Andrea
I'll admit I went into this one with my usual grumbling about pampered athletes who never worked a real day in their life, and Andrea Jaeger made me eat that a little. Sure, she was a top-ranked tennis player, which…
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July 31, 2026
Andrea Mitchell — Andrea
I've logged a lot of hours listening to the news out of a truck cab somewhere between two towns whose names I'll forget by next week, and Andrea Mitchell's voice has been part of that soundtrack for longer than I've had…
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July 30, 2026
Evelyn Ashford — Evelyn
Four Olympic golds across four different Games isn't talent, that's endurance, and endurance is a word I know something about after thirty-four years on a mill floor. Evelyn Ashford didn't just show up fast once, young,…
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July 30, 2026
Evelyn Glennie — Evelyn
I coach a lot of kids who think one setback ends the whole game, so let me tell you about Evelyn Glennie. She's profoundly deaf, and she still became one of the world's leading solo percussionists — not despite the…
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July 30, 2026
Evelyn Waugh — Evelyn
I'll admit English literature isn't exactly my home court, but I respect a specialist when I see one, and Evelyn Waugh clearly found his exact lane and dominated it. 'Brideshead Revisited' is the one everybody points…
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July 29, 2026
Mother Teresa — Teresa
There's a kind of composition where everything in the frame points toward one small figure doing something enormous, and that's how I keep picturing Mother Teresa's life — the wide, chaotic canvas of Kolkata, and then…
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July 29, 2026
Teresa of Ávila — Teresa
Sixteenth-century Spain didn't have productivity apps, task managers, or a single podcast about deep work, and yet Teresa of Ávila still out-output most of my LinkedIn feed. She wrote 'The Interior Castle' and a body…
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July 29, 2026
Teresa Weatherspoon — Teresa
When I read about Teresa Weatherspoon, I think first of the WNBA's earliest years — how hard it must have been to build something with almost no one watching yet, and to be good enough at it to end up in the Hall of…
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July 28, 2026
Megan Fox — Megan
Now I'll be honest with you, I have never once sat through one of those Transformers pictures — all that crashing and banging isn't my idea of an evening — but I do respect staying power when I see it, and Megan Fox…
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July 28, 2026
Megan Rapinoe — Megan
Okay, quick joke first: Megan Rapinoe has won more World Cups than I have finished side projects, and I have started a LOT of side projects. But real talk — winning two World Cup titles with the U.S. Women's National…
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July 28, 2026
Megan Thee Stallion — Megan
I confess I approached this one expecting my usual sport — some tangled, centuries-deep family line to unravel over tea — and found instead something rather more bracing: no ancient pedigree required. Megan Thee…
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July 27, 2026
Julia Child — Julia
Julia Child introduced French cooking to American home kitchens through her cookbooks and her television show "The French Chef," and in doing so she genuinely transformed how ordinary Americans thought about food, not…