Browse our opinion articles on baby and pet names.
World Pride 2025 in DC reveals a blind spot in how we count baby names. The Social Security Administration cannot, by design, see the most consequential naming decision many Americans now make.
Amber Heard introduced her twins on Mother's Day. Ocean and Agnes frame modern twin-naming poles: hippie-coastal versus vintage-grandmother. The choice signals values.
Mortimer is funny because it sounds upper-class. Brayden is funny because it sounds otherwise. Comedy naming exploits the same machinery that makes baby naming dangerous.
Netflix's Adolescence puts 13-year-old Jamie at the center of a fictional school murder. The show isn't killing the name. It is making the stewardship job harder.
Blue Ivy, North, Stormi, Apple, and the celebrity-baby cohort are growing up. The data shows their names aging better than predicted.
Helly R. and Helena Eagan share a body. Severance is asking, all season long, whether they share a name. The question is older than the show.
The names millennials are choosing for their kids — Arthur, Hazel, Walter, Pearl — track Boomer survival rates. The aesthetic story is incomplete.
When a famous Liam dies young, parents of 30,000 living American Liams have a private decision to make. The decision is not in any naming book.
Mateo, Luna, Mia, Sofia: the Spanish-coded names dominating American charts share a survival trait. They pronounce the same way under English mishandling.
Apple Intelligence puts generative AI on the default device of American parents. The naming consequence isn't weirder names. It is fewer of them.
The Oasis reunion crashed UK ticket servers. Millennial parents got something stranger from the announcement — a quiet realization that their kids' names are now period pieces.
Jools Lebron's 'demure' meme isn't about voice level. It's a referendum on how we perform tastefulness, including in the names we give our children.