Jackson

It started as a tag on a medieval English payroll — "Jack's son" — and traveled, as surnames do, into presidencies, pop stardom, and eventually the delivery room. Jackson carries a full American scrapbook inside it: a general on horseback, a painter flinging pigment across a Long Island floor, a boy from Gary, Indiana moonwalking under a spotlight. The transition from last name to first accelerated in the 1990s, and it now sits at rank 35 in the United States. Two sturdy syllables with a satisfying click at the middle, and a ready-made nickname in Jack. Modern, preppy, and unambiguously at home on a boy.