Megan Thee Stallion (b. 1995)
Filed under the name Megan · July 28, 2026
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 Stallion built her name entirely in the present tense, with Grammy-winning hits like 'Savage' and 'Hot Girl Summer' that I am reliably informed were inescapable, and — this is the detail I keep returning to — she completed a bachelor's degree the entire time she was doing it. There is no ancestral shortcut in that sentence. It is simply years of work laid end to end. I have spent a great deal of my life being charmed by lineage and old institutions, and I am slowly, occasionally uncomfortably aware of how little that charm has cost me personally. A story like this one corrects me rather usefully: the accomplishment here belongs entirely to the person who built it, in real time, with no family estate underwriting a single semester of it. I find I admire it rather more than I know how to properly say.