Caleb

Caleb

by Brigid O'Connell-Tran

Caleb is one of those Hebrew Bible figures who doesn't get nearly the attention of the bigger names, but his whole role in the story is being the one who stayed hopeful when everybody around him wanted to turn back — he and Joshua scouted out a hard, uncertain situation and came back saying it was worth pushing forward anyway, even when the rest of the group was terrified. I've had exactly one moment like that in my life, twice actually, when the bakery nearly went under and I had to decide whether to keep going or close the doors for good, and both times it was other people, not just my own nerve, who convinced me the hard path was still worth it. My daughter's growing up between two grandmothers who each pray and cook and talk about faith in totally different languages and traditions, and stories like Caleb's, encouragement over fear, patience over panic, feel like something both sides of her family would recognize immediately, even with everything else about their backgrounds being so different.

Caleb Williams (b. 2001)

by Sofia Marchetti-Nguyen

There's something almost too clean about Caleb Williams's trajectory so far — Heisman Trophy in college, then the first overall pick in the NFL Draft, like someone storyboarded the whole thing in advance. I know real life doesn't actually work that way, that there were surely messier years and harder plays that don't make the highlight reel, but from the outside it reads like one of those rare career arcs where every panel of the story lines up exactly where you'd expect it to. As someone who plans out a composition, only to have half of it fall apart under an actual deadline, I have real respect for anything that looks that inevitable in hindsight. Quarterback is maybe the most publicly graded position in American sports, every decision reviewed and re-reviewed on tape, and to come out of college looking like the obvious top pick takes a level of consistency under scrutiny that I don't think gets talked about enough underneath all the trophy talk.

Wikipedia

Caleb Landry Jones (b. 1989)

by Yasmin Al-Rashidi

Caleb Landry Jones has built a career on intense, unsettling performances, Get Out and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri both being movies that stuck with me way longer than I expected them to when I first watched them. Get Out especially hit different for me, honestly, not because of his specific role but because it's one of those rare horror movies that's actually about something real, using genre to say something true about race that a straight drama probably couldn't have landed as hard. I care a lot about how movies use uncomfortable subject matter responsibly instead of just for shock value, given how much media I watched growing up that got my own community's story completely wrong, and a film that uses an unsettling performance in service of something that actually means something is a totally different animal than one that's just trying to disturb you for its own sake. Jones being memorable enough in a small supporting role to stick in people's memory for years says something real about the performance itself.

Wikipedia