About this graphic
The original. Every one of North Carolina’s 100 counties sorted into three tiers by one question: would you name a child after it? The answer is 52 yeses, 24 maybes and 24 emphatic nos. The rankings are editorial, not data, and nobody is supposed to agree with all 100. The joke lives in the legend while the map stays straight-faced, and everyone can find their own county.
The geography underneath is real. Boundaries are the Census Bureau’s 2023 cartographic boundary files, detailed enough that the Outer Banks show as coastline rather than blobs, drawn in an equal-area projection so counties read at their true relative size1. The green is shifted toward teal on purpose: a plain red and green pair is unreadable for many color-blind readers, and on a map where green means yes and red means no, that would break the graphic.