How about a variation of what the Spanish do? In Spain, children take one name from their father and one from their mother, every child is named using the patrilineal names of there two grandfathers. Of course this leads to information loss, as the name of the grandmothers gets dropped. You have to lose information obviously, otherwise you'd get unwieldy names. How about changing it so that for the children's names, the mother contributes the name she got from her mother and the father the name he got from his father. So John Smith-Davis and Mary Hill-Richards have children who have Smith-Richards as a last name and the name of John's mother and Mary's father get dropped.

As someone with a Dutch last name, hyphenation would be quite hard. There are already plenty of systems, either old enough to be from an age where bits where precious or developed by incompetents that can't handle my last name because it has spaces in it. I shudder to think what would happen if I added a hyphen to that.

This is not a new problem. Picasso's given name was

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso [wikipedia]

There have been rules for this for centuries in the UK. Pre-hyphenated names wre combined on marriage as <woman's_family_name>-<man's_family_name> On two people with such names marrying the final married name is <first_part_of_woman's_name>-seond_part_of_man's_name> Archaic, I know, but there it is. I guess it all breaks down if you don't follow the rules in the first place, and since the rules are just some of the arcana of the british class system, who knows and who cares about them?

I'm confused. Why does it matter which name you have? Why keep the old ones and not just pick a random new one you happen to like?

Do as the Icelanders do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name

You erase the error of your parents, and go with the man's father's last name for husband, wife, progeny, and pets.

Or do what we did and keep your last names. It would feel weird to me if my wife had my last name, we are not siblings.

While I like this solution because it is indeed the simplest and most common, it will not work for gay males.

It's not any simpler than going with the wife's mother's last name. Or the husband's mother's last name. Or the wife's father's last name.

Or just do like they do in Quebec where women never take their husband's last name. In fact, it's the law.

Given that this has been solved in Spanish seeking cultures for quite some time - well, I guess I'm surprised that either no one at NPR speaks Spanish, or was willing to point out that this isn't an unsolved problem.