1. How ‘White Lotus’ Star Walton Goggins Became Hollywood’s Most Unexpected Heartthrob
As with Christ, there is a before and after Walton Goggins. One day, everyone woke up with his name on their lips—and they felt a type of way about it. The Alabama-born, Georgia-raised actor has been around for over three decades, with memorable turns in blockbusters like Django Unchained and Lincoln, but it’s his glitzy swagger as the spray-tanned, silver-streaked televangelist Baby Billy in The Righteous Gemstones that made him a bona fide star. Last year, Goggins’s eerily erotic performance as a festering ghoul in the first season of apocalypse drama Fallout turned him into a sort of unsettling heartthrob. “It was a surprise,” Goggins told Rotten Tomatoes at the time, of his newfound sex appeal. “He doesn’t have a nose?” So by the time the actor surfaced in Thailand on the latest season of The White Lotus—as a begrudging sugar daddy with daddy issues, tanned and ripped with scotch and a cigarette perpetually in hand—the word was out…
2. Never Mind the West Village Girls, Meet the Next Generation of Upper East Siders
If you stand at the intersection of Park Avenue and 63rd Street on a sunny afternoon, you would be remiss not to take in the scenery—glancing first up, then down the leafy boulevard at one of the most picturesque views of Manhattan there is. Indeed, the Upper East Side has a reputation for viewing the rest of the city from on high, bristling as it is with legendary fine art institutions and elite private schools. But the magic of its quiet streets is hard to deny—and a trickle of fresh talent is migrating uptown to bask in it. The neighborhood isn’t transforming completely—it’s more of a facelift, if you will. But amid the fur coats and herds of silent baby carriages, an undeniable shift is brewing. Here, a cast of nine Upper East Siders—designers, gallerists, Instagram documentarians, and more—report their findings from the ground…
3. The New Comfort Movie Canon: The 10 Best Feel-Good Films of the Last 10 Years
Winter has settled in. When the days are short and your patience even shorter, feel-good films like The Holdovers and Flow bring the perfect blend of humor, heart, and catharsis. Meanwhile, gems like Creed and Fire Island remind us that comfort movies don’t have to play it safe—they can pack a punch, both emotionally and literally. Over the past decade, filmmakers have redefined what “feel-good” means, crafting stories that balance warmth with wit and psychological complexity. While the comfort movie canon is packed with nostalgic fare and easy watching, we’re nominating the following films from the last decade to join their ranks. Let the movie marathon begin…
4. Five Debut Authors Weigh in on the State of the Literary It Girl
With startling clarity, cynical wit, and an intellectual rigor rooted in a yearning for connection, Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth, Grace Byron’s Herculine, Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds, and Sasha Bonét’s The Waterbearers break into the canon of contemporary literature, dissecting American womanhood in our ever-fracturing culture. This new generation of writers straddles the young millennial-Gen Z divide, alternately channeling the ironized, dissociated ennui of the early 2020s post-feminists and bravely embracing cringe when it counts. Byron and Bonét’s careers as critics lend their literary prose an analytical, anthropological eye, while Wambugu and Levy’s work editing magazines informs their tender yet eviscerating fictional portraits of creative industries…
5. Benicio del Toro Opens Up to Scarlett Johansson About On-Set Isolation and Press-Tour Logorrhea
Over the past three decades, Wes Anderson has cultivated a highly eclectic and faithful stable of actors. When the director calls, a motley crew comes running—spanning ages, career phases, and box office favorabilities. It’s like summer camp, but for really successful adults. One recent addition to the menagerie is Academy Award winner Benicio del Toro, who first entered the fray in 2021’s The French Dispatch before returning to star in The Phoenician Scheme as Zsa-zsa Korda—“international businessman, maverick in the fields of armaments and aviation, among the richest men in Europe.” After surviving his sixth airplane crash, the tycoon (written with del Toro in mind and inspired by Anderson’s own father-in-law) attempts to prime the sole heir to his vast fortune: one of his 10 offspring, who happens to be a nun. It’s Succession meets The Graduate at James Bond velocity…
6. Introducing CULTURED’s Inaugural Young Dealers List
If you spend more than 20 minutes on a gallery crawl in Tribeca, Bloomsbury, or Kreuzberg, you’re likely to overhear someone talking in hushed tones about the worrying state of the art market. But such doom-and-gloom threatens to overshadow another equally relevant truth: The past five years have seen a flourishing new crop of ambitious galleries taking root in cities around the globe. The pandemic ushered in a wave of experimentation, of why-not-now, that has enriched the art world tremendously. To select the group of gallerists comprising CULTURED’s first Young Dealers List, we reached out to more than 40 collectors, advisors, and curators to find out where they look to discover new talent. From over 100 recommendations, we narrowed our first edition to 23 galleries, all younger than five years old…
Leslie Bibb isn’t quite sure how to slow down. “As actors, we’re always trying to get the next job,” she says. “I don’t like downtime much because I love what I do.” But when we speak a few days after her June cover shoot for CULTURED—a joyride in the eternally estival East Hampton—Bibb is taking something of a break. She’s in Upstate New York now, at the home of a “very fancy interior designer” friend, her dog Gus wrapped around her feet. From her perch, she has a view of some Canada geese and a pond. She’s taking a moment to relax…
8. Zosia Mamet Is Hoping Her New Book of Essays Will Get Her Sued
Does This Make Me Funny?, Zosia Mamet asks in the title of her new book of essays, which is alternately humorous, devastating, and startlingly intimate. The actor—best known for her role as Shoshanna Shapiro in Girls, or to industry folk as the daughter of writer David Mamet and actor Lindsey Crouse—takes readers through her childhood on the fringes of the spotlight, working with abusive or listless agents, her television breakthrough and subsequent career wins, bouts of depression, and terrifying and wonderful relationships. It marks a new level of vulnerability for an actor who has seemingly already laid herself bare onscreen. This time, there’s no character to dissect, just Mamet, as well as all of our feelings about the life she’s lived (there’s a nepo baby disclaimer in the forward here)…
9. Gallerist Tim Blum Shaped the Art Market for 30 Years. Then He Stepped Off the Treadmill.
When the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe opened in 1994, its founders—two foul-mouthed surfer bros with very strong opinions about art—had a grand total of $25,000 to their names. It was enough to cover one year of rent and little else. Yet Tim Blum and Jeff Poe went on to build one of the most influential galleries in the United States, fostering the careers of then-unknown stars like Mark Grotjahn, Henry Taylor, and Yoshitomo Nara. The gallery’s trajectory mirrors the trajectory of the art world at large: increasingly international, capital-intensive, and oriented toward growth at any cost. Without Blum & Poe, it is difficult to imagine Los Angeles becoming the art-market capital it is today. So when Blum—who took over after Poe left the business in 2023—abruptly announced that he would close the gallery, DMs and text messages began to fly…
10. The Substack Stars: 15 Newsletters That Your Favorite Writers Can’t Get Enough Of
Let’s just say it: there are too many Substacks. Once a platform for the erstwhile freelance writer, the newsletter behemoth is quickly going the way of podcasts (low barrier for entry, high barrier for quality, dominated by bros with “opinions” about “the state of things”). But buried in the onslaught of content are some of the best writers of the moment offering up their wisdom for a few bucks or—gasp!—free. But how to find them… At CULTURED, we’re nothing if not the outsider’s insider (or the insider’s even-more-insider?). To glean insight on where the literary elite have been logging their email addresses, we reached out to a host of our favorite writers to learn which Substack they anxiously await a notification from. The answers will soon have your inbox as packed with quality reading as ours…
11. Homes, Memories, Livelihoods: LA’s Artists on What They’ve Lost in the Fires
“When I got to my front door, it was gone.” This is how the artist Alec Egan described an experience that many thousands of Los Angelenos now share as wildfires continue to devastate the city. Since last Tuesday, at least 24 people have died and more than 180,000 residents have been put under evacuation orders or warnings as wildfires tear through disparate neighborhoods. Governor Gavin Newsom is already calling the fires one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. Already lost to the flames are…
12. Fear and Loafing in Las Vegas: Ralph DeLuca on the Art Market Cool-Off
In a summer filled with political turmoil, tariffs, art market jitters, and general stagnancy, collectors with deep pockets are increasingly looking beyond blue-chip contemporary art. Instead, they’re parking their money in pop culture icons, historic artifacts, and natural history—safer bets in uncertain times. Those of you who know me—or follow me on social media—are aware that I don’t spend my summers in the Hamptons or Aspen like my clients, or globetrotting all over Europe like an A-list celebrity. I mostly spend the summers in my vintage house in Las Vegas enjoying the dry heat, the intense sun, my pool, good wine, cigars, and hosting friends and family for nice meals. This year, I’ve even managed to recruit my friend and mentor Todd Levin to buy a house a mile from my front door, and Heather Harmon, the esteemed director of the Las Vegas Museum of Art and a Las Vegas native, has also moved just down the street…
13. Stellan Skarsgård and Robert Reich Tell Us How to Escape the Political Doom Loop
A frigid Scottish oil rig. A sun-drenched Greek isle, awash in a sea of turquoise. An antiques gallery in an alien megacity. Stellan Skarsgård has a gift for fitting in, no matter where he is. For the last six decades, the Swedish actor has brought a metric ton of gravitas to every role, whether in his taboo-breaking turns with Lars von Trier or levitating from a pit of black ooze in Dune. Despite his willingness to stare into the abyss, Skarsgård has a wry, paternal side. His latest film, Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix-nabbing Sentimental Value, puts his sensitivity on full display, and may just win the 74-year-old performer a long-awaited first Oscar nomination. Skarsgård, it turns out, also has a strong sense of civic duty…
14. The 11 Best Indie Bookstores in the World, According to Indie Bookstore Owners
When I travel, I always make a point to seek out a really great bookstore. I don’t mean the Barnes & Noble hawking the latest celebrity memoir or the tourist trap that’s designed more for Instagram than reading. I mean the niche bookstore: the hole-in-the-wall, lovingly curated with independent magazines, design books in strange shapes and sizes, artist monographs in foreign languages, and vintage vinyl. I mean the dusty used bookstore with stacks from floor to ceiling, first editions locked in a cabinet, and a cat slumbering on the shelf. I mean the shop where the city’s artists, students, and designers converge to pour over esoterica, local zines, and out-of-print treasures. The niche bookstore is a haven of spontaneous discovery in a world full of sponsored content and algorithmic suggestions…
15. Introducing CULTURED’s 2025 Young Artists List
When CULTURED debuted its first Young Artists list a decade ago, we were coming off a few years of a booming art market. Some emerging artists had made six-figure sums from a single exhibition. But what goes up must come down—and down it went. The same boom-and-bust cycle is happening now. What we know from experience is that artists who are coming up at this moment have more freedom to experiment, to fail, and to grow…
For two straight months this past spring, Andrew Scott spent his evenings in the Lucille Lortel Theatre, performing all eight characters in a one-man interpretation of Uncle Vanya. Sam Yates’s adamantly off-Broadway adaptation of the Chekhov play, which made its way to the barely 300-seat New York venue after a sold-out, award-studded London run, saw Scott oscillate effortlessly among its lovelorn, disgruntled, and debonair characters, performing two-person coital scenes solo and melting in and out of tears—without breaking a sweat. “On the last day, the crew came to the theater dressed as me, and each played one of the characters,” Scott recalls. “I thought, Jesus, there are loads of people in this play, no wonder I’m exhausted…”
17. This Awards Season, Fernanda Torres Is Taking a Bemused Victory Lap
Even in the worst aesthetic circumstances—perched precariously on the edge of her bed, self-lit, wired headphones in her ears, and coming off the back of “working like a mad dog”—Fernanda Torres lights up her Zoom window. Her eyes are deeply swimmable as she calls in from Lisbon (“my Shangri-la”), and her rather intoxicating mix of composure and enthusiasm is palpable through the pixels. The 59-year-old actor is a household name in her Brazilian motherland—she lives in Rio de Janeiro, where she was born. Rather late to the party, Hollywood is finally waking up to Torres’s nuanced, softly powerful screen presence, thanks to her Golden Globe-winning turn…
Yes, that Adrien Brody. And yes, he’s earnest about this. The two-time Academy Award winner has opened “Made in America,” a solo show running through June 28 at Eden on Madison Avenue. It’s a sometimes-perplexing, always sentimental ode to the New York of Brody’s youth—part collage, part catharsis, and wholly committed. The presentation features a gum wall installation, a “Vermin” painting series, and some surprisingly dark musical beats composed by the artist. There are nods to fast food, childhood gun violence, and industrial decay, rendered with layers of paint smears, spliced cardboard sheets, and surfaces that intentionally disrupt their own polish…
19. A Psychoanalyst and an Internet Theorist Get Real About the Ritual Humiliation of Life Online
What counts as human in an era challenged by artificial intelligence? As a psychoanalyst, I was taught to leave the terrain of the human and inhuman rather uncertain because it is. After all, the unconscious is rather inhuman—a little like a large language model. Attune to the anxiety of patients, I was told. Approach what is real and really challenging. But that was then. Now, we all have anxiety in spades, disoriented in such a wildly shifting technological landscape. Down the rabbit hole, we are Alice in Wonderland swimming in a pool of our own tears because we followed the directions that said, “Eat Me…”
20. What Does It Feel Like to Be Called an Emerging Artist at 72? Ask Takako Yamaguchi
Takako Yamaguchi has lived a 12-minute drive from Santa Monica State Beach—and just 10 minutes farther from the wilder Will Rogers State Beach—since 1993, but she rarely ventures west to look out at the Pacific Ocean. That hasn’t stopped marine life from figuring heavily in her almost five-decade-long practice, especially since 2021, when the Okayama-born artist embarked on a new series of seascapes. They were featured in two recent milestones—a 2023 Ortuzar show and the 2024 Whitney Biennial—that set the stage for a reexamination of the artist’s prolific and genre-allergic practice, along with a suite of record-breaking auction sales of work from other periods…
21. R. Crumb and George DiCaprio Talk Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Astral Projection, and Acid Trips
Life as an underground comic book artist in the 1970s was as freewheeling as you imagine—just ask Robert Crumb and George DiCaprio. The two men, now in their 80s, had the kind of meet-cute that only old-world New York could conjure: DiCaprio offered his illegally inhabited loft to Crumb’s crew. The encounter was fortuitous. Crumb got DiCaprio the animation job that led him out West, where he ended up working as a comic book distributor and became the father of celebrated actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Meanwhile, Crumb emerged as one of the leading satirists of American culture. To revisit the bad trip that inspired Crumb’s new book, the creative scene that formed them, and the future of their art form, the two friends…
22. How Actor Molly Gordon Went From Balthazar Hostess to Hollywood Scene-Stealer
At the age of 18, Molly Gordon did what a few thousand young adults do every year: move to New York to start school at NYU. Her college career lasted less than two weeks, however—“not long enough to have a conversation about it,” she tells me archly, calling in from London, where she’s working on a new script with actor and writer Phoebe Walsh. Her real edification came in the form of a hostess job. Her campus? The well-heeled fixture Balthazar. “I always think of that Broad City episode where they mix up everyone’s coats,” Gordon recalls. “I did that all the time. I was a fucking mess, but I learned how to get my shit together.” Just over a decade later…
Forget the Real Housewives of New York. For the past few summers, the most hypnotic, can’t-look-away form of lifestyle voyeurism has been the cooking videos produced by private chefs in the Hamptons. Often hired for the full season, they serve clients ranging from household names to people who simply consider “summer” a verb. Even though many operate under NDAs, they still broadcast their shopping, cooking, and table-setting on social media. Private cheffing in the Hamptons represents a break from the grind of restaurant kitchens—not to mention the chance to spend a season in one of the country’s most idyllic enclaves. Some chefs have parlayed the gig into a career in content creation, building audiences from behind the kitchen counter and becoming brands in their own right…
24. These Are the 11 Indie Films on Our Editors’ Must-See List
Transporting us everywhere from near-future totalitarian regimes to the world of New York matchmakers, these flicks prove indie cinema’s pulse is thrumming stronger than ever. Included are picks like Pavement’s new docu-fiction; Eva Victor’s directorial debut Sorry, Baby; and an Alex Russell psychological thriller starring a rotation of recognizable young faces like Havana Rose Liu, Archie Madekwe, Zack Fox, and Sunny Suljic…
25. Legendary Restaurateur Keith McNally Reveals the Worst Guest He’s Ever Served
Keith McNally opens his new memoir with a quote from George Orwell that reads: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” Rest assured, the scandal-prone restaurateur’s book passes the test. I Regret Almost Everything takes readers back to the East End of London, where the founder of beloved downtown New York eateries like the Odeon, Balthazar, and Minetta Tavern had a hardscrabble upbringing. After a stint as a child actor, he set out at 19 to travel through India and Nepal, then ended up in New York. His goal was to make films—but instead he joined the army of many creative strivers who paid their rent by working in restaurants. (The filmmaking would only return more than a decade later, when his minor hit, End of the Night, premiered at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.) McNally chronicles the many strokes of good fortune…
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