Publishing is full of rankings, from power lists to best-dressed lists to under-40 lists. The CULT100 is different. There is just one criterion for inclusion—but it’s a high bar.

To qualify, a candidate must be actively shaping and changing our culture in real time. The people on this list represent five generations and hail from the worlds of food, publishing, art, fashion, activism, and entertainment. To put this group together, CULTURED‘s editors leveraged the full strength of our network, tapping artists, writers, and cultural leaders to tell us who they look to when they want to feel challenged, hopeful, and inspired.

Some members of the CULT100 are household names; others have been working behind the scenes to make possible the cultural encounters that stop us in our tracks. In a time of binary thinking, the creators featured in this year’s list are embracing contradiction, bouncing willfully between disciplines, and refusing to take no for an answer. They have guts, vision, and a potent cocktail of realism and optimism. None of them is shying away from the anxiety of our moment. Instead, they are thinking big, sharing generously, and embodying courage. The good news is, their work makes us all a little bit braver, too.

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Seth Caplan
Photography by Seth Caplan

Jason Farago

Writer and Critic

WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE, WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN FOR?

My tennis serve. I’ve still got it.

WHAT’S SOMETHING PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT YOU?

They think I want everyone to share my taste. Criticism is actually about showing people one way, your way, to think about things, so that readers can model for themselves how to think about culture more subtly and profoundly. Some of the best feedback I get is from readers who say, “I read what you wrote, I understood what you were saying, I thought it was really well argued, and you’re totally wrong.”

"Criticism is actually about showing people one way, your way, to think about things, so that readers can model for themselves how to think about culture more subtly and profoundly."

WHAT’S ONE BOOK, WORK OF ART, ALBUM, OR FILM THAT GOT YOU THROUGH AN IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE?

In that bewildering first month of the pandemic, I sat down to read Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, from 2,500 years ago. I didn’t have access to my library—we were at a friend’s house in the Berkshires—so I read it on my phone: doomscrolling for real. We were all so lost, so confused, and here was this classic about a city afflicted by an epidemic, whose leaders and citizens are asking themselves: What does this virus mean? What does it mean for our political future, our future as a community? Maybe it sounds weird to say that Greek tragedy is something that can comfort you, but I’ve always taken a great solace from art that shows us that our times are not unprecedented. Others have lived through times like we’re living through, made sense of them, and found beauty in them.

NAME AN INFLUENCE OF YOURS THAT MIGHT SURPRISE PEOPLE.

Don’t tell anyone, but I was a tweenage Céline Dion megafan. I even made my family take a road trip to Montreal so I could buy the early French albums. I put all that behind me by high school, but at karaoke I can still do a mean rendition of “The Power of Love.”

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ROSE BYRNE
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JULIANNE MOORE