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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Earl Wilson
Photography by Earl Wilson

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Writer

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SURPRISED YOURSELF IN YOUR WORK?

At the advice of two very good friends, the last pass I took on my new book was a cutting pass—a pass where you can’t do anything, not even fix a typo, except cut. I lost about 100 pages doing that. Prior to that, I would have said I was incapable of that.

WHO DO YOU CALL THE MOST?

My mother. She has four daughters, and it’s a little bit of a Hunger Games situation to get her on the phone sometimes, but she’s the person I want to speak with most.

"Information actually doesn’t want to be free. It wants to be procured by people who are expert at doing that, and it wants to pay its procurers a healthy salary for the trouble."

WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE, WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN FOR?

My tantrums.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN YOUR INDUSTRY? LESS OF?

In journalism, I would love to see more people keeping their jobs. More than 500 journalists have lost their jobs across major publications just this year. It didn’t have to be this way, and it’s to no one’s benefit that it is, except for those private equity chumps. Information actually doesn’t want to be free. It wants to be procured by people who are expert at doing that, and it wants to pay its procurers a healthy salary for the trouble.

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ROSE BYRNE
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JULIANNE MOORE