Here Are CULTURED’s 15 Most-Read Stories This June
By By Cultured Magazine
1. ‘I’m Less Vain Than I Am Tired’: Amy Adams Opens Up to Amanda Seyfried About Aging Onscreen
“That’s just life,” Amy Adams says of the time she spends off red carpets and film sets. It’s what she speaks most passionately about: making runs to the grocery store, braiding her kid’s hair. She even gets a bit misty-eyed while doing so (her daughter turned 16 the day after this interview; feelings were fresh).
“I’ve loved getting older. I embrace it,” Adams, now 51, tells Amanda Seyfried (herself newly 40) when they hop on the phone for this conversation. As booked as the actors both are, the pair’s chat focuses less on their upcoming film and TV slates than on the imperatives of family life and the decision to opt out of hours in the makeup trailer in favor of imperfect skin on camera. Neither is particularly concerned about hiding their flaws—in fact, they are eager to discuss them.
2. Playing a Robber Baron on ‘The Gilded Age’ Has Only Made Morgan Spector More of a Socialist
Morgan Spector is holding a dibble—a small wooden tool with a pointed crosscut used to press holes in the soil and plant seeds. His 8-year-old daughter made it in woodshop, he shares over Zoom from his home in rural New York. The earthy simplicity of such an object, I’ll soon learn, suits the flannel-ready actor, who has a woodsman beard and eyes that simultaneously invite you in and seem to get away with something. As the brooding industrialist George Russell on HBO’s The Gilded Age, Spector, with his gallantry and smoldering restraint, has become the object of desire otherwise known as “Railroad Daddy” to his fans. When I ask him about the phenomenon, he grins and says with unperformed humility, “There are many daddies, and I am but one. My time, I am sure, will pass.”
3. Inside Sarah Pidgeon and Celine Song’s 16-Hour-Long ‘First Date’
Making a movie is a little like being in a relationship. Forget the time commitment (although being together for 14-hour days over months is nothing to sneeze at). A good actor needs to be vulnerable, and a good director should communicate clearly about their needs. Both submit themselves to the embarrassing ordeal of being seen, accepting that their fate is intertwined with another.
Sarah Pidgeon has become fluent in this art form. As a fixture of New York’s theater world, most notably in her Tony-nominated turn in the Fleetwood Mac-inspired Stereophonic—and as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy on FX’s television sensation Love Story—she’s spent countless hours taking audiences deeper into the lives of pop-culture figures we know and love. As the 29-year-old starlet earns greater recognition, the offers have been stacking up. But how does one pick the right suitor?
4. Sienna Spiro, Your New Favorite British Belter, Loves It When a Musician Puts Her in Her Place
Every generation has its belters, the ones whose voices fill a whole room and then some. No Gen Z star has yet claimed the title as their own. Sienna Spiro, who turns 21 in September, is angling for it.
The London-born soul singer’s voice is mature beyond her years—world-weary with a raspy nuance so rarely heard in the age of AutoTune. A textbook ingénue, she has little formal training; she began writing songs at 10 before dropping out of a performing arts school at 16 to pursue music full-time. Spiro credits studying the records of the greats, listening attentively for every quaver, with teaching her how to telegraph the deep-seated longing all of us contain but few can crystallize.
5. Artist Danielle Mckinney Explains the Story Behind Her Painting on CULTURED’s Cover
“I spoke out loud and came up with the words,” Danielle Mckinney tells us. “There are moments at night when the house finally becomes quiet, and I can hear myself again. As a mother, as a woman, as someone constantly moving between emotional worlds, those moments have started to feel almost sacred to me. I think Recess, the painting on the cover of this issue of CULTURED, came from that feeling, the deep desire to slip away from the demands of being visible for just a little while.”
6. Remembering Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, Who Memed the Art World as Jerry Gogosian
Artist and writer Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, better known as “Jerry Gogosian,” the formerly anonymous Instagram account that skewered the art world with cutting memes, has died. She began making waves in 2018 with satirical takes on the art market that helped illuminate the inner workings of a famously opaque industry. The account—whose name is a portmanteau of New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz and mega-dealer Larry Gagosian—skewered nepotism, art flipping, and other nefarious art-world behavior.
7. What Mia Khalifa Learned From Two Long Years of Celibacy
For the Indulgence issue, we asked seven figures—Jamieson Webster, Dries Van Noten, Christine Sun Kim, Griffin Dunne, Mia Khalifa, Brontez Purnell, and Helen Molesworth—to examine how one sin threads its way through their life and work. Here, Khalifa reflects on lust, which, to her, “is just carnal desire. It’s an impulse. You don’t care whether the outcome is good or bad; you don’t care about the consequences. In my teenage years and early 20s, I never thought that far ahead. I made a lot of decisions based on lust when it came to my sex life. All of that accidentally became very public… another impulse.”
8. This Year’s Best Beach Reads, According to Rachel Reid, Yerin Ha, and More
As the summer heat climbs toward its peak, the hottest accessory for blocking the rays is, of course, a book. Whether it be on the beach in the Hamptons or poolside in a friend’s backyard, these reads, recommended by some of CULTURED’s favorite writers, actors, and artists, are perfect for summer Fridays and weekend getaways alike.
The choice is yours: Want to read a classic? Willy Chavarria suggests The House on Mango Street. Craving something a bit more quirky? Check out Chang-rae Lee’s go-to story of airborne romance. It’s so engrossing you might just forget to flip during your suntan.
9. Two of the Biggest Names in American Patronage Have Kept Their Homes Private—Until Now
On an overcast afternoon in Sagaponack, the famously down-to-earth investor and philanthropist Glenn Fuhrman is contemplating the impending loss of his privacy. As the founder of the FLAG Art Foundation, a board member at MoMA, and president of trustees at the American branch of the Tate, he and his wife, Amanda, a former lawyer, are a study in 21st-century patronage. They’ve donated monumental sculptures to their alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, including an edition of Simone Leigh‘s Brick House (commissioned for New York’s inaugural High Line plinth, the first edition of which resides on the couple’s Hamptons property).
After a decade and a half of marriage, their passions extend far beyond the art world: They sponsor a free Wi-Fi network covering 95 blocks in Harlem, as well as the annual FLAG Award for New York’s public school teachers. Yet, through it all, they’ve kept the personal private.
10. Introducing CULTURED’s 2026 Young Writers List
These days, young writers face a gauntlet of pressures laid out for them by a deeply distracted culture and a bedraggled publishing industry that once served to undergird a lifelong career. Advances are shrinking. Tours are a thing of the past. The urgency of an adaptation-worthy manuscript is bearing down harder than ever and an online following is practically a prerequisite.
It is into this turbulent landscape that CULTURED is releasing its first-ever Young Writers list. Developed in collaboration with Montblanc, the beloved companion of all serious writers, the list spotlights a group of rising talents. To compile it, our team asked 30 authors and publishing houses to share which young authors they are most excited about, and narrowed their suggestions down to 10 of the most promising.
11. Is This 28-Year-Old Our Next Great Playwright?
Georgica Pettus has a “can’t-teach-it” facility with language. It’s something you notice in great playwrights: They attach themselves to certain words and speech patterns that have an unusual music. You notice it when it’s not there, and you appreciate it when it is.
Pettus’s new play, Truck, has just this kind of lively musicality. Set at a used car dealership in Texas in 2021 (which feels like very long ago), it is centered around a farcical, if morbidly serious, contest: The last person to take their hand off a truck gets to drive it home for free. It’s unusual for a playwright who grew up on the West Coast and went to school on the East Coast to slip into the verbal texture of the Southwest and the rural. A playwright has every right to try to sound like anyone, but Pettus also has the unusual skill of being able to sound like someone she is definitively not.
12. ‘House of Criticism’ Is for Fans, Not Critics: Johanna Fateman on the Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith Doc
An inevitably nostalgic tribute to two last-of-their-kind, late-career writers, House of Criticism builds to Roberta Smith’s 2024 decision to retire from her post at The New York Times, where she was co-chief art critic for two decades (and a contributor since 1986). So, though Chernick tracks both writers—from their Midwestern childhoods to their courtship and 1992 marriage; from their emergence as critics to their present-day writing routines, coffee consumption, and gallery-going—it is Smith’s story that, retrospectively and in the context of the film’s arc, takes on greater significance. (The announcement of her retirement comes a bit after the one-hour mark.)
13. The Gayest Places in New York, According to the Queer Culturati
Ask enough queer New Yorkers where they actually spend their time, and an entirely different version of the city begins to emerge, one that exists beyond social media, party apps, or the rogue club-night poster. It’s a geography built on memory and activism, friendship and flirtation.
As the Pride month rigmarole unfolds, we asked some of the city’s most plugged-in queer figures (from grand marshals and nightlife impresarios to DJs, drag icons, and organizers) to share the places that matter most to them. Their answers span institutions and dive bars, beaches and vintage stores alike.
14. ‘Get a California King Bed’ and 17 Other Tips for Dating Within the Creative Community
Most gallery openings simply ask for your attention. Dealer Pietro Alexander‘s inaugural exhibition asked for your attendance at a wedding. Thirty minutes before the doors opened to “The Wedding Show,” the dealer married writer and filmmaker Sara Apple inside his new eponymous SoHo gallery. The gesture lent a splash of sincerity to a moment often defined by industry spectacle, folding a real-world love story in with an art-world curatorial statement.
For CULTURED, featured artists in the show and wedding guests alike offered up some guide rules for creative relationships, where the art of staying committed—to a person and a practice in tandem—is rarely straightforward, but always worth the trouble.
15. A Guide to the Best and Worst of Marilyn Monroe in the Culture
Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 on June 1. To mark her centennial, institutions around the world are staging exhibitions that explore the actor and pop cultural fixation’s legacy. The National Portrait Gallery in London opens “Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait,” bringing together Monroe-inspired works by Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, and Richard Avedon alongside her personal effects. The Academy Museum in Los Angeles is presenting hundreds of posters, photographs, letters, and costumes that offer new insight into the star. And the Cinémathèque Française in Paris is running a retrospective of her films through June 12. Here, we present our own guide to the best and worst cultural works and moments that Monroe inspired, as well as the ones that made her famous.
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This article was originally published by Cultured Magazine.