The triple mysteries are many in French author Jean-Christophe Valtat’s new novel, Aurorama. In North Pole paradise New Venice — amid crystalline structures, never-ending expanses of frozen tundra, and brief bouts of sunlight — the colonizers and the Inuits play power games. This place is called “the pearl of the…

You know what Cultist loves best about Second Saturdays? The opportunity to pad our art portfolio, laugh at dirty losers with cheap perms, and party alongside overeducated trust-fund friends while doing fat lines of Bolivian marching powder off cold hard slabs of pure Italian marble. We joke. Really, the art…

Have you noticed the stinky, low-class, drunken hordes tearing up Wynwood during Second Saturdays lately? No. Actually, neither has Cultist. But Joey’s Italian Café co-owner and Women of Wynwood co-founder Thea Golman claims to have spotted a certain “negative element” invading our streets. Now, if you’re wondering what exactly is…

With the anniversary of the apocalypse only 34 and a half hours away, it’s high time you finalized your 9/11 memorial plans. Like most Americans, you could just curl up on the couch under a star-spangled comforter and cry yourself into a coma while CNN reruns archive footage of the…

How craptastic has this season been for your Florida Marlins? Well, there was Roy Halladay’s perfect game against the Fish back in May. But apparently giving up the 20th perfect game in Major League history wasn’t disconcerting enough, so the organization decided to sell all unused game tickets as souvenirs…

Yes, we know you’re a huge fan of unfettered adventure. But really, this whole “urban taste test” thing is an extremely bad idea. Let’s face it: You don’t know shit about nature’s nibbles. If you pick an empty lot or back alley at random and then eat whatever fruit you…

Static, deep silence, and the sound of thought waves wind and rush through Serge Carrefax. A boy raised on an English estate where his radio-obsessed father ran a school for the deaf, Serge watches his teenage sister Sophie die, serves as a radio operator during World War I, becomes a…

A day after ditching his home country of Holland for New York City in pursuit of something bigger and stranger, photographer Ari Marcopoulos got a twisted version of what he wanted. On December 7, 1980, Marcopoulos flew into NYC. Less than 24 hours later, Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon…

A clown has two faces: the smiling, cherry-cheeked joker and the dangerously depressed, homicidal boozer. One makes us laugh, and the other makes us crap our pants with fear. Silent film funnyman Fatty Arbuckle was a perfect case in point. The guy was so hilarious that he actually invented the…

As a guy who gets his genes from two notoriously tiny-penised races — the Irish and the Asian — comedian Steve Byrne could very well be one of the most underendowed males on Earth. If so, he’s probably cool with it. “That Asian stereotype is not bad at all. ‘Asian…

Way back in the First or maybe the Third Century AD, there was a Greek rhetorician and literary critic named Longinus who wrote a little treatise titled On the Sublime. He riffed on its essence (“the echo of greatness of soul”), championed risky writers (“bold, lawless, and original”), and tried…

The Miami Heat start playing preseason games in exactly 34 days, 1 hour, and 51 minutes. Soon all of Miami will know whether LeBron-mania was just a temporary schizoid fit or a permanent state of being. Are we gonna stay crazy forever, mama? Probably not. For now, though, people are…

Maybe you’ve been lucky and you’ve never come face-to-face with a Juggalo or Juggalette in full grip of a homicidal sugar rush. Don’t fool yourself, though, they’re out there, guzzling gallons of Faygo, hoarding unholy amounts of candy, flashing their floppy titties, touching up their scary mugs, and plotting crazy…