The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Best/Realest Tweets of the Week, 3/10-3/16/13

    Best/Realest Tweets of the Week, 3/10-3/16/13

    a ‘blurb’ seems like something that we should all feel embarrassed about — gabby gabby (@seemstween) March 16, 2013   starting to feel v alienated whenver 2chainz introduces himself in a song by screaming his own name — vicki tingle (@vickitingle) March 15, 2013   like, if every time i was about to speak i…

  • Signs She’s Not Cheating on You, Just Relax

    Signs She’s Not Cheating on You, Just Relax

    She Reads You Her Text Message History. All girls are protective of their iPhones. It’s a gender thing, not a her thing. So she slams down the knife when she’s chopping onions and runs in from the kitchen when her phone buzzes near you. Listen, that might sound scary BUT, she reads you her text messages…

  • “Stoker”: So THAT’S How It Is In Their Family

    “Stoker”: So THAT’S How It Is In Their Family

    Just a couple of weeks after I wrote about movies that inaccurately get called “smart,” along comes a classic example of that species: Park Chan-wook’s Stoker, a colossally stupid movie that also happens to feature an ambiguously erotic passive-aggressive uncle-niece piano duet on a composition by Philip Glass. Wentworth Miller’s screenplay made a 2010 list…

  • On Being a Liberal Suffering From Conservative Episodes

    On Being a Liberal Suffering From Conservative Episodes

    I’m a pretty liberal person. I grew up with a lesbian pastor and parents who earnestly campaigned for an opera hall to be built in lieu of a new Vikings stadium. When I was six, I lovingly embraced a tree for 20 minutes, tears soggifying my pink velour overalls, as exasperated laborers waited to remove…

  • Hipster Pope Names

    Hipster Pope Names

    Pope Cumberbatch VIII Pope DIIV Pope John Paul Collective Pope Austin SXSW Pope Warby Parker I pOpE Pope Indifferent Pope Kashi Go Lean Pope John Misty Pope? Pope. Pope Generation X Pope Pulp the Juice Pope Olivia Pope of ABC’s runaway hit show Scandal Pope Just a Second I’m Tweeting This Pope to the Maxx Pope…

  • Best/Realest Tweets of the Week, 3/3-3/9/13

    Best/Realest Tweets of the Week, 3/3-3/9/13

    skipping first period to get dunkin donuts is iconic — alessandra cat (@alessandradite) March 4, 2013   I caught my insane ex going through my garbage, but I guess that’s what I get for dating a raccoon. — Bridger Winegar (@bridger_w) March 4, 2013   They say that man is the most dangerous game, but…

A short history of The Tangential

The Tangential is a pop culture and creative writing blog launched in 2011 by three writers living in Minneapolis: Becky Lang (now Radecki), Jay Gabler, and Katie Sisneros. That was a golden age of irreverent confessional blogging, and over the first couple years we built a national following. Notably, we gained over 120,000 followers on Tumblr, where we were often associated with the provocative, extremely online writers in the movement known as alt lit. We created spinoff blogs including The Sport Hole, The Party Whip, The Tangential Ruins Minneapolis, and Tan Genitals. We hosted Minneapolis events and published three books.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that we never got around to monetizing. Oops! Well, we did have a little income from the books and events, and we became an Amazon affiliate. (This is your official disclosure that we subsidize our hosting costs via revenue from partner links.) Eventually, though, the editors and contributors who fueled the site’s early years largely moved on to other projects.

Today, The Tangential is run by Jay, who continues to publish criticism and other writing as well as to maintain the site’s catalog of posts — if only for, as we’ve always said, “the good of society.”

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