The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Nicholas Sparks Movies Make Me Hate My Life

    Nicholas Sparks Movies Make Me Hate My Life

    I saw that new Nicholas Sparks movie last night after drooling over the trailer for about a month.  If you’re unaware of it, it’s called, “The Lucky One,” and it features a beefy Zac Efron as the world’s most perfect man. (I, too, wonder where all his muscles came from.) While watching the movie, I kept…

  • How Wisconsin Dells Heightened My Dreadlock Complex

    How Wisconsin Dells Heightened My Dreadlock Complex

    I recently bought a Wisconsin Dells weekend getaway Groupon so that my roommates and I could live out our childhood water park fantasies as mid-twenty-somethings. Having never been there, we asked our seemingly innocent, middle-aged hotel front desk clerk where we should eat lunch. After starring hard at me for a few seconds, she said,…

  • Questions to Ask Yourself Before Acting Like a Grammar Nazi

    Questions to Ask Yourself Before Acting Like a Grammar Nazi

    Today, Salon.com writer Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote an essay cleverly punned “The Audacity of Hopefully,” which angrily decries the A.P. Stylebook’s decision to add the word “hopefully.” As she points out, “hopefully” is an adverb, and using it to say things like “Hopefully, my future child will be a boy” is incorrect, unless we mean…

  • Pros and Cons of Putting Bumper Stickers On Your Car

    Pros and Cons of Putting Bumper Stickers On Your Car

    Pro: It’s free advertising for my favorite causes! Con: But really, does anyone ever get stuck behind someone in traffic and say, “Hey, I want some of what he’s having!” Pro: I can express my individuality! Con: Via mass-produced stickers featuring brands and slogans? Pro: Makes it easier to find my car among others. Con: Maybe if…

  • America’s Next Top Model Recap: More Toochin’, Less Bullyin’

    America’s Next Top Model Recap: More Toochin’, Less Bullyin’

    I’m guessing Tyra can’t even remember whether or not Top Model has centered a challenge around anti-bullying ever since Glee and Lady Gaga made it into last year’s important zeitgeist-y social issue, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances and let the opportunity to deeply inspire pass her by completely. You…

  • A Modest Proposal to My Hot Cousin … To Do Some Incest with Me

    A Modest Proposal to My Hot Cousin … To Do Some Incest with Me

    Hear me out. My cousins are hot. Ok. And not “hot” in a Pam Anderson in Barbed Wire kind of way. Gross. And, dumb. No, my cousins all (or all except those creepy athlete girls from Nebraska we hardly see ‘cept at funerals) have this attractive combination of wit, class, and legs. Dynamite legs. And…

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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