The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Signs You’re Getting Too “Meta”

    Signs You’re Getting Too “Meta”

    -You spend national holidays thinking about cliché ways to celebrate holidays. -You make Siri transcribe a text apologizing about how Siri totally sucks at spelling. -You find yourself contemplating whether or not Ron Artest uses “meta” correctly or exactly what he means by that. -You find yourself craving alcohol while you’re already drinking. -You tweet…

  • 71 Nicknames From My Dad’s E-Mail Address Book

    71 Nicknames From My Dad’s E-Mail Address Book

    Adam “The One With Padded Pants!” Piper Al “You Really Want a Subsidy???” Carlson Al “He Said He Once Held Elective Office Somewhere” Hofstede Alyssa “She Once Longed to Be the Next Jane Goodall!” Rebensdorf Andrew “Value-Added” Pitcher Angela “THE Tax Credit Legal Expert!” Christy Ann “THE Housing Preservation Expert!” Norton Barb “She’s Greg’s MUCH…

  • The Tangential Answers MORE Cosmo Readers’ Questions

    The Tangential Answers MORE Cosmo Readers’ Questions

    My guy doesn’t make as much money as I do. I like to go to nice dinners and I’m fine paying for them, but it annoys him. How do I get him to lose the attitude? It could be that he gets sick of eating vegan sushi with tapioca smoothies all the time, but when…

  • My Stream of Consciousness While Surrounded by Tweens at a GROUPLOVE Concert

    My Stream of Consciousness While Surrounded by Tweens at a GROUPLOVE Concert

    Oh no, I’m at the wrong concert.  Did I buy tickets to iCarly? I’m pretty sure she sings. This could be her concert. I’m having a stroke, I forgot my own age.  When was I born? Was I even cognitively conscious in the 90s? Just let me be a 90s kid! Compared to them, I…

  • What Your Summer Vacation Says About You

    What Your Summer Vacation Says About You

    You’re going to Hawaii … again! You have rich parents and enjoy toe rings. You vacation to invest in your tan rather than to see the sights of the world. You probably have some other fund that you use to see the sights of the world. You have dated someone who has been in a…

  • Single People and Their Coupled Friends: A Lifetime of Meaningful Conversations

    Single People and Their Coupled Friends: A Lifetime of Meaningful Conversations

    8-year-old single person: Wanna play video games? 8-year-old single friend: Cool. 12-year-old single person: Wanna go to the mall? 12-year-old coupled friend: Okay, maybe, but lemme text to see who’s gonna be there, because we kinda promised to hang out today maybe I don’t know I’M SO NERVOUS!!! 17-year-old single person: Wanna go to this concert?…

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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