The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • 10 Reasons Why One Direction is the Next Backstreet Boys, But Way Better

    10 Reasons Why One Direction is the Next Backstreet Boys, But Way Better

    1. They’re all the same height and size, making them feel like a pack of Crayola Diversity Crayons, or a Bonne Bell Lip Smackers First Kiss kit. 2. They don’t have the word “Backstreet” in their name, via not pretending to be from the “backstreets” but instead the backroom of Hot Topic, neatly folding jeans,…

  • Enough With the Children’s Choirs Already!

    Enough With the Children’s Choirs Already!

    In John Gardner’s seminal how-to-guide On Becoming a Novelist (a professor once told me all books about writing books suck….except for this one), he addresses that nasty habit of writers and other general creative types hating on each other’s work. This is okay, even cool, Gardner says. Just means you have standards. Naturally, this was…

  • The Toys I Can’t Let Go

    The Toys I Can’t Let Go

    I’m writing this on Easter, remembering how when I was a kid, the holidays were fundamentally about toys: new toys that would come in Easter baskets or birthday presents or under the Christmas tree. The farther I get into adulthood, the stranger it is to remember just how intensely invested I was in those little…

  • Tangential Writers As Seen Through Google Glasses

    Tangential Writers As Seen Through Google Glasses

    – Jay Gabler 0 likes

  • Hyper-Active Child Live-Tweets Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

    Hyper-Active Child Live-Tweets Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

    I WILL BE YOUR NEIGHBOR I WILL I WILL X10000 #butwheredoulive? Same outfit as yesterday @MistaR I want to touch the sides of your shoes. #tactilelearner @MistaR Puttin on the shoes. Unlace. Unbutton. Closet. Hanger. Zip up. Lace up. #icanfeelmymotorskillsdeveloping GOTZ A PACKAGE @MistaMcFeely #speedydelivery Oh. Just an envelope with the number 8 inside. Learned…

  • 2012: The Year The Illusion of Post-Racism Died

    2012: The Year The Illusion of Post-Racism Died

    I’m not going to pretend to know exactly what post-racism is. I think it’s the idea that white people don’t want to feel bad about slavery anymore, and we’ve decided that everything’s even now, even though there is clearly a huge racial disparity problem. Or maybe it’s something white people made up so that we…

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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