The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Suggested Track Listing for Carly Rae Jepsen’s Covers Album

    Suggested Track Listing for Carly Rae Jepsen’s Covers Album

    God Bless the U.S.A. Maybe (Lee Greenwood) Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car Maybe (Billy Ocean) I Kissed a Girl Maybe (Katy Perry) Fall On Me Maybe (R.E.M.) Like a Virgin Maybe (Madonna) I’m Goin’ Down Maybe (Bruce Springsteen) Push It Maybe (Salt-n-Pepa) Beat It Maybe (Michael Jackson) Eat It Maybe (“Weird…

  • The False Mystique of Living in Small Town USA

    The False Mystique of Living in Small Town USA

    I’m 27 years old. And for approximately 85% of my twenties, I’ve lived in a small town. (The other 15% I was in Rochester, MN, and Minneapolis, MN, in Loring Park.) Point is, when someone has said I’ll meet you at the bowling alley, I’ve known which one. Occupying the lone coffee shop in town,…

  • The Freakish Resonance of the Final Destination Movies

    The Freakish Resonance of the Final Destination Movies

    “You are obsessed with Final Destination,” my boyfriend told me the other day, as I was talking on the phone in my car, describing the freakish accident I totally could have just gotten into, in my mind. “Of course I am.” “But why? They’re not even good movies.” “Well .. the first one is. No,…

  • Less Obvious Reasons It’s Good I Don’t Have a Baby

    Less Obvious Reasons It’s Good I Don’t Have a Baby

    I hate sharing food. I have Joey Tribbiani-levels of devotion to the food on my plate. If I offer you a bite, hey! Congratulations! You’ve passed over into a coveted level of friendship in which I have deemed you worthy to consume food that is rightfully mine. But children have no sense of personal ownership.…

  • Please Take More Photos of Me Looking Young and Carefree

    Please Take More Photos of Me Looking Young and Carefree

    Dear Friends and Family, As you may know, Beyonce’s tumblr went live with loads of photos of her personal life. This is particularly interesting because I like to compare myself to Beyonce. However, it has come to my attention that my online persona is not nearly as artsy as hers. Because of this, I have…

  • Other Kinds of Sisterhood than the Traveling Pants Kind

    Other Kinds of Sisterhood than the Traveling Pants Kind

    Underage sisterhood of the constantly upsold remaining fractions of a bottle of Karkov Sisterhood of girls on the playground sitting under a tree playing Nintendogs, with one honorary boy member who collects gel pens Sisterhood of 5’s and one 7 who doesn’t like to be around girls hotter than she is Cat sisterhood of lady…

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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