The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Mountain Range or Hipster Baby Name?

    Mountain Range or Hipster Baby Name?

    Ahmer Pirin Amaro Ruby Atlas Wicklow Rif Bale Entoto Pioneer Elk Rila Golden Everett Erta Kilimanjaro Driftless Area Stone Bruce Kipengere Lebombo Franklin Joy Castle Clearwater Kokanee Davis Laguna Owl Mahale Pare Kuray Madison Owen Stanley Boulder Pamir Sierra Pierce Tian Shan Sesvenna Bear River Dauphine Selasitsa Harz Massiff Pelly Blue – Chrissy Stockton is…

  • How to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day When You’re One-Sixteenth Irish

    How to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day When You’re One-Sixteenth Irish

    • Wear green shoelaces. • Put a spoonful of Lucky Charms in your Cheerios. • Gargle with Jameson, then spit it out. • Listen to Bonnie Raitt sing “A Stór Mo Chroí” with the Chieftains. • Look at the Blarney Stone. Think about walking over and saying hi. • Instead of watching a whole parade,…

  • How Moral is Having Children?

    How Moral is Having Children?

    The Rick Santorum-fueled war on contraception stakes its argument in morality. According to God and the Bible and the Pope and all the sources that the kinda-monotheistic religion of Christianity listens to, contraception is wrong. Why? Because women are only supposed to have sex for the purpose of having children. If it’s for pleasure, it…

  • Gen X to Millennials: Quit Making Us Look Good

    Gen X to Millennials: Quit Making Us Look Good

    Published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study finds Millennials (born 1982-2000) more civically and politically disengaged, more focused on materialistic values and less concerned about helping the larger community than Generation X (born 1962-1981). (USA Today, March 16) God damn it! This is the last straw. You’ve been able to…

  • Transcript from a Phone Sex Conversation Between Two Lawyers

    Transcript from a Phone Sex Conversation Between Two Lawyers

    Lawyer One: I have my pants off, for a limited time only. Degree of close shave throughout various areas of my legs and genitals may vary. Lawyer Two: You know that promotes increased bloodflow to my genitalia, helping to encourage and sustain an erection. You should receive photographic evidence within moments. Lawyer One: My bra…

  • Things I’ve Never Done

    Things I’ve Never Done

    What? Me? No, I’ve never done these things, no way. I’ve never been neurotic about my hair, getting gray hair or having bad hair or anything about my hair. With me and hair, it’s always been copacetic. At my first job out of college, I never laid down on the floor of a house (which…

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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