The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Does it Mean You’re Dumb if You’re Bad at Trivia?

    Does it Mean You’re Dumb if You’re Bad at Trivia?

    This question has been on my mind lately – by that I mean every Wednesday night, as I contribute next to nothing to a trivia team I go to mostly because it’s an excuse to eat chicken fingers. Let me back up: I like the idea of trivia. Learning while drinking? Those are two of…

  • Why the Utter Failure of “Project X” is More Terrifying Than If It Had Actually Succeeded

    Why the Utter Failure of “Project X” is More Terrifying Than If It Had Actually Succeeded

    The most noteworthy achievement of party-rocking send-up Project X is that the garden gnome (whose fingers are permanently flipping the bird) doesn’t end up stuck conspicuously on a kitchen table or on a book shelf at film’s end as the unwitting parents of the party boy inspect the house for signs of shenanigans. Instead, they…

  • Live-Blogging the AWP 2012 Conference: Days 2 and 3

    Live-Blogging the AWP 2012 Conference: Days 2 and 3

    10:00 AM Saturday: “Let’s pick a really great place to eat brunch in Chicago!” 11:00 AM Saturday: “This place is supposed to be the best. And they have a Bloody Mary bar!” “How far is it?” “Well, we’d have to take the train.” 12:00 PM Saturday: “This Mexican place was totally worth the two-block walk….

  • Live-Blogging the AWP 2012 Conference: Day 1

    Live-Blogging the AWP 2012 Conference: Day 1

    9:00 AM Friday: “Jay, can we smoke in your mom’s car?” “No.” “Can we eat in your mom’s car?” “Yes.” 10:00 AM Friday: “Aaaugh, that guy with a ladder in the back of his pickup just pulled in front of us! This is like Final Destination!” 11:00 AM Friday: “Aaaugh, we’re driving into fog! This…

  • What Women Think About Porn

    What Women Think About Porn

    I obviously can’t speak for all women here – I’m sure there are some out there who, if they discover you watching porn, will consider it cheating and write to Cosmo about it before angry-baking all night to deal. But most of us realize that most of you – men – watch it, download it…

  • A Guide for Drinking Responsibly With Your Parents

    A Guide for Drinking Responsibly With Your Parents

    My mom doesn’t drink. Rumor is she once had a white-wine spritzer and passed out, feet-up, as an ambitious undergrad at a law school party in Des Moines. And my dad mostly kept the same 5-to-6 bottles of Rolling Rock in our fridge for most of my high school career. I’m not sure if this…

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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