The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Stupid Things I’ve Done in Hotels

    Stupid Things I’ve Done in Hotels

    Gotten kicked out of the same hot tub four times in one night. I don’t know why hotels close their hot tubs at 11, but I tried to protest this one night by repeatedly breaking in and enjoying the bubbles. The 4th time I broke in, I was extremely intoxicated and telling myself the security…

  • Dude Characteristics That I Fetishize

    Dude Characteristics That I Fetishize

    A Signature Accessory. Historically, this has included aviator goggles, ascots, cufflinks, all manner of hats, and even obnoxious “Don’t Mess With Texas”-style belt buckles. But it could also be silly underpants, a monacle, or even a friendly little monkey with his own tiny beret.  Just a touch of dandy in a man makes my eyebrows a-flutter….

  • Proof That I Haven’t Quite Made It To Adulthood, According To My Mother

    Proof That I Haven’t Quite Made It To Adulthood, According To My Mother

    I sent out an excited mass text to everyone in my cell phone when I got “High School Musical on Ice” tickets for Christmas. Talk radio makes me car sick. I proudly display my Kleenex content to anyone near me after a powerful nose blowing. If said content doesn’t fit within the snot color status…

  • Cutest Apocalyptic Scenarios Ever

    Cutest Apocalyptic Scenarios Ever

    Coordinated attack by terrorist cats wearing tiny airline pilot uniforms! One word: Tribbles! Anthropomorphous Tonka trucks, voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, wreak havoc while making fart jokes! Boo gets into the nuclear suitcase. Ruh roh! Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, but with penguins and voiced by Morgan Freeman! Godzilla vs. Totoro! Anything involving Dr. Evil…

  • How to Act Like a “Social Media Expert” on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr

    How to Act Like a “Social Media Expert” on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr

    Facebook • Friend everything that moves. • Post lots of links about various topics and tag the names of anyone who might conceivably be interested. • When someone famous dies, immediately post “RIP [Person Who Died]. You will be missed.” Get 83 Likes. • Complain about how Facebook is always changing their features, but express…

  • FAQ For Letting Your 25-Year-Old Intern Run Your Major Publication’s Tumblr

    FAQ For Letting Your 25-Year-Old Intern Run Your Major Publication’s Tumblr

    Should I let my 25-year-old intern run my major publication’s Tumblr? Yes you should. Everyone on Tumblr is ~25 and wants to sit around and look at GIFs of Stephen Colbert and Amy Poehler in between reading 2-sentence recaps of real news from the world outside of Tumblr. You need someone who understands this complex…

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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