The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • 10 Personal Tidbits I Considered Including in My Tangential Bio

    10 Personal Tidbits I Considered Including in My Tangential Bio

    Once, while traveling by plane, I tried to recall how many times I’ve flown in my life. My family likes to travel. It’s a good thing I don’t have a flying phobia, I thought. Then I considered an aerophobe’s reasoning, and suddenly realized that I was in fact THOUSANDS OF MILES above ground in a…

  • A Phone Call with a Former Classmate That Should Dissuade Everyone From Going to Grad School in English

    A Phone Call with a Former Classmate That Should Dissuade Everyone From Going to Grad School in English

    Me: “Hey man!” Sean: “Dunstan…I’ve got a problem.” Me: “Oh?” Sean: “I have 25 students at this technical college. And 19 of them are from completely different countries. So they each make 19 different mistakes.” Me: “Sucka.” S: “It’s like the level below regular freshman. And they all hate it. It’s the fifth time most…

  • What Kid Rock Sees in Mitt Romney

    What Kid Rock Sees in Mitt Romney

    Every former-white-rapper knows his base: rednecks. Rednecks aren’t able to actually come out and like hip-hop because Lil Wayne stickers don’t look dope on a four-wheeler. But, white guys rapping next to chipped-paint barns and whiskey distilleries pass the test. And with former-super-redneck candidate Rick Perry (“these bills have too many words!”) now gone from…

  • Bruce Chatwin Visits the Land of Tumblr

    Bruce Chatwin Visits the Land of Tumblr

    The young girl posted a pensive #GPOY and rolled deeply into her duvet. Only yesterday she’d been reblogging unicorns, but on this day she felt an overwhelming ennui that would come to engulf her until she’d be awakened by the scent of chicken nuggets crisping in the oven. Further down the dashboard, an aspiring poet…

  • What Your Bed Covers Say About You

    What Your Bed Covers Say About You

    You recently posted a photo of your new comforter on Facebook and/or Tumblr: You’re a 20- or 30-something with a relatively boring office job that stresses you out, but leaves you with enough expendable cash to frequent Happy Hour almost every night, get sushi delivered, and order comforters with bird prints from IKEA and West…

  • How to Dismantle Your Rick Santorum

    How to Dismantle Your Rick Santorum

    Rick Santorums in your home or on your property need to be on all the time to alert you and your family of any threats to God’s favorite country. But if your Rick Santorum starts going off accidentally, you will need to dismantle him. Every Rick Santorum secular siren is designed slightly differently, but you…

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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