The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Other Evil Things You Didn’t Know About the Girl Scouts

    Other Evil Things You Didn’t Know About the Girl Scouts

    -Their leaders have them make “collages,” where they cut up magazines like Redbook and Playgirl and make visual representations of their plans to go to liberal arts college and study queer theory. We’re not sure what queer theory is, but we think it is a crash course in homesexual intercourse methods that produces unemployable graduates…

  • To Walk a Mile in Santorum’s Shoes

    To Walk a Mile in Santorum’s Shoes

    I don’t think you understand how hard it can be, guys. Having a patriarchal monotheistic God, who only used to talk to illiterate nomadic desert peoples, yammering in your ear 24-7 is super tough! It’s always “Don’t use condoms! Your sperm is the cereal and your wife’s vagina is the bowl, and spilling cereal outside…

  • Words Artists Are No Longer Allowed to Use In Their Show Titles

    Words Artists Are No Longer Allowed to Use In Their Show Titles

    Light Dialogue Rediscovered Reflections Tapestry Movement Gesture Foundations Merging Encounter Visions Juxtaposition Deconstruction Exploration Collision – Jay Gabler, Becky Lang, Dunstan McGill, and Jason Zabel Photo by Wonderlane (Creative Commons) 0 likes

  • A Guide to Life as a Cool Christian Bro

    A Guide to Life as a Cool Christian Bro

    Jesus. The first thing for a cool Christian bro is Jesus, gotta be down with JC. He died for everyone and His doing so opened the way to heaven, which is going to be the best time ever.  Dave Bazan, he’ll be there, playing his guitar. Mark Driscoll, he’ll be there, giving a sermon on…

  • Gawkerizing Huffington Post Headlines

    Gawkerizing Huffington Post Headlines

    HuffPo: ESPN Crosses Line with Offensive Lin Headline Gawkerized: Surprise, Surprise, There’s a Racist Idiot at ESPN HuffPo: Is THIS What the iPad 3 Will Look Like? Gawkerized: Let’s Unintelligibly Speculate About the Next iPad HuffPo: Emma Watson: Journalists Asked Me If I Was a Lesbian Because of Haircut Gawkerized: What? We Thought Hermione Was…

  • 2012’s Most Dangerous Idea: If We Deny the Existence of Race and Class, They’ll Just Go Away

    2012’s Most Dangerous Idea: If We Deny the Existence of Race and Class, They’ll Just Go Away

    “I have a dream,” said Dr. King, “that that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” For all the hard-earned and justly-celebrated progress America has made since the 1960s—including, most dramatically, the election of an African-American president—we’re…

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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