The Tangential

Five Things You Notice When You Watch “2001: A Space Odyssey” Three Times in One Year

It looks great in every format. This year I’ve seen 2001 in a standard theatrical presentation, in a 70mm “unrestored” print, and in an IMAX presentation. Each one was amazing. Seeing the 70mm print — made from the original negative, it’s full of visible scratches and wobble — between two viewings of the pristine digital version…

Audiobook Review: Rosamund Pike’s “Sense and Sensibility” is Cool as a Cucumber

Between Jane Austen’s two best-known novels, Pride and Prejudice is having a moment while Sense and Sensibility is taking a breather. Lizzy Bennet, demanding R-E-S-P-E-C-T from D-A-R-C-Y, is a more immediately sympathetic heroine for the 21st century than Elinor Dashwood, patient and persevering in the face of repeated slights. The Bennet business is also more involving than the…

Spray vs. Cream Sunscreen: One Man’s Journey

When I was student-teaching in Australia in the ’90s, everyone was justifiably freaking out about the ozone. When we’d take our students to the beach, they’d line up and we’d systematically slather them with thick white sunblock — even behind the ears. That was enough sunscreen-spreading for a lifetime, so I was delighted when spray…

Audiobook Review: Star Wars “Thrawn: Alliances” Pairs a Blue Man with a Dark Lord

Older gen-x fans and writers of Star Wars novels like to wax nostalgic about the late ’70s, when books like Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Han Solo at Stars’ End were eagerly devoured by moviegoers dying for the sequel to finally come out. Younger members of that generation, like me, feel the same way about Timothy Zahn’s Heir to…

“Eighth Grade” Celebrates the Small Victories That Add Up

The deeper we fall into the moral abyss of the Trump era, the more audiences are drawn to celebrations of simple kindness and unassuming empathy. Suddenly Mister Rogers, never less than admirable, is a superman: a public figure who understands, and says, that seemingly small victories can be hard. His attitude is the opposite of…

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.”

The Effects of Location on the Growth of Grass