The Tangential

“Mamma Mia!”: Thank you for the music, Ordway

Picture a warm summer day on a lovely island surrounded by beautiful shimmering water with a small hotel serving up hospitality. Now add in romance and a serving of intrigue. Wrap it all in upbeat musical numbers and energetic, creative choreography. If this is not a recipe for success, I am not sure what would…

Aerospace Engineers: Designing Our Future

The career I have chosen to write about and eventually pursue is aerospace engineering. Aerospace engineers design airplanes and space vehicles, and test them for efficiency and effectiveness. Aerospace engineers represent only a small fraction of America’s population of engineers, and aerospace engineering is considered to be a very small occupation nationwide, but it is…

Book Review: Jason Fry Follows “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” Through the Eyes of the Tico Sisters

Even after listening to Jason Fry’s Last Jedi novelization, I was a little fuzzy on the post-Empire politics of the Star Wars universe. Why is the Resistance different from the New Republic? Where did the New Order get all that cool stuff? Is General Leia still a princess? A pair of new young-reader books by Fry helped…

“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” Needs Way, Way, Way, Way, Way More Jeff Goldblum

Everyone loves the part in Jurassic Park where the Tyrannosaurus roars while the WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH banner flaps down to the ground. The Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom filmmakers seem to have been given the mandate to take that moment and make a whole movie out of it. There are so many predator roars in the franchise’s newest…

Audiobook Review: Maria Hummel’s “Still Lives” is, Indeed, Inert

Listening to Maria Hummel’s Still Lives shortly after Megan Miranda’s All the Missing Girls (2016), I realized I’d stumbled onto a contemporary microgenre. Here’s how it goes. An intelligent, highly attractive, and modest-to-a-fault woman in her late 20s (not quite 30, it’s precisely specified) is getting over a breakup. It’s recent enough to still hurt, but not so recent…

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.”