The Tangential

At 50, “2001: A Space Odyssey” Is Still 33 Years Ahead of Its Time

The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 is a 1970 book edited by Jerome Agel. A rare artifact in and of itself, the book finds the Marshall McLuhan collaborator and paperback pioneer spending 368 packed pages chronicling contemporary attempts not just to make, but to understand the transcendent science fiction film. The final page features a lone quote…

Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” Needs a Hard Reset

It’s easy to understand what attracted Steven Spielberg to Ready Player One: it’s a story about a media mogul who captivates billions with a souped-up reinvention of the pop culture of his youth. The part of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Spielberg seems to have paid less attention to is the part where that same mogul fails…

Audiobook Review: “The Last Jedi” Brings a Little Whiz-Bang to a Heavy Story

I’m just old enough to be an original Star Wars kid: a trio of bounty hunters from Empire were among my first toys, and I went to see Return of the Jedi for my eighth birthday party. Listening to the Last Jedi audiobook took me back to the ’80s in a couple of ways. First, it reminded me of the particular fascination of…

“Flower” Takes the Bloom Off Zoey Deutch

I was less than shocked, when the credits rolled for Flower, to see a bunch of men’s names flash by. Why? Well, let’s talk about this movie. Zoey Deutch, insanely charismatic and adorable, plays Erica, a 17-year-old who’s constantly chipper and witty despite having an imprisoned father who she’s trying to bail out by giving blow…

Audiobook Review: Amy Kaufman’s “Bachelor Nation” Is Here for the Right Reasons

America’s mixed feelings about The Bachelor franchise make for a relatively low-key crisis of conscience among the many we’re currently maintaining on high simmer. Still, the ABC shows’ strange fascination is starting to look less like a blip in TV history and more like a genuine cultural phenomenon. 16 years after the first Bachelor met his suitors, the…

Celebrating International Women’s Day Like a REAL Woman, 7 Years Later

Seven years ago, when I was but a wee baby 24 year old in the 2nd year of my PhD program, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek, fart-joke-filled post celebrating International Women’s Day. I would like to update that post for my 2018 post-graduate school life. Hello, women. Everybody remembered the secret handshake to get into the…

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.”