The Tangential

Facebook, Harvard, and the (Supposedly) New Social Hierarchy

This post was originally published in 2010, in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. I knew when I was at Harvard that I was surrounded by people who, unassuming though they might have been when puking in the bushes (or, per the neighbors’ written complaint to the dean, urinating in “expensive shrubbery”), would one day be…

Audiobook Review: Holly Black’s “The Cruel Prince” Is Torture Porn for Teen Fantasy Fans

Say this for Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince: the title is an undersell. I counted at least four cruel princes, with cruelty levels ranging from occasional and playful to routine and deliberate. If you queue this book up hoping for some rotten royals, boy oh boy, will you ever get your wish. Among Goodreads users, The Cruel…

“The Phantom Thread” is “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Except Literally

Daniel Day-Lewis attended this year’s Golden Globes with a shaved head, looking uncannily like Matt Lauer. Every time the camera cut to him, he’d be smiling gently and for a moment, before the correct solution clicked into place, your brain would have to reconcile the idea that a notorious abuser was sitting placidly in a…

“The Shape of Water”: A Love Story Sans Towel

The first half of The Shape of Water is a marvel of quiet visual storytelling. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) works on the cleaning staff of a mysterious midcentury lab in Baltimore. Vast corridors lead to locked doors, and while we only see what’s behind one of them, it leaves us wondering what can possibly be behind the…

Christmas Audiobook Review: Audible’s “Gather ‘Round the Sound”

About the audiobook: Audible’s annual holiday freebie runs 72 minutes and collects five short “holiday stories from beloved authors and great performers across the globe.” What that specifically entails are: “Zip Code 12345.” A This-American-Life-style documentary about the Schenectady headquarters of General Electric, which gets all letters addressed to Santa at that ZIP code. There are some…

Christmas Audiobook Review: Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

About the book: The timeless Christmas classic, yada yada. The novella so popular it’s spawned innumerable adaptations and a new movie specifically about its writing. At this point, A Christmas Carol has been so widely adapted that reading (or listening to) the original book constitutes a lesson in how art is made. What gets stretched, and what…

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.”