The Tangential

“Rocky Mountain Express”: Crossing Canada at Science Museum of Minnesota’s Omnitheater

Few large-format films are as lyrical as Rocky Mountain Express. Writer/director Stephen Low goes light on the didactics and lets his audience lose themselves in the romance of the rails. These particular rails are the pride of Canada, and Low doesn’t let you forget it. He implies that Canada as we know it wouldn’t have been…

“100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs” Makes You Look, and Think

How under-appreciated is landscape design? One of the landscapes highlighted by John Hill in 100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs is in my home state of Minnesota, yet I’d never even heard of it — despite the fact that I’ve even written a travel guide to the Twin Cities. I’ll take whatever knocks are due to me…

“Coffee Style” Photo Book is Pretty But Empty

Photographer Horst A. Friedrichs gave himself an Instagrammer’s dream job: crossing Europe and America photographing boutique coffee shops. His focus was “Third Wave” shops — run by a new generation of aficionados who set out to make “specialty coffee even more special,” as Nora Manthey explains in Coffee Style. Coffee Style is what would once was…

Poke: The Peculiar Phenomenon of the Erection Peep: Windows of the World Poot: The Odd Instance of Demi Lovato’s Doppelgänger Bloop: The Sinister Science of Green Texts Hulce: The Man Who Would Be Mozart Boom Bap: The Curious Circuitry of the TR-808 Foof: The Curious Case of Farts Schmuck: Adventures with Yiddish Slang Chum: Discovering…

“Rough Night” Could Be Rougher

“My review,” said my girlfriend Dana as we walked out of Rough Night, “is that TV is officially better than movies.” The new comedy was directed by Lucia Aniello, who’s directed and written for Broad City; and co-written by Paul W. Downs, who also writes for the show as well as playing the show’s character Trey. Rough Night…

“The Mummy” Is Really Not What 2017 Needs

As we walked out of The Mummy, my friend Bob shrugged. “Everybody needs a universe now.” It’s true: “cinematic universes” like the competing Marvel and DC franchises are now the standard for big-budget fantasy movies and TV shows, with interconnected storylines drawing fans from one episode to another — just like it works with the comic…

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.”