The Tangential

“The Space Between Us” is Science Fiction, Minus the Science

The Space Between Us is a science fiction movie that seems like it was written by people who learned their science from a screenwriting class and their screenwriting from Trump University. Every movie requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but The Space Between Us asks us to swallow such an elaborate series of unlikely developments and alternative…

“Toni Erdmann”: A Very European Family Comedy

By the end of Toni Erdmann, a woman has grabbed her father’s false teeth out of his pocket and stuck them into her mouth. He’s seen her naked, and they’ve done coke together, and none of those are even in the movie’s most awkward scene. The emotions underlying writer-director Maren Ade’s widely acclaimed film are universal,…

Ten Beers That Are Totally Worth the Hype

Natural Ice In a glass it’s nearly translucent, like you filled an empty yellow Gatorade bottle with water. But, don’t be fooled: this beer packs a lot of flavor. Specifically, it tastes the way your bathroom floor smells after a party. There’s plenty for your palate to sample here: the goopy bottoms of Converse sneakers,…

Martin Scorsese’s “Silence”: A Hair Shirt, in Movie Form

However you define a “popcorn movie,” Silence is the opposite. I went in with a big tub of buttered on my lap, and every kernel stared up at me for 161 minutes, guilting me for thinking this was an appropriate movie for indulgences of any sort. Really, it should be best watched sitting bolt upright on…

A Slightly Less Creepy Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38)

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a young woman who also happened to be a virgin. The woman had gotten engaged to her longtime boyfriend named Joseph, a descendant of David, on a vacation to Iceland. They hadn’t planned a wedding yet,…

Ten Top Movies of 2016

I’m not going to call these the “top ten movies of 2016,” because that would imply they’re actually the year’s ten best movies, and I’ve missed too many contenders for that list (Moonlight, Fences, Hidden Figures) to pretend I have a claim to stake there. Still, it’s worth revisiting ten winners I did see this year — some great,…

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.”