The Tangential

“Great Works”: Art Critic Michael Glover Finds an Entire World On Every Canvas

Years ago, I was walking through London’s National Portrait Gallery with a family friend who was then a teenager. She was distinctly nonplussed, and she said something that’s haunted me ever since. Looking around and shrugging, she said, “They’re just pictures on a wall.” So final, and so unanswerable. No critic, curator, or artist could…

Choreographers’ Evening 2016 at the Walker Art Center: Dancers at War

“Make no mistake — we are at war,” wrote curator Rosy Simas in a program note for Saturday’s Choreographers’ Evening at the Walker Art Center. “The white supremacy that is preparing to take power of our country is waging a war on women, on Native Americans, Muslims, GLBTQ, People of Color, and undocumented immigrants in…

“100 Years, 100 Buildings” Surveys Remarkable Architecture From 1916 to 2015

The most refreshing thing about 100 Years, 100 Buildings is that it’s not those 100 years. By cutting himself free of the artificial constraint of highlighting the 20th century alone, architect John Hill brings his survey of remarkable buildings up to the present — and really, who’s going to miss a page on the Flatiron Building? Hill’s new…

Headless Pilgrims

Thanksgiving has always been a sham. It’s built on a hoary bit of mythology about how important it was for Native peoples and America’s early European colonists to set aside their differences (like, say, their differences over whether or not the entire continent was up for grabs) and eat some wild turkey together. You don’t need to…

With “Question the Wall Itself,” the Walker Art Center Examines Image and Context in a Fragmenting World

The concept of Question the Wall Itself sounds like a skit from Portlandia. “As artists, we just really think that it’s time to question the wall. Why are you there, wall? What are you saying to us? What if you…went away for a while?” The Walker Art Center’s new exhibition, though years in the making, happens to be opening…

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” Proves J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World Has Legs

Some time in 1999, I noticed that one of the kids in a family I was baby-sitting had spent the entire day in her room. “Anna, are you okay?” I asked, cracking the door. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “I’m reading the best book. It’s about a school called Hogwarts where you learn to be a wizard, and 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.”