The Tangential

Deliver Us From “Arrival”

For the first half of its two-hour running time, Arrival unfolds remarkably like a science fiction story from 1949. Alien beings have made contact, inscrutably. The military deploys its might (I like to believe that’s stock footage of a fleet assembling at sea) — but wait! We might just have a chance if a lone academic,…

A Diagnostic Chat With Doctor Strange, WebMD

Connecting… You are now connected to StephenVincentStrangeMD. StephenVincentStrangeMD: I don’t have time for this. jaygabler: I’m sorry, is there another doctor I should be connected to? StephenVincentStrangeMD: No. I’m the best. jaygabler: But you just said you don’t have time for this. StephenVincentStrangeMD: I don’t. You’re wasting my time. I’m the last, best hope you’ve got. jaygabler: Okay. So…should I just…

My PhD Defense Gift Registry

Because damnit I’ve worked for six and a half years for this friggin’ thing and I deserve some prezzies. —– – A copy of the 250 dollar academic book I desperately needed for my dissertation work but couldn’t afford to buy so I kept renewing the copy I had checked out at the library for…

Kelly Reichardt Talks About “Certain Women” and What It Means To Be an “Independent” Filmmaker in 2016

Kelly Reichardt has made a name for herself in a way that would be the envy of any filmmaker or aspiring artist: through hard work and the steadfast ambition to make her films her way. After her feature debut River of Grass turned heads at Sundance back in 1994, she became dissatisfied with the industry system…

“Yesterday’s Future”: Remembering utopian architecture

In these apocalyptic times, utopian architecture has fallen out of favor. Why design for the future when the planet is burning up and you’re one election away from a constitutional crisis? Of course, even when utopian architecture was in favor, its products that were actually built tended to be distinctly unlovely — vast concrete edifices without…

Ten Movies to Watch Instead of “The Girl on the Train”

If you’re into body-double obsession: Vertigo If you believe the Sight & Sound decennial critics poll, this Hitchcock classic is the greatest movie ever made. You know what’s not the greatest movie ever made? The Girl on the Train. If you’re into neighborly drama: The ‘Burbs This may not actually be a better movie than The Girl on…

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.”