The Tangential

“We Are Baseball”: Hall of Fame comes to Mall of America

The Hall of Fame has brought its new interactive traveling exhibit We Are Baseball to the lot adjacent to the Mall of America for a two-week stop. It’s advertised as combining the timeless charm of Cooperstown with cutting-edge technology, but I found the exhibit longer on technology than on the historical baseball artifacts that are…

“Blair Witch” Super-Sizes the Terror

The Blair Witch Project (1999) remains a beacon for independent filmmakers: a movie that demonstrates it’s possible to outdo 99% of the studio films in your genre with nothing more than a microscopic budget and a good idea. The quintessential product of the “found footage” genre, it also presaged a coming era in the way we create…

Anticipated Product Upgrades

Ford: The new Focus won’t have an opening for the gas tank. No one likes buying gas, right? Now, the Focus has a sleeker profile, you can feel better about your stewardship of our planet, and by the time you run out of gas, we’ll probably have invented some way to keep this feature from slowing you…

“Rise Up, O Men”: Plymouth Playhouse’s Church Basement Ladies Give the Fellas a Turn

The Church Basement Ladies franchise began in 2005 with the original Church Basement Ladies play, set in 1964. After serving up A Second Helping (set in 1969), the franchise took the story back to 1959 with a Christmas story and then a fourth show celebrating Reformation Sunday circa 1960. In 2013, the fifth show saw the church…

I Want to Be Your 6th Grade Class President, by Donald J. Trump (age 11)

Hello, fellow sixth graders of Kew-Forest School. My name is Donald J. Trump, but you can call me Donny. I am eleven years old, I like riding my bike, pulling the legs off grasshoppers, and my pleated chinos. I would like to be your class president. I would be a very good president, the greatest,…

“Star Trek Beyond” Is a Lot of Silliness, and That’s Just Fine

“I don’t know why they called it Star Trek Beyond,” said a surly nerd walking out of the screening in front of me. “They didn’t go ‘beyond’ anything!” Actually, I would argue that they went beyond multiple things — and the most important of those things is the idea that this rebooted franchise needs to be…

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.”