The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Guthrie Theater’s “South Pacific” Soars

    Guthrie Theater’s “South Pacific” Soars

    I walked into the Guthrie’s new production of South Pacific perhaps a little sadistically eager to measure it against the national tour of the 2008 Broadway revival. That tour’s performance at the Ordway was one of my favorite theatrical experiences of all time. South Pacific is a musical set during World War II, about two…

  • Other Exits That Are Probably Going to Happen Now

    Other Exits That Are Probably Going to Happen Now

    Texit Quebexit New Mexit Hawiixit Switzerlaxit One Direxit Fraxit [North Dakota secedes] Bexit [Rebecca Black quits YouTube] Aborxit [abortions] Hodor – Jay Gabler, Lisa Olson, and Becky Lang   0 likes

  • “The Neon Demon”: Nicolas Winding Refn Flashes Lights in Your Face For Two Hours

    “The Neon Demon”: Nicolas Winding Refn Flashes Lights in Your Face For Two Hours

    The Neon Demon is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who’s such a fucking auteur that he embossed his initials onto the opening credits, like Perry Como did with his slippers. N-W-R, in cascading script. He might as well have also branded the letters on his actors’ asses, and our eyeballs. Refn is a Danish director best-known in…

  • “The Bridges of Madison County” Musical Brings Quiet Passion to Minneapolis

    “The Bridges of Madison County” Musical Brings Quiet Passion to Minneapolis

    The beloved novel The Bridges of Madison County was written in 1992 by Robert James Waller, an Iowa college professor. Considered too short to be a novel and met with mixed reviews, it took word of mouth for the book to eventually rise to the bestseller list, where it stayed for 164 weeks. In 1994,…

  • Magnus Nilsson’s Nordic: A Scandinavian Fantasia at the American Swedish Institute

    Magnus Nilsson’s Nordic: A Scandinavian Fantasia at the American Swedish Institute

    I drank the aquavit wrong. I know this because text and a series of photos of chef Magnus Nilsson later made clear that “sipping is generally considered not good practice for enjoying aquavit.” Still, I felt compelled to sip, after standing in a line of a few dozen people on Wednesday for a taste of herb-infused aquavit from…

  • “Me Before You”: Manic Pixie Dream Nurse

    “Me Before You”: Manic Pixie Dream Nurse

    My girlfriend scoffed when someone offered her a sample pack of tissues as we walked into a preview of Me Before You. “What do they think this is,” she asked, “Inside Out?” No, it’s certainly not Inside Out. That movie — which, unlike Me Before You, actually made both of us cry — is a rich and imaginative…

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.”

Site ©2026 The Tangential LLC. Post content copyright is held by individual authors.