The Tangential

Wedding Vows Updated for Various Groups

Millennials: I, [Brooklyn], take you, [Jonas], to be my #mancrushmonday/wifey, to Snapchat and to swipe right on, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for bottomless mimosa brunch times, and for grad school debt times, in gluten-allergies and paleo diets, until YOLO turns to BAAAAIII. Yuppies: I, [Salix], take you, [Eleanor], to be my…

An Update on Daytime TV for All You 9-5-ers

A few months ago, I decided to go freelance. Not trying to be all “I QUIT MY DAY JOB TO BE AN ARTISTE, BUT IT’S ACTUALLY WAY HARDER THAN WORKING, GUYS” here. It’s more like I saw people charging hourly and calling their cats their colleagues and I wanted in on that racket. Who knows if it will be forever,…

“X-Men: Apocalypse” and the Saturation Point of Serial Comic Entertainment

I work in a comic book store. Like, full time, benefits, get sent to San Diego Comic Con, seriously-Mom-and-Dad-this-is-a-viable-life-choice, work in a comic book store. I hear a lot about comic book movies and we need to establish something about comic books. Comics are much weirder and dumber and more glorious than you think. When…

Major Laser: Science Museum of Minnesota Prepares to Take Its Omnitheater Digital

I don’t believe I’m saying this, but I attended a presentation at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and they spoke poorly of prisms. No, they didn’t trash prisms in general — a representative from IMAX simply pointed out the limitations of prisms as commonly used in digital projectors. Light passing through prisms is slightly diffused, and the…

Marvel Wins Again With “Captain America: Civil War”

I found myself thinking about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice a lot while I was watching Captain America: Civil War. The films both address the evergreen comic-book question of acceptable losses. Is any civilian casualty in the fight against demon aliens attacking New York from a portal in the sky acceptable? Is it 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.”