The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Remember When the St. Thomas Academy Crack Drill Squad Was On Ed Sullivan?

    Remember When the St. Thomas Academy Crack Drill Squad Was On Ed Sullivan?

    My dad, a graduate of St. Thomas Academy — then called St. Thomas Military Academy, and located on the college campus — sent this video he found, noting, “This was about ten years before us. Same drill routine, though. Can you imagine how big a deal it would have been to be on the Ed…

  • The Change Anita Hill Created

    The Change Anita Hill Created

    Confirmation, the new HBO movie about the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has brought the name and legacy of Anita Hill back into the spotlight. Those strange and painful hearings have never been forgotten, but it’s been a while since Facebook was filled with posts about Hill and Thomas — many, now,…

  • More Inventive Names for the “Avatar” Sequels

    More Inventive Names for the “Avatar” Sequels

    also can we PLEASE come up with more inventive names for the Avatar sequels, at least??????? come on, Now You See Me Avatar — LW (@lindseyweber) April 14, 2016 Avatar Me Up! Tar Me Down! Avatardy Pocahontas II Colonialism: Again! Big Eyes II The Decameron Avatar: Available to Chat Avatarier Avatar: The Trees Are Alive…

  • How to Make an Old Fashioned Wrong

    How to Make an Old Fashioned Wrong

    Desire a drink. Something with whiskey or one of those other names for whiskey that you still don’t quite know what they mean, like bourbon or scotch. It should also have something in it that makes it not just straight booze, like ice, bitters, syrup or … somehow, bacon. Try to remember the difference between an…

  • It’s 2016. Are You Kidding Me.

    It’s 2016. Are You Kidding Me.

    It’s 2016. No, I’m not reminding you what year it is (it’s April, get that shit on lockdown). I’m saying it’s fucking 2016. This has become the mantra of the frustrated, horrified, embarrassed masses who cannot believe we’re still having some of these conversations. Is a transgender person going to assault me in the bathroom?…

  • “Less Than One”: Walker Art Center turns a timely lens on its collection

    “Less Than One”: Walker Art Center turns a timely lens on its collection

    The title of the Walker Art Center’s new show Less Than One might cause you to think that at least we’re making progress from Less Than Zero — but in fact, the inspiration for the show’s title was contemporary with Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel. The title essay of Joseph Brodsky’s 1986 collection is a little more metaphorical: No…

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.”

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