The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Five Reasons Golf Is Not Actually the Most Boring Sport

    Five Reasons Golf Is Not Actually the Most Boring Sport

    1. Every course is different There is no major sport where differences in the playing fields are as significant as they are in golf. Not to underplay the significance of thousands of screaming home-field fans, all baseball fields, basketball courts, and tennis courts are near-identical compared to the dramatic differences among golf courses. Even on the…

  • ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ dances back to Minneapolis

    ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ dances back to Minneapolis

    After more than ten years, the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis has brought back Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a short run (March 29 – April 3). Joseph tells the familiar Bible story of Jacob and his 12 sons. Jacob gifts his favorite son Joseph (JC McCann) with a lovely new (Technicolor!) coat. This…

  • In “Batman v Superman,” We All Lose

    In “Batman v Superman,” We All Lose

    Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a cinder block of a movie, smashed over your head for 152 minutes until you’re semi-conscious, throbbing with pain, and bleeding from your ears into your popcorn. Utterly joyless, it’s sheer torture. Zack Snyder’s movie is filled with Bat Signals and stylized consonants, but its most iconic moment is a…

  • How Old Things Are, in Context

    How Old Things Are, in Context

    One year old: Not that old. As old as a baby that can’t say much or even walk that great, probably. Two years old: Only slightly older than the car I’m leasing, and it still has “new car smell,” at least according to the guy who tried to fit a table in the back of the car…

  • My Dog’s Threat Level Rankings

    My Dog’s Threat Level Rankings

    RED ALERT -Moms pushing strollers on walks -Unexpected Amazon package on stoop -Hissing cat -Free chair on someone’s curb -Halloween decoration of zombie woman with hole through her stomach ORANGE ALERT -Small dogs being walked past house -Unfamiliar stairs -Any dog seen from inside the car -Statue of dog butt with head seemingly buried in ground…

  • How I Don’t Write

    How I Don’t Write

    When it comes to my complete and utter lack of a writing career, people never ask me, “How do you do it?” It’s pretty simple, actually: I am wholly dedicated to never actually writing, but — and this is crucial — thinking about doing it a lot. My routine starts when I wake up early-ish,…

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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