The Tangential

Things You Can Turn to Your Date and Say After Seeing “Knight of Cups”

“Wait…that was the movie? I thought it was just a really long trailer.” “Bears, Hawks, Sox, Bulls.” “They sure made Pittsburgh look great.” “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” “This is why abortion needs to be safe and legal.” “I liked it better the first time, when it was…

“10 Cloverfield Lane” Is the Year’s First Great Summer Movie

When the credits rolled on 10 Cloverfield Lane, I looked down to see that stray popcorn covered the front of my shirt. At some point during the movie — probably during the first five minutes — I’d stopped paying much attention to whether the popcorn was actually making it into my mouth. 10 Cloverfield Lane is…

When will our phones know us better than we know ourselves?

Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, still popular over two years after its publication, is set in the near future and describes an eerily omniscient technology giant. Eggers devotes a lot of attention to the dangers of allowing our privacy to be compromised by a corporation, but he barely touches on a key reason why we might be tempted to…

What We Thought of the Oscar Nominees (Mostly They Sucked)

The Big Short “The whole production amounts to an ugly spectacle. By the time the far-seeing Big Shorters were literally screaming at a visually-impaired woman being portrayed as a comically pathetic pawn of the corrupt bond-rating industry, my girlfriend made her own short sale: she got up and walked out of the movie.” – Jay Gabler The…

Good Move Dropping the ‘House Masters’ Nomenclature, Harvard

I was completely unsurprised, and glad, to learn that Harvard College has decided to rename its “House Masters” as “Faculty Deans.” The fact that you probably have no idea what a “House Master” is unless you’ve attended or taught at Harvard (they’re faculty who lead residential communities) seems reason enough to make the change. Harvard has…

“Ordinary Pictures”: Walker Art Center Deconstructs Stock Images

To create an exhibit exploring the subject of stock images, there are multiple approaches you could take. You could present a straightforward history of stock images — exploring style, technique, and distribution. Alternately, you could curate a show about those images in social context: their uses and intentional misuses. In the Walker Art Center’s Ordinary Pictures, curator…

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.”