The Tangential

“National Parks Adventure”: An Omni Ode to Our Parks as Playgrounds

In the rootsy jukebox that soundtracks the new National Parks Adventure, two songs are actually heard twice each. One of those songs is unsurprising: if you thought you were going to see a film about the National Park system without getting both the Bruce Springsteen and Little Feat versions of “This Land is Your Land,” you had another…

Six Things You Learn on a Mall of America Bar Crawl

1. The Mall of America is actually pretty boozy. Really, though — these days, there are about a million places that serve alcohol at the Mall of America, so you have a lot of flexibility when planning your MOA bar crawl. Our most surreal stop was probably Burger Burger, a fast casual food stop where…

A Love Letter to These Fuckin’ Lil’ Weenies

My Dearest Lil’ Weenies, When I saw you at the grocery store prior to my drive up north for a nice long weekend in a warm cabin, I knew it was meant to be. There you were, near-ish the bacon and just above the cheddarwursts in the refrigerated back wall section where they also inexplicably…

“State of the Art”: Old-Fashioned New Work Comes From Crystal Bridges to the Minneapolis Institute of Art

At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the exhibit State of the Art includes pill-bottle pendulums, a collage of refuse, and a woodcut with a hidden sex act — but the show’s real object of curiosity isn’t anywhere to be seen. It’s the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the controversial institution that convened the show. Crystal Bridges…

“Eddie the Eagle” is a totally ’80s Olympic underdog story

The natural point of comparison for Eddie the Eagle is Cool Runnings, the 1993 movie about the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. Well, I actually haven’t seen Cool Runnings — except for the epic slow clap sequence, which I’ve watched countless times — so I may be the only reviewer who came to Eddie the Eagle never having before…

“Zoolander 2” is a mess

As the credits rolled on Zoolander 2, I found myself asking a question that I’m guessing will be on the minds of many moviegoers this winter: why, again, did David Bowie agree to be in the original Zoolander? Where was once the spark of life in this now-deadened franchise, such that one of the most creative and…

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.”