The Tangential

Daniel Fish Does David Foster Wallace, Dynamically, at the Walker Art Center

When you arrive at the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater for Daniel Fish’s A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again After David Foster Wallace, you’re greeted by the sight of hundreds of tennis balls, laid in precise formation across the entire stage. A serving machine repeatedly chucks tennis balls against a…

“Fahrenheit 451”: Theatre in the Round Finds Layers in Bradbury’s Classic

If you, like a lot of people, read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 once, in high school, you might remember it sketchily as a dystopian science fiction novel about a future where firemen burn books so as to keep the populace from thinking the kind of complex thoughts that might upset the social order. The moral: don’t burn books.…

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is a Phoenix-from-the-Ashes Story

I saw The Force Awakens for the third time today, and this time criticism of the movie was on my mind as I watched. Particularly the idea that this movie is derivative, that it won’t age well, or, as The New Yorker said, it’s a “forgery” that made us recognize George Lucas as a true artist. (Ouch…

“RoosevElvis”: At Walker Art Center, the TEAM Take a Resonant American Journey

Prior to the start of RoosevElvis at the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater on Thursday night, the TEAM’s artistic director Rachel Chavkin stepped onstage and explained that the Brooklyn-based company’s mission is to create shows that illuminate “what it means to live in America today.” Okay, then. RoosevElvis, however, proceeded to do precisely that: to tell…

A Manifesto for the Profoundly Uncoordinated

Some people are beautiful, symmetrical, smooth, and glowing. Some are off-putting, pocky, inexplicably lumpy, and faintly resemble a flesh-colored garbage bag full of porridge. Some are witty and erudite, but some are one taco short of a combination plate, if you catch my drift. Some are tall, some are short. Some have lovely long hair,…

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.”