The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • Realistic New Year’s Resolutions for Reluctant Adults

    Realistic New Year’s Resolutions for Reluctant Adults

    1. Remember to lift your wiper blades if there’s snow in the forecast. Sometimes, you know there’s a real adult nearby just by looking at context clues. Do you see a car parked uphill with the front tires turned away from the curb? You know damn well a grown ass adult parked that car. Did…

  • 9 Things I Noticed The Second Time Around in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

    9 Things I Noticed The Second Time Around in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

    1. Hints at Who Rey’s Parents Are I left my first viewing feeling as if Rey was somehow Kylo Ren’s sister. I also wondered if she was Obi-Wan Kenobi’s kin. Then I heard that she might be Luke Skywalker’s daughter, which also seemed to make sense. This time around I looked for clues. Here are…

  • Everything I Reviewed in 2015, Ranked from Best to Worst

    Everything I Reviewed in 2015, Ranked from Best to Worst

    Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play The Magic Flute Amy Girlhood Glensheen Oregon Trail: A Musical Wise Blood Diary of a Teenage Girl Nothing Is Something Space Girl Kinky Boots Straight Outta Compton Still Standing You It Follows Ex Machina Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta What I Want Now I Will…

  • Science Museum of Minnesota’s Omnifest Takes Enlightening Trip to Jerusalem

    Science Museum of Minnesota’s Omnifest Takes Enlightening Trip to Jerusalem

    I’ve never been to Jerusalem, but it’s always been part of my life. Raised Catholic, I grew up hearing daily stories about historical happenings in the Holy Land. As an adult, I’ve been attentive to the political and moral debates that center on Jerusalem and its environs’ occupation and governance, with global ramifications. Friends and…

  • “The Revenant”: Fast Times in the Fur Trade

    “The Revenant”: Fast Times in the Fur Trade

    After The Revenant ended, I felt like I never again needed to see, talk to, or think about another man. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s frontier epic puts us very much in the company of men — and men who will stab you in the back much more literally than Aaron Eckhart’s manipulative asshole from the movie of that name, another film…

  • “The Big Short” Mansplains the Housing Bubble

    “The Big Short” Mansplains the Housing Bubble

    When I was a freshman in college, one of the guys in my dorm (the same guy who thought we should have an absurdist band where I just spent the whole show sitting in a trash can) suggested that we establish a sort of salon: several guys would attend, wearing smoking jackets and sipping brandy. Each…

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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