The Tangential

British Arrows 2015: A Raucous Ride in the Spin Cycle

To watch this year’s finalists and award-winners for the British Arrows is to be reminded of why the media machine has become known as “the spin cycle.” After over an hour of video ads for everything from diet soda to child abuse prevention, you’re left feeling slightly buffeted — and yet strangely exhilarated. The British Arrows are…

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2”: It’s Heavy

Essentially, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 does exactly what you want it to: it faithfully portrays the final cluster of action sequences and delivers on that cathartic epilogue. The ongoing love triangle that so defined the first three films is largely absent in this, the orgy of thinly veiled social commentary and inevitable…

“Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict”: Documentary Celebrates Pathbreaking Collector

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict serves its subject much in the way she, in turn, served many of the 20th century’s greatest artists. Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland doesn’t try to explain Peggy Guggenheim; instead, Vreeland puts the legendary collector on a pedestal to draw attention to the many facets of a remarkable woman. The capsule version of Guggenheim’s…

Guthrie Theater’s 2015 “Christmas Carol” Doesn’t Miss a Beat

Longtime followers of the Guthrie Theater’s Christmas Carol think of the succession of actors playing Ebenezer Scrooge as eras — the way Bond fans think about 007s and the way football fans think about coaches. On the basis of the evidence onstage for opening night, we’re now at the peak of the Cutler Era. In the…

“Doubt”: New Epic Theater Plumbs the Depths

I’ve always thought John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play Doubt was an open-and-shut case. I think the priest accused of child molestation is as guilty — well, as sin. I was surprised, then, when an audience of female correctional facility inmates with whom I saw the play a few years ago expressed a majority view that the…

“Welcome to Leith”: White Supremacy In a (Very) Small Town

Welcome to Leith is a film about a drinking town with a racist conclave problem. Is that how the t-shirts go? New York filmmakers Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker rushed out to the North Dakota hamlet (pop. 16) in the fall of 2013 when the self-proclaimed “most famous racist in the world” Craig…

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.”