The Tangential

Thoughts Re: Halloween

For me, Halloween has typically meant going to a bar, staying out late and generating a horrible hangover for the next day. But now my relationship with my friends is more “I’ll feed your cats when you’re out of town” than “let’s take four shots before we even get to the bar.” Because of this, I’ve…

20 Things You Never Knew About Cats

-A cat is actually a bunch of smaller cats working together to look like one cat. -Cats will shut down if you touch them in a certain spot behind their right ear. -Schrodinger’s cat was arrested during Occupy Wall Street. -The largest cat on record wasn’t actually as big as you might think he was.…

“Hippie Modernism”: Walker Art Center Revisits a Utopian Dream

Last year, Miley Cyrus created the Happy Hippie Foundation: a nonprofit organization that aims “to rally young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable populations.” Cyrus raised awareness for the foundation through a series of loose, affectionate backyard music videos; meanwhile, she collaborated with the Flaming Lips on a psychedelic album…

“Jem and the Holograms”: Family fun for everyone (except the neglected younger sister)

Jem and the Holograms is a movie about magical transformations, but really, the most incredible transformation we see is a cheaply animated cartoon about a flashy ’80s hair band being turned into an inspirational movie about the power of a capella. Having expected a live-action movie about Hasbro’s Jem toys to be something along the lines of Spice World,…

Why Vampires Will Never Go Out of Style

It may seem like vampires are having a hot minute in popular culture—or maybe a hot decade is more like it, since Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was first published ten years ago, creating a juggernaut franchise that’s inspired wannabes including The Vampire Diaries and innumerable others. Vampire teens may be a popular twist at the moment, but the fact…

8 Things that Might Happen in the New Star Wars

1. The soundtrack will be the original John Williams music as covered by Ryan Adams 2. Emoji subtitles 3. The dark side will be breeding teacup Ewoks 4. In the wake of Empire’s setbacks and destabilized economy, the new galactic currency will be changed to Bitcoin 5. Sarah Koenig will be narrating the search for Luke’s hand 6.…

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.”