The Tangential

What It’s Like to Work for a Company in Sweden

1. We are ruled by the seasons The first warm day of spring, I noticed a marked change in my coworkers. The somber Swedes of the winter had transformed into frolicking nymphs already making plans for Midsommar. The kitchen was filled with laughter and play-wrestling and slightly fewer people wore their black jeans. Now we’re…

A Eulogy for America’s Next Top Model

The fierce and sometimes bootyful reality television series America’s Next Top model was pronounced dead today via a tweet by its creator Tyra Banks. The leading cause of death is thought to be Banks’ new makeup line, Tyra Beauty, which looks to be a modern spin on Mary Kay makeup with tangibly higher levels of “Boom Boom Boom.” Other possible causes of…

If Haruki Murakami Were Editor-in-Chief of Playboy

Table of Contents 1. Letter From the Editor: It Occurred to Me at a Baseball Game that I Could Edit Playboy 2. Girls of the Month: 5 Girls with Particularly Cute Ears 3. Which of America’s Sexiest Women Can Unpeel and Eat an Orange in an Uncanny Way? 4. Advice of the Month: When the Complicated Girl’s Boyfriend…

Should Civil War Battlefields Be Preserved?

The first time I ever got on an airplane, it was to fly across the country and see Civil War battlefields. The second time, same thing. This was the early ’90s, when I was a teenager and Ken Burns’s PBS series had just become the decade’s most unexpected must-see TV. My dad and my uncle grew up as Civil…

The Bakken is the Halloweeniest of all museums

I knew I was making a mistake by waiting all these years to make my first trip to the Bakken Museum. “It’s awesome!” said everyone. “I know!” said I. “It’s on my bucket list!” Yet, I never made a point of going. What a fool I’ve been. One thing I did right, at least: I chose…

Better Names for Generation Z

Amandla’s Army Generation Phablet More-lennials Generation AEIOU and sometimes Y Generation Zed* The Soylent Generation #Generation Generation United FC Generation Payback, Bitches!!! The Aquafina Generation Generation Nostalgia Generation Rescue Dog Generation Gawker Hates Even More Than Millennials Generation Sext Generation Estrogen** Generation Buy a Pair, Give a Pair Generation Thinkpiece The Problematic Generation Generation Ursher***…

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.”