The Tangential

“Black Mass”: Johnny Depp rivets in a South Boston requiem

Two brothers grow up in South Boston. One becomes a prominent politician, while the other turns into the state’s (excuse me, the commonwealth‘s) most dangerous gangster. Their childhood friend goes to work for the FBI. Why? We don’t find out from Black Mass, which makes an argument about human psychology that basically begins and ends with, “Boys…

“Pawn Sacrifice”: A Bobby Fischer movie that’s somehow not about chess

As Cold War proxy-battle lore goes, the story of Bobby Fischer’s 1972 chess match against Boris Spassky is darker and more ambiguous than the story of, say, the Miracle on Ice. America’s beloved “Brooklyn boy” Fischer was already slipping into the madness that would eventually all but consume him, but he was still capable of…

Theatre Pro Rata Tells “A Lie of the Mind” with Vigor

When I was growing up, I was fascinated with my dad’s CD of the Red Clay Ramblers’ music for the original off-Broadway run of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. The songs were gothic and foreboding, as was the play’s very title. What could it mean? Is it possible, I wondered, for your own mind…

How much Star Wars is too much?

I’m not the biggest Star Wars fan you’ve ever met, but I’m probably in the top five percent. I’ve seen all the movies a bunch of times, I have strongly negative feelings about the Special Edition, I have moderately positive feelings about the prequels, I have the Vanity Fair cover with the new cast members pinned up…

We’re never truly landlocked

The projectile vomit just sprang into being. I don’t remember a transitional state or any inkling that it would happen like that—just the timeless, world-ending nausea of “before” and then the “oh my God.” This was how I learned that I had become susceptible to sea sickness. Previous family deep-sea fishing trips had been one…

New “Cinderella,” at the Orpheum Theatre, fails to enchant

The production of Cinderella currently playing at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis is playwright Douglas Carter Beane’s 2013 adaptation of Rogers and Hammerstein’s 1957 musical, which was originally written for television. According to a press release, Beane went back to the original French version of the story and found additional elements that had been left out…

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.”