The Tangential

Don't be boring. Don't suck.

  • “The Story of Emoji”: Gavin Lucas Has the Inside Poo on Those Ubiquitous Little Icons

    “The Story of Emoji”: Gavin Lucas Has the Inside Poo on Those Ubiquitous Little Icons

    Where did emoji come from? Why did they seem to suddenly become ubiquitous? Are they here to stay? Should you or should you not use them in sexts? Those aren’t especially profound or difficult questions, but there’s been no handy way to find the answers all in one place — until now, with the publication…

  • Where Your Ass Gets Taken When You Fuck Various Celebrities Good

    Where Your Ass Gets Taken When You Fuck Various Celebrities Good

    Beyoncé: Red Lobster Shia LaBeouf: a conceptual “restaurant” at PS1 (livestreamed) Carly Rae Jepsen: a Chuck E. Cheese that she booked out entirely for herself Toby Keith: Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill Ted Cruz: his basement, where he keeps those 100 soup cans Orlando Bloom: Ibiza Lena Dunham: a Starbucks in a…

  • Ideas for Celebrating Women During Modern Financial Transactions

    Ideas for Celebrating Women During Modern Financial Transactions

    Yay! Apparently, they are going to put a woman on the $20 bill sometime in the next 15 years. Girl. Power.  Just kidding. By then almost no one will actually use cash anymore. We women know when we’re getting played. Thus, I, a woman, have come up with some demands for celebrating ladykind every time you…

  • Remember When the St. Thomas Academy Crack Drill Squad Was On Ed Sullivan?

    Remember When the St. Thomas Academy Crack Drill Squad Was On Ed Sullivan?

    My dad, a graduate of St. Thomas Academy — then called St. Thomas Military Academy, and located on the college campus — sent this video he found, noting, “This was about ten years before us. Same drill routine, though. Can you imagine how big a deal it would have been to be on the Ed…

  • The Change Anita Hill Created

    The Change Anita Hill Created

    Confirmation, the new HBO movie about the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has brought the name and legacy of Anita Hill back into the spotlight. Those strange and painful hearings have never been forgotten, but it’s been a while since Facebook was filled with posts about Hill and Thomas — many, now,…

  • More Inventive Names for the “Avatar” Sequels

    More Inventive Names for the “Avatar” Sequels

    also can we PLEASE come up with more inventive names for the Avatar sequels, at least??????? come on, Now You See Me Avatar — LW (@lindseyweber) April 14, 2016 Avatar Me Up! Tar Me Down! Avatardy Pocahontas II Colonialism: Again! Big Eyes II The Decameron Avatar: Available to Chat Avatarier Avatar: The Trees Are Alive…

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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